 I'm hoping we can just run down the list of participants and I'm going to just say your name and then ask you to unmute yourself, repeat your name and say where you live. Just so we can kind of get introduce ourselves the way we used to do when we were in person. I'm Jonathan chapel so cool. I'm I'm on the ward 1 side of the steering committee and I live on North prospect street. Um, Liam. Hey, this is Liam darty. I live in board 1 and I'm the, um, CEO liaison, um, the NPAs. Thanks, Liam Tom. Yeah, my name is Tom Darenthal. I live on Nash place and which is in Ward 1 and I'm on the steering committee. Jess. Hello, I'm Jess Hyman and I live in Ward 3 and I'm actually on the word 3 steering committee. So it's exciting to be attending a different words meeting and I'll be speaking later today. So, thank you so much. Don't don't judge us Lee. Hi, my name's Lee Perry. I live in Colchester, but I'm the assistant director of maintenance for the city of Burlington public works. Grew up in Burlington now. Thanks, Lee Carol Carol Livingston. I live in Ward 1. I'm on the steering committee and I live on Colarco Court, which is a small little one block street just off Colchester Avenue as you head down the hill. Karen. Hi, my name is Karen long and I live on Henry Street. I've been here many, many years, 35 years. Angie, unmute yourself. Hi, I'm Angie and I live with a guy next to me. That guy. I live on North prospect stream. So, yeah. Bob, I'll be tiny. Hi, I'm Bobby Tony. I live on Fletcher place. I've lived here for 11 years. Dave, Holly. Hi Dave, Collie. I live on Nash place. I've also been here for about 30 years and I'm a member of the old Eastern neighbors coalition. Earhart. Hi folks. I live down in Grove Street opposite Shamanica Park. Lift here since 1982 and please ignore the thing that says Senator Sanders next to my name. I'm not here in my official capacity working for Bernie. Oh, and also a member of the old East End up steering committee with Dave and others that are on the call. Glenn. Glenn McCrae guy live on Mansfield Avenue and Ward one. Jack. Everybody Jack Kansen, the East District City Councilor and I live on Collins Street. Jane. Hi everyone. I'm Jane Stromberg. I live in Ward 8 and I'm the Ward 8 City Councilor. Jean. I'm Jean Hopkins and I live off of East Ave on at Burlington co housing and I've been here about 14 years. Jonathan. Jonathan Pratt. And I live on Riverside of losing my place here. Kevin. Kevin Larissa. Hi Kevin McGrath and we live on Pearl Street. Company. Yeah, we have a full house. Karen. Hi. I just joined. So I'm not sure if you all are using yourselves. We're just introducing ourselves just going around the room as we would do if we were in person. Okay. Well, hi everybody. I'm Karen Bastian. I work for the UVM health network. Nice to see you all. Hi, I'm Kim. I live on Grove Street. I've been here about 11 years. It's nice to meet everyone. Sarah. Hi, I'm Sarah. I'm a UVM student and I live on North prospect Street. Welcome. Sarah. My name is Sarah flash. I'm part of Ward one. Part of. Uh, I just got my student ID card. Yes, I am. Brought into housing off East have Martha. Hello, I'd like to thank all of our hardworking city counselors for trying so hard to make the city better. It's really deeply appreciated. Especially jack. He's such a hardworking young man and the other two as well. Thank you. City counselors. Thank you. and parks and we'll be presenting a little bit later. We're pleased to be here tonight. Great, thank you. Somebody from town meeting TV, we're very grateful you're there. You don't have to come out from behind the camera if you don't want to. You can also raise your hand if you haven't been called on using the raise your hand function. It might make it easier for Jonathan. We're down to the end here. Wendy. Hi everybody, I'm Wendy Koenig. I'm the director of government relations for the University of Vermont. Happy to be with you all tonight. Thanks. Thanks for coming. And Zariah. Hi everyone, Zariah Hightower Ward One City Councilor. Okay, did I miss anybody? Yes, CJ Knudsen from the Vermont Lake Monsters. Oh, I'm sorry CJ. That's okay. And I live in Rutland, Vermont. Okay. Diana, you're on mute. I'm the marketing outreach manager for the City of Burlington Park for the Creation and Waterfront. Happy to be here today. Thank you. And that may be it. Thank you, everybody. When we went around the room, we'd go around the room. It was very welcoming and we're gonna keep trying to do something to bring us into the same space together even though we're all in our own spaces. So let's go to speak out. I know we have a couple of people who are here to give just brief updates on things but before that, if there's folks who want to say anything to the Gus group, raise your hand. I do, I don't know how to. Okay, I see Karen, then Dave, and then Bob. So go ahead, Karen. Hi, I wanna echo what Martha Lang said about our three city counselors. You are very quick to respond and I really appreciate that. I think you are doing a great job and I'm really impressed that you do that. A couple of things, I am glad the weatherization thing is going forward for rental properties. I totally support that for many reasons but I do wanna say that we have had storm windows have been required for many years as part of minimum housing and there are still many places that I have reported and there still don't have storms. So I think the hardest thing is how are we gonna ever enforce this? We've got rules now that we can't enforce. So I don't know, I'd like to meet with you three sometime and talk about some of these things I've run into. The other thing that's also like energy related is that we have a ordinance that requires people to move their cars every three days and we own a duplex and our renter is a walker and a biker and that seems bizarre that if you don't use your car for three days you still have to move it if you are parked on the street. I didn't know that, I've lived here 35 years. So anyway, that seems like really weird ordinance and I also feel like it's a little snarky that on Saturday the police said they couldn't do anything about the crowds on the beach because there were only six officers on duty and we all know that COVID is really ramping up now. So I find that setting and it was the dispatcher that said that, not a police officer. So that is one thing and then I guess I have a lot of things here but the other deal is neighborhood project. I'm wondering if we're ever gonna bring that out and do anything with that report that we have. I spent quite a bit of time on that. I know a lot of people did that our citizens and counselors and CEDO workers. I really think that would help us a lot if we could use that information. And I guess lastly, and Jonathan is on the tax board the reappraisal that is supposed to be kind of leveling the market value, it's really wacky on Henry Street. One of my neighbors, her home is appraised as $180,000 more, not a hundred. Yeah, $180,000 more than the average house on Henry Street, which seems really bizarre that and it's not, I wouldn't even know if that's the nicest house on our street. So that there are some real problems with that. Personally, we own a duplex on North Willard and our place is 1,400 square feet, the triplex next door is 2,400 square feet, five bedrooms, our duplex has three bedroom and we are appraised at $63,000 more than this duplex. I'm excuse me, the triplex. So I mean, just those are just two that I've noticed, I'm sure it's all over the place. So I don't know how that, I mean, we can appeal, I know that and my neighbor can appeal, but how can it be so far off when we've hired this company, this professional team to come in and try to level out the market rate of the housing? Like that was what they're supposed to do is set us a market rate. So anyway, I don't know, Jonathan's on the board. Maybe he knows the magic number on that or magic solution. Well, I could probably spend the next two hours talking about it, but I'm not going to. I'll be, I'll give you a call Karen, we can talk. Okay, great. But Karen raises a very important point if you're unhappy with the way your new appraisal comes out, there's an appeal process and you should definitely appeal if you think there's something wrong with it. Absolutely. And if you, and if you can't find the instructions online, I think the mayor sent out an email. If you can't find the instructions online, I'd be happy to send them to you or I'm sure your city councilors can help. Dave, Colleen. Thanks, Jonathan. I just want to remind folks that Green Up Day is actually a couple of weeks away now, May 1st and Old East End Neighborhood Coalition is getting together to help promote Green Up activities around the neighborhood. We're going to have three locations. There's going to be a Shemanska Park, Green Mount Cemetery and next to Burlington Co-Housing at the Little Free Pantry there. So those will be gathering points that people want to come and get involved. We'll have the bags and we'll have supplies. We're also going to be doing a few other things up at Green Mount Cemetery to help clean up some of the stones there. And we will be gathering between eight and 10 on that Saturday morning. We'll also have all the details up on our website, which is oldeastendbtv.com and probably by about Wednesday next week. So if you know folks that want to get involved, direct them to the website and we can get them involved from there. So looking forward to more spring. Thanks. Great, thank you. Bob Dutani? Thanks, John. I just want to give a shout out to UVM that organizes a yearly block party for Fletcher Place. We didn't have it last year because of the COVID. So we're looking forward to having it again when the new class comes in in September. The other issue is I just want to provide an update on the proposed project that is to go up behind our homes. As I mentioned before, a gully head failure has been identified as part of the mapping of landslide areas on Riverside. The gully head failure is right behind our homes on Fletcher Place. The state is aware of it. And we're attempting to have the developer, Frank Von Turkovich move the project back, reduce it in size. So it's been going on for about 10 years. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anybody else who just wants to speak out about something in public forum? You can raise your hand physically or raise your hand digitally. Okay, and CJ and CJ and Wendy have asked for time also. So CJ, go ahead. Great, thank you very much. Thank you guys very much for having me here. Obviously it's exciting news. The Vermont Lake Monsters plan on playing baseball this year, which is great. We're actually part of a new league called the Futures League, which is a collegiate with that league. So it's no longer professional minor league baseball, but the quality of baseball will still be outstanding. Be a lot of division one athletes. And the exciting thing about it is there'll be a couple of guys on a roster from Vermont that played baseball in Vermont or from Burlington, which is great. And the Futures League plays a 68 game schedule. And the fun thing about it is if we're tied after the 10th inning, then it actually goes into a home run derby. And whoever wins a home run derby actually wins the game. So we don't anticipate a lot of extra inning games, obviously the season does start a little earlier. So we'll start towards the end of May, but we wrap up a little early. We were all finished by mid-August. Again, 68 games total. We have the same number of home games, so it's 38 games. And same names of Vermont Lake Monsters, same jerseys. And the most important thing is champs still gonna be dancing in the dugout. So it should be pretty cool. We're obviously excited about it. I'm not sure if you've heard about it on the media, but Ray Peacore sold the franchise to a person named Chris English. Chris is from Montreal. He actually lives in Woodstock, Vermont. And he's just a really committed person in the community. And he's excited about being here. And with the sale, we signed a five-year lease with UVM. And hopefully, we're able to add some fan amenities at some point here in the near future. And the one thing I would like to let you guys know is we would like to do a couple of fireworks. So it's a summer potentially, probably in the July-August timeframe, if possible. So it should be a very similar fan experience. Hopefully, we're obviously gonna abide by all the COVID rules and regulations and make sure safety is priority number one. Thank you, CJ. Wendy? Hey, everybody. Wendy Cohn from UVM. Thanks again for having me. Want to start out by thanking Carol for inviting me to speak to you tonight. It's really been a pleasure to be able to share some information about what's happening on campus and want to thank this group for their support and for listening to us. So I appreciate it. Just gonna go over a couple of things that I think are relevant. And then if anybody has any questions, I'm happy to try to answer them for you or get you information. So wanted to start by letting everybody know that it's been pretty widely reported that we've been testing two times a week for the majority of this semester with the COVID numbers being up in the state and nationally, we decided that we needed to do that. We've been sort of deciding if that's the right thing to do for the whole semester and we will do twice weekly testing for the remainder of this spring semester. The only exception to that is if you are a student who is fully vaccinated, you test once a week instead of twice a week. We are continuing to push out communications to students very frequently and also to their families about adherence to the green and gold promise to the COVID regulations that are happening. I think everybody heard about the North Beach incident over the weekend where there's a lot of people gathered and we put out a communication to students and their families reminding them that we are in the home stretch of the semester and that it's really hard to be this isolated and we understand that it is, but it's really, really important to keep up the momentum of masking, hygiene, distancing and doing the right thing in order to protect our community. So I did, I know that my colleague, Joseph Adele, sent a copy of the letter that went out today to Carol. So if anybody's interested in seeing it, she could share it or I could share it with you as well. I also want to report that summer classes are mostly going to be remote. We did all remote classes last summer. We're going to continue that this summer. The only exception to that will be if you have a course that has a lab attached to it, the labs will be in person or for clinical rotations for medical students will continue to be in person with COVID protocols. We are working with the state of Vermont on vaccinations. I think that we were maybe expecting a little bit of an acceleration in the timeline for vaccination of students but with the pulling of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. I think they're going to have to wait until the end of the month but it's part of our messaging to really strongly encourage all students, faculty and staff to be vaccinated as soon as they possibly can. We're in the process of planning for our fall semester. We have great hope that things will be a little bit more normal as we head towards fall but we are being very mindful of watching the data and seeing what happens. So if anyone is interested in hearing from us again a little bit later in the summer, I think we'll have more information about fall then. And if anybody's interested, we continue to have data on our return to campus portion of our website that you can access right from our front page and that gives updates every week on our COVID numbers and about all of the things that we're doing on campus. So I really appreciate being able to speak tonight and happy to answer questions if I can. Are there questions for Wendy or any other speak out items? People who want to say something about something. Jane has a question, Jonathan. Okay, for Jane. Thank you. Thank you so much, Wendy. I'm so sorry, I'm like literally crunching on chips right now and I hope I didn't miss this. Did you talk a little bit about graduation? I heard that that was in person. So the hope is that we have a modified in-person commencement and it would be in compliance with the governor's orders the way that they're rolling out. And what would happen is that students would be able, it won't be one commencement like it usually is where we split up into 10 different commencements with a maximum of 300 students at each one of those events and what it will allow the students to do is to walk across a field and receive their diploma physically in their hands. The students will have to have a COVID test 48 hours prior to each ceremony that they'll go to a negative COVID test. And at this point, the students will be allowed to have two guests that are fully vaccinated and attend that event with them. They'll all be outdoors on our athletic fields and there will be no tents. It's gonna be a rain or shine outside, complete outside event with social distancing and masking. Okay, and then if God forbid, we have like a severe backslide of, we're already kind of seeing a little bit of an uptick with the UK variant. Is there like a plan to just kind of go all virtual if need be in that case? Yeah, I'm sure that that would be the case that if things, and in the communication that went out to families that said, preface on the fact that nothing changes and that the governor's rules don't change. All right, okay. All right, thank you. Sure, thanks. Other questions or comments? Jonathan, before we go, could we just, oh, CJ just left. So I was just wondering if there are questions for CJ, but. I'm still here. Oh, there you are. Okay, I just didn't know if there were any questions for CJ before we let him go. I see Sandy has her hand up. I don't know if that's for CJ or for something else. We can barely hear you. Can you hear me now? It's better. Okay, I have a question. I'm sorry, I just jumped on. So I missed part of Wendy's conversation. I was an eyewitness to, it wasn't a situation. There was a thousand drunk kids on North Beach. I was on the bike path watching it. It was frightening. It was huge. It was disgusting. It was appalling. Because you couldn't park in the park, they parked on every square inch of grass or bacon they could find. Had there been a need for rescue, it wouldn't have been able to be happening. This was dangerous. Are these kids going to be held accountable? Thank you. I appreciate the question. And I think that we are taking this incident very seriously. To the extent that we are able to identify students and we have received from BPD and from the city, some video and some photographic evidence, we can identify students. They will be put through the conduct process immediately. There's tons of pictures on Instagram, just for the record. I mean, I got high school kid friends that can pick up all these kids. Not to mention the trash they left, but I have to tell you, I just want UVM to take this a lot more seriously than they are. I want to hear from the president. He has not said a word. The head of the trustees. This is not just dangerous. This is just absolute not giving a, you know what about anybody or anything, but having a drunken party. And I can tell you, it was shocking to watch. And I am an alum, I'm a long time advocate and working with UVM, but this put every single person in this community at risk. And I can't stress enough. I have heard nothing strong come out of UVM and it is very, very concerning. Thank you very much. Thanks. Other questions or comments or speak out? I don't see any more hands. Thank you. Why don't we move on to city council reports and feel free to do it however you want to do it. I'm happy to start. I won't talk too much about weatherization because that's very much Jack's wheelhouse and he'll do a lot better job than I will. But I do want to, one, I have gotten a lot of emails and calls about the North Beach conglomeration of people. And I know that there was about 2,000 to 3,000 people there Saturday and that is terrifying. And I am disappointed, not hearing. I've written many emails to the president and I haven't really gotten a lot of response. But I do want to also just point out that Wendy has been doing a really good job in terms of carrying out the plans that UVM does come up with. And I really commend you. This has been really difficult and you can't control thousands and thousands of kids. And I shouldn't call them kids, they are adults, but that was appalling. And I understand the fear and that is very much high on my priority list of radar here, especially in this part of the city. Kind of moving away from that, and we can talk more about that. I'm happy to talk offline more about like planning and kind of being more strategic with the administration and just kind of like having more real conversations because this is time-sensitive and there are a lot of vulnerable people in our community. But on a different note, I just kind of want to give like a blanket overview of what's changed since our last meeting. So we had our new council begin, so we welcomed Mark Barlow, who's the new North District City Councilor. And Mayor Murrow Weinberger gave his State of the City address which really focused on climate, I'm sorry, climate racial justice and social justice. And I had a really good conversation offline with him and kind of opened up more avenues of communication with him about that in particular, about moving forward and kind of really, all of us holding ourselves accountable in a really healthy way on that topic and kind of really asking him to lean in this year and for the rest of his term, because we do need to see change. What happened with the report and with, you know, Kyle Dodson and the department with Taisha Green and I'm sure everyone's kind of read or heard a little bit about that in due time since that's happened. Again, happy to give more detail or elaborate later but I want to see change and I, knowing from my constituents and people emailing me and we all want to see that change. And so I just want you to know that I'm doing the best that I can to see that come through. We did reelect the Board of Finance. So it's the same exact Board of Finance that it was. And what else? There was a few other things on my mind. The city appraisal, the mayor just kind of sent out a thing and I'm going to put that on front porch forum as well as my Facebook and other avenues of communication of the reappraisal like guidelines for the appeal process and the date. The date has now been moved. The deadline to appeal has been moved from, I believe the 23rd to now April 30th, which is a Friday. So that's good. I foresee a lot of appeals honestly. I've gotten a lot of emails, a lot of disappointed people that really echo what Karen said exactly, almost word for word, except the exact numbers maybe, but yeah, I understand that there's some kind of disparity that is a little disappointing in many ways. So we'll work through that and I'm here to listen and help as much as I can and point folks in the right direction. And oh man, there might have, there was something else that'll probably come back to me unless Zariah or Jack gets to do it. And then, yeah, David, I saw the line, the signs for the old East End green up. Yeah, I was on a jog earlier and I saw those, I thought those were wonderful and I really like what y'all are doing with that. So yeah, all right, I'm going to hand it over. Thank you. I guess I unmute it first, so I'll go. Yeah, same thing on weatherization. I'll let Jack cover that. That's really just amazed at how Jack pushed that through. Yeah, the reappraisal, I did not realize I'm not going to lie, until the letters came out that we wouldn't also have the new tax valuation until that we would just have the new values, but not what that actually means. I think that's also part of the frustration is that it's a little hard to tell right now what that actually means for any of us. I think there's also maybe just to acknowledge is, you know, Burlington was a little late to the game on finishing this. And so I do think, not I do think, but you know, we talked about that residential properties will not have a lower value quite as much as we thought given that COVID has decreased commercial value so much over the last year. So market values of commercial properties have gone down since commercial property value has gone down with COVID. And so just flagging that for folks a little bit, I think we thought that housing values would be, you know, like a smaller share of the overall pie than they ended up being. So that is definitely a thing. But the other thing on parking, I think I just have to like give a small shout out to Karen who's just, I think it's just such an advocate for a neighborhood and you know, always happy to sit down with you anytime. Yeah, we'll talk about the weatherization. I do think, I think I'm excited about the weatherization because I think that'll be a good process, but I'll tell, I'll let Jack talk about that. I just wanna quickly reflect on I guess the year past just because it's been a year on council for me. And I'm gonna be on the same committees except for the SRO task force, which ended, which the conclusion that came out of that. I don't know if y'all have read the report. I'm gonna send out a from porch forum post. I think I'm gonna send out a series of there's just so many things to say on public safety right now and I've not been great at communicating it. It's been, it's, I think you all maybe caught this. It's been such a crazy year. Like I was on four committees over the past year. I guess five if we count public safety still and it was just every single night I had meetings. And so I'm really glad that this year I think I'm only gonna be on three once the joint committee ends. I hopefully won't be chairing one anymore. So hopefully I'll have some evenings just a draft of communications to let everybody know what's actually going on because I think it's been a year of scrambling and not a lot of year of communicating back to people and not being as intentional as we could be but as I could be, sorry. So I will try to get better at that but the SRO task force is done and or at least as the current, like the previous iteration of it is done there were recommendations sent to the school board which they seem to be the unanimously voted to adopt. So I think we'll start to see movement away from the SROs and towards some alternative and just to reflect on a few things that I heard in that task force which is one, I think there's some really vital roles for SROs to play in terms of like planning school safety that they will continue to plan and that they're one and then two that there's just an officer who has a good understanding of juvenile of our youth and how to interact with youth and how youth are different than adults and has training on that. And so I think that's something that's gonna be really important for the city to preserve and that was part of the task force recommendations. And then I think there's the second thing around like what maybe is less necessary to preserve which is this was ultimately a city funded adult resources in the building and in ways that it wasn't necessarily like a police officer is necessarily the best person to have it. So it's always good to have more adults in the room but if the city is gonna spend money on some adults in the room, it didn't necessarily make sense that some of the roles that the SROs were filling be filled with police officers. So I think moving away from that and having the SROs still be a thing but not be dedicated to being in the building but rather being a resource to the schools kind of in that consultant and in that having someone who understands like working with youth in the room. Yeah, the second thing is public safety is continuing. I'm still gonna chair the joint committee which hopefully you all met to lead the consultants. I think last time and they're doing their last town hall on April 27th. The website still says 7 p.m. but it's actually at 6.15. So there I think will hopefully be, we've got a little bit more leeway this time. So this time there should be a little bit more advertisement going out ahead of time in terms of getting more folks and more voices into the room. And I think based on some feedback, I'm gonna push for there to be affinity break up groups so that businesses can kind of have a conversation and report back and BIPOC people can have a conversation and report back. So I'm hopeful that that last town hall would be a good one and we'll have all the right links and everything will work out. And then CNA has started and that's the group that's actually assessing the police department and they seem, they've done a lot of assessments of police department. I think the thing that they're going to struggle with is alternatives. That's something that they don't quite have as much of a methodology for and that they haven't done as much research on but they seem, I will say they seem like a very, like bright, very professional group. So I have high hopes for that being a really good process and coming up with some really good research that will, and I wanna clarify on this because I think there's some like the ask of the RFP is not that they come out with the right numbers of police officers or that they come up with like, they're supposed to give a menu of options kind of in terms of if you have as many police officers here some ways that you could staff, here's some alternatives that have been done in other places. So it's really supposed to be providing information that then the community and city council, the mayor's office can use to make decisions. So just so folks not know that, kind of pivoting away from public city, I guess I'm still gonna be on CDNR. So excited, I think just cause eviction, which everybody knows I was pretty big proponent of is going to go through the state house. I don't know if somebody else on this call Earhart or others might know more about it, but I think we're doing well on that along with all of the other charter changes that are going through the legislature. I think that's it. Sorry, that was kind of a long window report bag that I've just been doing a lot of reflecting over the past since it's been a year now. And just grateful for folks on this call and to see all of your faces every month. Thank you, Zariah. It's been quite a year working with Janans, Ryan, you all, but yeah, it's really great to have this community here and to have such awesome co-councillors as well and such a great NPA to do all this work with. I guess I'll try to go quick because we're over time. So on Monday night, we got a report from Burlington Electric Department, the head of BED, Darren Springer, about the city's progress towards net zero. Burlington has some of the strongest goals on climate of any city. And the overarching goal is really to get off fossil fuels by 2030. And we have a net zero roadmap that the council approved in 2019 that provides a framework and a pathway to get there. And this was the first big report back where we actually got a lot of data on how we're doing towards those goals. And it was pretty positive overall. We reduced emissions since 2018 by, I think, 15% or so. So we are actually, yeah, more than 15% actually. So we actually are on a path where we're ahead of, we're sort of ahead of the pathway that was laid out to get us there by 2030. There is the huge asterisk though, which is that COVID had massive impacts on travel. And so a lot of the emissions reductions are just due to COVID and people traveling less in cars. So it's unclear to what extent we can really take that progress and feel like we're actually on the trajectory because a lot of it may or may not stick around after COVID, a lot of these behavior changes. So that's kind of from a high level. The report and BED is gonna continue some really generous incentives that they have going, that they started throughout COVID, but things like electric heat pumps, electric vehicles, both including pre-owned electric vehicles and additional low-income rebates there. On most of these products, there's additional low-income rebates, electric bicycles, electric lawn mowers, really anything that uses fossil fuels, they've got an electric option and there's strong rebates for that. And then in terms of rental weatherization, so yeah, the fight goes on there, not really a fight. I mean, it's a really, really popular policy, as you all know. So it's not really a fight, but we are trying to decide the timeline of implementation for it. That's kind of the final decision that we need to make as council. And so some of us are pushing for a stronger timeline. The timeline that the administration had put out just a few days ago was basically a five-year phase in. And a lot of us, I feel like this could be done much more quickly and really should be. It's a huge priority in the community. It's gonna make a big difference in a lot of people's lives and it's gonna help address our climate goals. So I think we should get this done in three years or less. And I think that's doable. The enforcement of it, it's gonna be part of the minimum housing code or minimum housing standard. So it would be, and it would be part of the inspections. But I think we, yeah, I agree with Karen that we could do a lot better in enforcement of minimum housing. And that is where this is gonna live. So I think we need to have a bigger, we need to have a bigger conversation about that. I've directly experienced issues with that. But I am feeling pretty good about where the policy's at right now. And it seems like it's being taken really seriously by the administration, by code enforcement and by everyone. So I'm hopeful that it is gonna be well enforced. And it's pretty easy to enforce because Vermont Gas, who provides this, it's a huge rebate that they provide for weatherization, 75%. And so they're gonna have a receipt of that. And we partner with Vermont Gas. So it's gonna be easy for us to know whether or not a landlord has done the weatherization work that they need to do. So it's really just a matter of basically show me the receipt. And we also have data from Vermont Gas on the efficiency of each unit. That's how we're gonna decide who has to comply when it's the least efficient. Buildings are gonna have to be weatherized first in the timeline. So I'll leave it there. I don't know if we even have time for questions, but I'm always happy to chat offline if we don't. And I do just have to add one thing to the weatherization piece, which is I think in addition, so one, the five-year timeline is just when folks would need to comply. So that doesn't even mean like when it would be done, that would be probably closer to six and a half years in terms of how long it would take. And then the second thing is to Karen's point, like I think part of the conversation around shortening the timeline will also be resourcing. And so having more inspectors here specifically for this weatherization timeline. And then I think it does make it kind of easy. One was starting with the worst offenders. We hope that the worst, the people who have the most kind of leakage in their buildings have the most deferred maintenance on their building as a whole. So I'm hopeful that this will not just have weatherization impacts, which are great and amazing, but also will just generally push up the timeline of saying like, hey, we inspected your building, which has all these weatherization problems. Oh, and we also found like a few other things that have deferred maintenance on it. So it's not a silver bullet, but I think it's gonna like really push forward some of our inspections that have been like delayed and pending and not enforced. So, but that could be me being optimistic, but I am optimistic. Okay, we're really, we are running late. Erhard, I know you raised your hand a while ago. If you have a quick question, maybe that would be our one question or comment. Thanks, Jonathan. I guess my only comment and question is, how can we wait it so long for a reappraisal? 15 years is just, it's a complete outrage because the shock is gonna be really hard for low income homeowners in the city to take. It's gonna be really bad, especially with all the COVID refugees buying up real estate all across Vermont, including in places like the Old North End, driving up prices, residential owners are gonna totally take it on the chin during this reappraisal. And I'm just really concerned. Not so much about myself, although looking at our reassessed value, it's off. But I'd be very, I'm very concerned about low income homeowners throughout the city, people living on fixed incomes who've lived in their homes for years and years. It should never have taken 15 years for us to get to a reappraisal. It has to be done regularly and it has to be done with a much narrower timeframe in between reappraisals. I was on the city council back in the 80s when we hadn't reappraised since the 60s and I was on one of the tax appeals crews and literally had homeowners crying about losing their homes or the prospect of losing their homes because they were not gonna be able to pay taxes. So it's really bad. Sorry, it's not a question, just a comment. Okay, well, let me try to answer a little bit of that. You know a lot more about this than I do and I don't wanna overstep it. I did a little back of the envelope calculation and when I did, I saw that at least 60% of the single family property owners should be paying, their burden has gone down with respect to the grand list. I mean, you'd expect it to be half and half, half up, half down, more than half, the burden should be less. That doesn't mean taxes are gonna go down because that awaits a budget. But so I think there's some subtleties to it and every case has to be reviewed and that's what makes it a challenge. I'm hoping that the low income people are getting their, the state is helping them out which is what the state is supposed to be doing and that should make this a lot easier. So it's not, so the people aren't paying taxes strictly based on their property. So it'll be a process. So I think that it's a very expensive thing to do, the reappraisals, but I believe that John Vickery has a plan, places like Massachusetts, for example, have they essentially reappraise every year. So the common level of appraisals stays very close to one every year based on what sales are happening. So people see adjustments constantly rather than this every 20 years, 15 years that it's been. And I'll stop yacking. What's next on the agenda is school commission update neither Kathy nor Adam were able to be at this meeting tonight. We have a very short comment from Kathy which I can share my screen and show. And Carol, maybe you can just quickly say a word about it. I think this will be also on our minutes. So I think that's the key. You may be aware that BHS is looking for a new principal and the finalists, they've got three finalists and are welcoming people to come tomorrow night to a forum to meet them and to hear what they have to say. The other thing they've been looking at too is their PCB update. They had a meeting last night. So I don't know what the results were of that but that's also on, there's a link for that information as well. And then let's see the PCB. I think those are the two main things. There are some changes after our break which is next week, April 26th, more students will be in person. And so hopefully that will ease situations for families and teachers are working hard to ensure and administrators as well to ensure that that goes well. Okay, so these links will be available up on our NPA page on the CEDO page if you wanna look at it or you can contact any of the NPA steering committee and we can send this to you if you want it sooner. Next on the agenda is Parks and Rec, Diana and Company. Hey, thanks for having us. I guess I'll do the intro and my planning team will do the presentation. So I'm here with Sophie, John, Max and Cindy, our director. Sophie is the Companies of Planner. John and Max are both on the planning team. We'll do a short presentation highlighting a few of the parks projects, concentrating on some of them in your wards and then some other ones as well, especially in the major parks. We'd also like to add that we're working on kids week. That's gonna happen. And then July 3rd, stay tuned for more details on the fireworks and things like that. And with that, I will turn it over to Sophie or a copy instead of Planner. Great, I'm going to share my screen. Is that visible to everybody? Awesome. Well, thank you for having us this evening. We're really excited to give you a glimpse into what we've been working on, what's coming up in terms of construction and what we're hoping to accomplish in the next five years in several parks. So it's just a mini version of what's happening everywhere, but really like Diana was saying, focusing on your ward and then nearby parks that are more regional parks as well. So just to give you an idea of some of the icons we use, when there's a light bulb, it means we're in a stage where we're still collecting our ideas. The pencil is the design process is ongoing. So we have either ourselves or consultants working towards drawings or construction documents to eventually get to the check mark point, which is the project is ready to be built. Max, I will pass it on to you. Evening everyone. So at Shemanska Park, this past summer we completed several renovations to the barn. Unfortunately, this picture is slightly dated. The new doors that have been installed so that we can consistently ensure that all of the doors are open for fire access. Those have been replaced. And also a new sprinkler system was put in. So we basically brought the building up to code as per the fire marshal to allow public events and gatherings to take place there. So whenever COVID restrictions allow that space will be available for renting. And then upcoming, we're hoping by next fall, possibly as early as this summer, we'll be advancing some long-planned asphalt pavement walkway improvements throughout the park. Mainly the main one will be paving the dirt access road that shoots down onto Grove Street that is pretty consistently shooting gravel into the street after every big storm. We're hoping to cut that off and hopefully direct some of that storm water into some green spaces within the park so that it's infiltrating and going into the ground. And then looking at making a full ADA connector pathway to the barn, finishing up connecting from the 5% path that's there and also looking for some ADA accessible parking closer to the barn, then that could be used for events. It would need a temporary control like ballard or something like that. That would be closer to the barn, sort of near the base there. So those are just some things coming up in Shmatska. Next up, we have 311 North Avenue. We have a couple of different projects going on here. For anybody who doesn't know, this is the city's newest park and it's still awaiting its formal naming at this point. But projects we have going on out there are rehabilitation of the historic Stone House. We have an architect on board who is working on that for us right now. Coming out of that will be several roof repairs which the architect is gonna be pricing up for us cost differences between slates which would fit the historic character of the building and just a asphalt shingle. And lastly, our conservation team is working on the management plan for the vegetation and conserved spaces throughout 311. Down the line, we will be doing some trail improvements to an existing informal pathway that will include upgrading that to a stone dust surface and then having a multi-use paved connector that will connect through 311 and through the next door Cambrian Rise development to North Avenue from the Greenway. Good evening. Go ahead. Good evening, everyone. I'm John and happy to be here at Adogs Skate Park. Our maintenance crews are working on sourcing a replacement coping for the upper edge of the larger bowl. And this week, the Skate Park became home or a new home to three large transplanted trees that we spaded out of the bike path project at Perkins Pier. Battery Park, in fiscal year 22, I will see a master plan process to evaluate the future of the park in terms of layout, connections to the surrounding community and most notably Chief Greylock and involve the public in a process of asking everybody for their ideas of the vision for Battery Park, so that they'll be coming up. And then once we have a master plan, we'll also look at implementation in future years. The Boat House, we are looking to hire a consultant to evaluate the Boat House's future in terms of what repairs are needed and what order the repairs should come in in terms of priority. And once we have a scoping study and understand the needs of the Boat House then we'll implement the recommendations from that study. We had to put it in City Hall Park since it's our most newly renovated park and hoping that everybody has had a chance to visit it during what we call the off season and everybody hopefully will visit it during the peak season when the water is turned back on, which is in the coming weeks. Callahan Park is currently undergoing a master plan process. It's at the early stage. We'll be hosting our first public meeting on May 13th which everybody is invited to attend. And we also have a community survey that has been released to just garner initial feedback from everyone on how Callahan Park is faring, how people use it, what amenities might be missing, et cetera. And you can always check our project webpage for more information on that ongoing project. On the Burlington Greenway, it will be another very busy season of construction. As I think most of you are aware, the city put all the pieces together to achieve the longstanding goal of keeping the bike path on the west side of the tracks through the central and southern waterfront area. That was of course precipitated by the imminent arrival of Amtrak and the city's successful negotiation of overnighting the Amtrak in the rail yard. We will be kicking off construction there in the coming weeks starting at the northern end from college to King. As many of you are aware, there is a detour in place in that section currently. And we also began a few tree removals today in preparation for the construction. And also like I mentioned, we're able to transplant three larger maples to the skate park. Oakledge? I can talk about Oakledge. I thought we had an Oakledge slide and Oakledge construction, we're about ready to go out to bid for that last section through the park that will complete the rehabilitation of the Greenway. Highlights there are really focused on accessibility. There will be beyond ADA or universal access to the beach. A pause place, exercise equipment, and the standard cross section from where we left off in the northern part of the park last year to the southern border of the park at Austin Drive, which will also feature a gateway. At Letty Park, we are in the process of fabricating a new steel structure to replace the wooden staircase that is due for replacement at this point. It would be a nice way to put that. And our contractor is hoping to get that all built and installed in early to mid-May. At the same time, we're working on advancing design and refreshing our design and permitting for the pause place at Letty Park. And then we have a whole slew of future products, projects lined up for Letty, including finalizing a master plan for the park, a shelter, playground, a potential mountain bike park that has a lot of community support, upgrades to the rest rooms, and then all the construction of all those different things down the line. At North Beach Campground, we have some projects that have been busy this past season, this past winter, I should say, as well as this coming spring. So we recently tore down the large maintenance building that is right where the hand is there on the screen. And we are currently in design for what you see in the 2017 Campground master plan here for those pull-through sites. Those would be several RV pull-through sites that would be part of the campground to accommodate increasingly large RVs that are booking at the campground. And then to design the sort of new entryway and a widened road with a formal sidewalk going all the way down to North Beach under the overpass to the beach. Bookletch Park. As I mentioned, the bike path work we're also gearing up to put the universally accessible playground out to bid in the coming weeks. And in combination with that playground construction, we will renovate the lower pavilion restrooms to match the upper pavilion restrooms which were highly focused on accessibility. And at some point in a couple of years, fiscal year 24, we'll be working on stormwater management, reconfiguration of the entrance and exit to minimize pavement and pull it away from the drainage. Yeah. Perkins Pier is currently undergoing a siding study. We had our first public meeting in March and we will have our second public meeting also in May, May 18th, which everyone is encouraged to attend. It's a virtual meeting and at that meeting, we'll have our consultants from agency and their team presenting options for Perkins future essentially. The first meeting consisted of hearing everybody's input on their use of Perkins and potential things that are missing or visioning essentially. And this one will be more about looking at different alternatives. Sophie, can I add a little something on that? I would encourage anyone watching or listening to join us for the second session coming up on the 18th. We had over a hundred attendees and just as many questions at the last one. So turnout has been great and the Zoom format has really made it accessible to everyone. And I'd say on that note, if you wanted to look back and watch the meeting or just go through the slides that were presented, they're available on our project page listed down here. And then in the fall, we'll also have mooring replacements at Perkins Pier and part of the siting study will decide where basically the playground should be located and it could be where it is right now and replaced or look for a new home within Perkins Pier just depending on the siting study essentially. And then based on the siting study, we also have looking at the paving the parking lot and replacing or renovating the Lyman building and restrooms. And then just to wrap up our summary of some of the action that's happening in the parks system-wide, there's always work going on throughout the system, the park system, including proving lighting and looking at making sure all our playgrounds are compliant and safe. Looking at restroom designs overall, a universal kind of, we have universal standards, but to implement those throughout this park system, upgrading our shelters, making sure our signage and wayfinding is also up to our new and improved, with our new improved logo and standards there as well. And then also just overall looking at updating the urban forestry master plan is on our radar for the next year. But a lot of the system-wide activity is what we do yearly and then the projects are more focused on individual parks. And that's what we had for this evening, but we are open to questions if there's time. Should I just fill the questions based on the hands that are up? Jonathan, you're muted. Yeah, sorry. Yes, why don't we do the questions? We should probably do them with a little bit of, a little bit of haste, but let's go through the questions. So, left to right, Carol. Just real quickly, I live just above Shemanska Park. Amazing improvements there. The barn is fantastic. And it was really a godsend for lots of different groups last summer. Lots of different groups all there at the same time. It was just really spectacular. Thank you so much. We also, my other, the flip side is last weekend is pretty typical on Friday night. We had guys driving their cars up two o'clock in the morning, putting on their headlights to play basketball for an hour, music blasting loud. We did call the police who came after half an hour. And it, you know, given our struggle with trying to ensure that we're using our officers effectively, it's frustrating that they call them for this, for this issue. My understanding was that there were supposed to be signs and people weren't supposed to be at those parks after 10 and that we're also wondering about putting some kind of chain across the access road. Now that's going to be beautifully paved. I'm making it easier, but I appreciate the ADA access. I get that. It's just as a nearby neighbor, that's really frustrating. And it happens often during the summertime. So just have some concerns about really thinking about how to make it manageable for neighbors. Yeah, that's a good point. I didn't mention in our paving, part of what we want to include in that is installing a removable bollard sort of at the base there so that people can't pull into the park like they now do. You know, so that that bollard would basically be pulled out for staff for when we need to get in to do maintenance or plowing or that kind of thing. So that we do want to start to try to control that a little bit more and we're going to see what we can do for solutions on that before we just... And are there signs, I mean, it's at the convention that the parks really are closed at 10? Yes, all of our parks close at sundown and we do have some standard rule signage. We can look at what we've got available for budget to have one of those put in at Shemanska. I guess, and to be perfectly honest, the other side is 20 and 30 year olds, what is available for them at midnight on the weekends? And that's not your issue, but it is one that I think we need to look at as a city to what can we provide for young people to be able to do. Thanks, Carol, Karen. Hi, thank you. In my front porch forum, excuse me, there's been discussion about the little playground at Parmalo Park is being used as a dog park for people. This has gone on and on like for a couple of years now. So it's not a fancy park, but it's really nice to have that little, it's a small little playground, really for young children, probably maybe one to six years old. And people like that it's fenced in and I guess they've been letting their dogs loose and chatting and not being there to pick up the poop. And it just should not be, I don't think a child should be playing in an area that somebody has been letting their dogs run free. So anyway, I don't know again, it's sort of like Carol's problem, like how do we maintain the park behavior for that park? And you've probably heard this before. I know for a while there were some meetings, maybe a year ago about this, but it has really come up again. So I hope you can take care of that for the people that, I mean, I think it's a play, it is a playground. That was money we spent for the equipment and defense it in and it should be a playground, not a dog park. Thank you. So I'll go ahead and address that one. It is a real challenge at Pomeroy and Jesse who was the previous director, he met with the neighborhood and there wasn't consensus on removing the fence there that would in the bushes to help make it more visible and help make it less of a dog park. And then councilor Tracy and I met with the neighbors again and there still wasn't consensus on it, but I connected with councilor Tracy again on that one. And he, you know, he's very interested in meeting again with the neighborhood and seeing if we can help get consensus to that. Our next meeting, we wanna show what the design, what it might look like, if we remove the fence and put in a different plantings, lower plantings, and then it's less desirable as an off-leash space because it isn't fenced anymore. And part of its education and, you know, just, you know, why it's not good to have dogs in there. I think sometimes people think but there's no kids in there right now. Why can't I let my dog in there? And they're not thinking about the fact that kids put everything into their mouths, younger kids especially. And so part of that is education. And I know the neighbors have been trying to educate each other on it and not everybody is receptive to listening. So I think as much as we can, trying to get the message out, why you shouldn't be doing it, but we tried the no dog signs, made sure they're on the gates and that hasn't done anything. So, but thank you for continuing to bring that concern up and just know that we are aware and we'll try to get another meeting on site with the neighbors again and again, see if we can show them what it might look like to help maybe get that consensus to removing that one fence line in the bushes. You're heard. Okay, thank you. Thanks Jonathan. Thanks Cindy and to the whole team. Great presentation. Really want to echo what Carol said about Shematska Park. It's just really been wonderful to see the park come back to life and everything that you guys have done so far. It has been awesome. I'm really looking forward to the accessibility path and really excited that that's part of the plan this year. And my first question was the same one that Carol had about bollards or something, preventing people from being able to drive up there because it's not just a nuisance, it's dangerous. People come barreling up there who have absolutely no business driving up to the barn. The second question though that I had was around the back of the barn the sliding door is now no longer closed. And I understand why that is, but I'm just concerned about vandalism as I think folks know, we had a terrible fire in the barn that almost destroyed the whole thing many years ago back in the, it was the early 90s. And without, with just having like these glass doors in the backside of the barn, I'd be very concerned about potential vandalism. There's just no way that anyone can see what's going on on the backside of the barn really well at all. So that's just my comment is maybe when the barn's not in use, if that sliding door could be closed so as to avoid potential vandalism and someone breaking in from the back. One of the things I just wanted, I want to make sure we're not remiss on when it comes to Shemanska Park. There's an amazing, some of you may belong to it, but the Old East End Neighborhood Coalition, it's just an amazing group of volunteers in the neighborhood who have put so much time of labor and love into that park to really make it special. We do the, we do the expensive things like as far as replacing tennis courts or replacing basketball courts, but it's the neighbors and that neighborhood group that really make it a very special park. So many thanks to that group. Jack. Thank you all so much for being here and presenting. I had a question about the bathrooms at City Hall Park and just kind of what the plans are for those because when last I went down there, they were just kind of not usable, it seemed like, just locked. The City Hall Park one was the Portland Lou was locked? Yeah. Oh, I don't, yeah, I'm not sure, I'm not aware of that. So I'll check into that. I wasn't aware that. This was a couple of weeks ago, but. Yeah, I know there was one point in the middle of winter when it got really, really cold that they had to close it down. It got to that like lowest temperature, but then it went back on again. So again, I'm not sure what the status is on that. I can check though. Okay. They're meant to be just open to anyone though, right? Yeah, it's supposed to be 24 seven that they're open. So it would have been, unless there was some mechanical issue, I didn't hear about it. Okay. All right. Thanks, Cindy. Okay. If there are no other questions, we can move to our next agenda item. And that is. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Chittin and Sol Waste District, Lee. Hello everyone. My name is Lee Perry. I introduced myself earlier, but for those of you that weren't on yet, I am the Assistant Director of Maintenance for the City of Burlington Public Works. I am joined by Michelle Morris of Chittin and Sol Waste District. She is the Director of Outreach and Communications and we are going to be presenting on recycling today. I will be talking specifically about Burlington recycling and I'll do my presentation. And then Michelle will talk specifics about recycling and materials and where they should go. And she has a short slide presentation as well. So I will start with mine. Can you all see my screen? Perfect. Oops, I'll start at the beginning. Sorry about that. So City of Burlington Recycling Program give you a quick summary on the state of recycling in the City of Burlington. The slide with a picture of one of our newer trucks that we use for curbside collection has a cart tipper on the other side of the truck which lifts the car into the truck and dumps it. So it doesn't involve the employees lifting it. And how do we do recycling? Well, the City of Burlington utilizes three 24 cubic yard recycling trucks to do recycling program. We have four trucks. We keep one at a spare at all times at the shop. Just in case we have mechanical failures and such like that we have a vehicle to fall back on. We have one operator per truck who does about 500 plus stops a day per route. So three routes, that's around 1,500 stops a day for the three drivers. We break the city down into three routes per day as I just said for the total of 15 routes per week starting the south end and by Friday we end up in the new north end. Currently the city's averaging around 3,200 tons of recycling annually which is up significantly from what we had been averaging in previous years. We usually average around 2,880 tons a year but my feeling is with COVID and everybody being at home, people working from home, people ordering stuff online, Amazon boxes we're really starting to see an increase in our tonnages. So that's a big deal. It's material that wasn't really accounted for but we're dealing with it. And all the recycling we collect is disposed at Chittin's Always Districts Materials Recovery Facility which is they call it MRF. I don't know if you've heard it called that before but it's located on Avenue C in Williston. So every day all our trucks take all our material we pick up in Burlington and it's dumped there. Current disposal cost is $80 a ton. This is funded by our solid waste generation tax that we charge local haulers who pick trash up in the city of Burlington. For every residential unit that they pick trash up they pay the city of Burlington $4.84 tax per month and that's what funds our recycling program and recycling carts. This is a picture of we just got a delivery of carts in. I think this was this past fall. City of Burlington offers carts to residents and property owners at a discounted price. We offer 35 gallon, 65 and 95 gallon carts that 10, 20 and $25 respectively. It's a pretty good deal and it helps in the recycling process because you'll see why in my next slide. So why do we offer recycling carts? One offers residents the option of a larger container which you don't see in this picture. Yeah, there is one tucked in behind those bags. There's two blue bins stacked inside of each other. Obviously this residents needs a cart because they produce more recycling than what they can hold in whatever blue bins are hidden in there. So by getting a cart, it helps keep neighborhoods cleaner. Obviously you get a windstorm with this pile of recycling materials out. It's gonna blow all over the neighborhood and we try to get out as much as we can to clean up any debris that's blown off to the side of the road. And then having carts covers that keep some material dry. It's easier for our city workers to handle and it's easier for the Murph employees to handle when they're sorting throughout this recycling. As well as carts, they limit injuries related to the job. I mean, recycling is a very hard job. I've done it multiple times myself until we went to the carts. It was pick up the blue bin and you're dumping it at chest height into a truck and some of those bins during the winter, they freeze, they can weigh upwards of 80, 90 pounds. And you're trying to dump them in the truck. And it's a lot of shoulder injuries. So going to the carts has really limited the injuries we've had. And just to kind of wrap it up, what's the future of recycling in Burlington? And for environmental and economic reasons, the city of Burlington is currently exploring the possibility of consolidated, curbside consolidated collection of trash recycling and food scraps. And Jack knows we've had multiple meetings to discuss this option. And I have listed two meetings that are coming up. This Wednesday, we'll be meeting with the Public Works Commission. And then we'll be back at the Duke at the end of the month on the 28th to discuss it further. And I have a link here and I will send this presentation to Tom at the end of the meeting. And with the link, and you can view all the meetings that have already happened and any information on consolidated collection. The study we had done by a consultant is on there as well. And I'll just end it with questions. Any questions might rise after the meeting. You can certainly send them to my email at lperry at BurlingtonBT.gov. But I think we'll let Michelle her presentation and then field questions after if you have anything on either of them. Does that sound okay? Okay, so I'm gonna stop sharing this one. And Michelle, do you want me to share or? I can give a shot at sharing my screen but I have to be enabled to do that, I think by the host. Liam? But Lee, if you can and you want to make sure that I set you, that's fine with me. I can make you a cohost right now and you should be able to share. Okay, let me know when it's all set. I made you a cohost. Oh, there we go, okay. I'll put it up in a second. Let me know if that's working. Okay, first of all, I see that there's some Burlington parks folks still here and so I just want to give my shout out in appreciation. I'm not a Burlington resident but I've lived here for over 21 years in Vermont and Jericho and the parks are one of the things that draw me into the city to visit and spend my money and I visited I think almost every one of them. So I super appreciate all the work that goes into maintaining those properties. So thanks for that. Okay, I'm Michelle Morris. I'm the director of outreach and communications the Chittin and Solid Waste District. Leah is your Burlington commissioner to our board of commissioners and he just asked me to just, I have three slides I think or maybe four to answer some of the very basic questions about what can and can't be recycled and then I'm happy to answer for other questions or you're welcome to reach me. So basically why do we accept what we accept the drivers behind what's recyclable is that you have to have the technology in place to collect like Leah explained, sort it which is what we do at the MRF, the materials recovery facility and then market that material. There has to be a buyer who's willing to buy it. The economics must work for the processor and then there has to be demand for recycled products to close that loop and as consumers that's really the best thing we can do to support recycling is do it properly and then buy products that have recycled content to support the demand. Basically what we accept and not just in Chittin and County but across Vermont is it's very really simple paper, clean, dry, paper, cardboard and rigid single use containers. So you can see we've really been trying to emphasize visuals here. So it's cans, tubs, jars and then paper, clean and dry. The some key things to remember is that we want them empty so we don't want that food or beverage that's in them and then to facilitate the curbside collection in particular but also processing at our facilities we want items to be smaller than two feet by two feet. So particularly cardboard, you don't want those big pieces stacked up next to the cart, they need to fit in the cart and then it should be larger than two inches in two directions and that's about how we process it in the machinery that's used to process it and I'm happy to explain more about that if folks want me to. And then this is just really the major things that cause problems for us and it's not just us. This is true of Merse across the country. It's plastic bags is the number one offender. We don't want anything bagged. If you have plastic bags and there should be fewer of those now that they've been banned but take them back to the grocery store or the vendor. No batteries, no stuck on food or drink, no scrap metal, all we want to remember is those cans that are metal, no clothing or textiles, no electronics. We have special recycling for that and nothing that had hazardous materials in it, please. And that's it. Happy to answer questions. Here's my contact information and we are also offering our outreach team is offering webinars on recycling, composting and special recycling now while we're under COVID restrictions and can't do our popular in-person workshops and tours. I'll stop, screen sharing. Jonathan, I don't know if you can see my hand but I've got a couple of questions. Yeah, okay, go ahead and then Glenn. Yeah, hi, a couple of quick questions. One is you say there has to be a market for the materials that you collect. Recently there's been a fine imposed on the solid waste district for dumping glass. Is that something that can be, is there a market for that? And are we still collecting glass? What's going on there? We absolutely are still collecting glass. And we disagree that the glass was dumped but we've settled with the attorney general and the agency of natural resources and we have moved on from that. That was really decisions made by previous administration at CSWD. So we have been collecting glass. The glass is processed at our materials recovery facility and it's turned into a material called process glass aggregate that we send to the quarry in Colchester where it's blended with natural aggregate. So it's used in place of the natural aggregate in civil engineering projects. And when conditions warrant and we are not able to meet those PGA specs which are pretty specific, then we do sometimes during the winter send it to other facilities that have more equipment that's able to process it further in Quebec or Massachusetts. And it's used in similar projects or it may be turned into things like fiberglass or abrasives. But glass, to answer your question, we pay $5 a ton roughly to send it to the quarry and last year we paid something over $300,000 to send glass to those beneficiation facilities in Massachusetts to be processed. And glass is a challenge for facilities across the country because it's heavy, but it is being processed. It is being turned into new products and we're excited about opportunities that we see in the future that we're working with the Agency of Transportation on having even more applications for that material. Okay, I've got one follow up question. That's a slightly different subject than that said. A lot of the things that you had in your picture those products probably have the recycled triangle on them. But I have been told, I think unofficially that not all things with that triangle really are recyclable. For example, black plastic I'm told to put in the trash. Is that true and are there other things like that? There are many, many other things like that which is why we don't refer to the numbers anymore for plastics in particular. Those triangles you're referencing in those numbers are called resin codes and they were really developed for the marketing, the commodities markets, not for the recycling, not for the work that we do in trying to educate the public. So we as in the recycling folks who do what I do, we don't talk about those triangles and numbers because you can look at almost any plastic thing and it'll have that resin code on it and all that tells you, I like to say it tells you more about the history of the product, what it's made from than it does about its future, what it can be made into. So don't look at the numbers, go buy what I said rigid single use containers and packaging. And in terms of black plastic, that's correct. We don't accept black plastic. I know that sometimes people are sort of flummoxed by that. There's many reasons why we don't, but the short answer is if it makes it into your recycling Ben, it's likely to get sorted off the line at the mirf and sent to the landfill because there is not a market for black plastic. The better news is that it is a fraction of a fraction of a percentage of all the plastics received we receive and plastics in total make up about 5% by weight of all the material we serve. We process at the mirf every year, which is about 47,000 tons of recyclables. Okay, thanks. Yep. Glenn? Yeah, the following up on the outdated technology question back to Lee, though, is I was part of the movement in the early 90s that brought the first blue bins to Vermont and really promoted curbside recycling. And we're still using the same containers, 30 years later. Yeah, we don't offer those containers anymore so whichever ones are out there, if you need a new container, it's gonna be a wheeled car. That's great. And I'm glad to see the price came down since I bought mine. So I'm sure there aren't rebates back on that, but this maybe is more a question for city council is when we brought this up five, six years ago, there was a new ordinance that did mandate them, I believe that multifamily houses and rental units and so forth. And on those units that have put that into place, you see a notable difference in the lack of litter around that and obviously the convenience for pickup, but in many cases that isn't. And that picture that Lee showed, that's a common occurrence in our neighborhood all up and down the street. And so the amount of litter all year round is just enormous. It's really embarrassing to walk the streets. We had an incident six, seven years ago with friends, a young family that was interested in moving to Burlington. And they came through the city and they looked at it and they said, we live right now in Kigali, Rwanda and the streets in Kigali are much cleaner than Burlington. And it's true. And I visited Kigali. So, it's one of our biggest issues. It is going, that trash is going into the lake. It plugs up the stormwater. There are a whole host of problems. And so I'd like, we talk about exhilarating change here. What is it gonna take to exhilarate getting those bins for use at every household in the city? Yeah, so that picture was sent to me by one of our drivers. So I instruct all our drivers. I said, when you go up to a place like that, take a picture, get an address, picture of the house with the address, send it to me. I forward that to code enforcement and they follow up with the property owners. Usually it's like you said, one to four unit rental property. And along with that, usually once or twice a year, code will do mailings to all the property owners, that own one to four units with flyers from CSWD, what they need for containers and such like that. So we're doing the outreach. It's just like you said, there's a lot of them out there. Yeah, I think your folks are doing great. I watch them all the time, handling it. I really, it's terrible when they have to literally pick up multiple soggy bags. And then my Tuesdays walking through the neighborhood are with litter bags and I'm constantly stuffing things back into recycling bins. And Wednesday again, it's with a litter bag that fill up in its glass and cans, its paper. And it's not the problem of the recycling truck or unit. It really is that we aren't accelerating and really requiring this in the city. So I'll just leave that back with the counselors that that's something that really needs to be addressed. And hopefully, oh, sorry, sorry counselor. No, I agree. And this came up just, I think last night in planning commission, Emily Lee, who's the ward eight member of the planning commission said that she wanted to have the commission take it up to basically add a penalty for non-compliance. Cause I think right now there's no penalty at all. Maybe Lee can correct me, but. No, I would have to look into that. I could find out that information Yeah, so I think there's no penalty for non-compliance. And I feel like at this point, if we want to accelerate it, we might need that that might be necessary because it sounds like there is outreach. There is education, but sometimes, you know, if that's not working, sometimes you have to add in stronger enforcement. And with consolidated collection, it's going to be mandatory that everyone has a wheeled cart for trash compost and recycling. So it's going to eliminate those blue bins. Oh yeah. Well, that'll accelerate it then for sure. For sure. I just wanted to comment that CSWD is no longer giving away, you know, for a couple of years now, we haven't been giving away free blue bins and we've seen a marked reduction in consumption. So I'm hoping that'll help. Of course that's county wide, but hopefully that helps in Burlington. Angie, do you have a question? Yes, I do have a question. It's actually less a question than a big compliment and thank you to your organization. I find your website is so helpful. I can find out anything on your website and I really appreciate that. And as well, I appreciate that the work that you do can be really nasty. And I have taken note of your request that no dirty items be recycled because it is gross and because there are people who handled those things. And so I just want to say I thank you for the work that you're doing and the enormous effort that you have put into providing as much clarity for people as possible. I think you're doing just a momentous job here and you're doing it very well. So thank you. Thank you. If there are no further questions, thank you very much. You're welcome, thank you. I think we all appreciate it. Thank you, Liam and Michelle. Thank you, have a good evening. Next is Jess Hyman, CBOEO. Thank you, Jonathan. And I'm Jess Hyman from the Fair Housing Project. Yeah, we do, no apologies necessary. It's one of CBOEO's statewide housing advocacy programs. And I'm really happy to be here tonight with Rachel Batterson of Vermont Legal Aid and Todd Rawlings of CEDO. And we're here to talk about Fair Housing Month. So Todd is going to read the city proclamation and we'll all learn more about Fair Housing Month from the proclamation and then Rachel's gonna talk a bit more about Fair Housing, how it shows up and what to do about it. And then I'll share some information about the activities that are happening all month. Todd, would you like me to screen share the proclamation? Or do you want me to read it? Yeah, I would prefer to read it actually, if that's all right. Perfect, thank you. So good evening everyone. Thank you for having me here for this. My name is Todd Rawlings, I'm the housing program manager for the city of Burlington Community and Economic Development Office. And on Monday, April the 12th at the city council meeting, the mayor read a proclamation declaring April Fair Housing Month in Burlington. The mayor couldn't be here today to read that proclamation but the mayor's office asked me to do that on his behalf. So I'll jump right into it. Whereas the Federal Fair Housing Act was passed in April 1968 in order to take steps towards eliminating discrimination in housing opportunities based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, family status and disability and to further housing choices for all Americans. Whereas Vermont's Fair Housing Act strengthened the protections of the Federal Fair Housing Act to include age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, receipt of public assistance and people who have experienced abuse, sexual assault and stalking as protected classes and whereas the month of April is now celebrated as Fair Housing Month both nationally and locally and whereas the ongoing struggle for dignity and opportunity for all in housing is not the exclusive province of the federal or state governments and vigorous local efforts to combat discrimination and expand housing opportunities can be extremely effective. And whereas Burlingtonians need safe, decent, affordable and inclusive housing and illegal barriers to equal opportunity in housing no matter how subtle diminish the rights of all. And whereas the city of Burlington supports the efforts of fair housing organizations, concerned citizens and the housing industry to create broader housing choice in Burlington and Shinden County and to promote understanding of the Fair Housing Act. And whereas inclusive, welcoming and affordable communities promote diversity and a climate conducive to equitable and vibrant development. And whereas Burlington submitted to the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development an assessment of fair housing which was subsequently approved by the department in December of 2017. And whereas Burlington continues to work to expand housing opportunities and the availability and affordability of housing in Burlington through policy reform including the development over the last two years of new policies to implement energy efficiency standards in rental housing, eliminate requirements around parking standards in order to reduce a major driver of the cost of housing and align the city's land use policies with its climate goals and restore and increase the dedicated funding for the city's housing trust fund among others. Whereas the coronavirus has put additional strain on the city's housing and support services and exacerbated existing inequities for people whom fair housing laws seek to protect from discrimination, particularly for people of color. Now therefore be it resolved that I, Murrow Weinberger mayor of the city of Burlington to hereby proclaim the month of April, 2021 to be Fair Housing Month in Burlington and do hereby urge all individuals, agencies and institutions, public and private to contribute to the observance by continuing our efforts to eliminate housing discrimination in our communities and increase housing opportunities for all. Thank you, Tom. So my name is Rachel Batterson. I'm the director of the Housing Discrimination Project at Legal Aid and I'm just gonna talk a little bit about what we see in Vermont because a lot of people think there isn't really discrimination in Vermont and that's just not the case. So at Legal Aid, we receive about 100 complaints per year of housing discrimination. The most common complaints are discrimination against families with children and the next most common are discrimination against people with disabilities who are requesting reasonable accommodations in their housing and being denied those accommodations. But then the next category is people of color which isn't as many in number but is disproportionately high for the population of people of color that we have in Vermont. And I also, I wanted people to think for a minute about another context. Let's say you applied for a job and 40% of the time you just got a blanket no. You got no information. They just said, sorry, we're not interested. And so then you have to look at the pool, the 60% that's left and you apply among that pool and then you might have some other times when you don't get an interview or don't get the job. But imagine further that you found out afterwards that that first 40% was completely because of discrimination. So 40% of the time you're just not considered because I'm sorry, you're a woman, we're not interested. And then, okay, you've got the 60% left and of those 60% there's still discrimination happening and those transactions as well. And that's kind of what it's like if you're a person of color looking for housing. Usually you, most discrimination against people with color of color happens. It's called with a handshake and a smile. So in other words, you go to see you apply for an apartment or you apply for a house and everything is fine, nobody's mean to you, nobody says anything discriminatory, nobody treats you badly, they smile, they give you a handshake and you leave and then you find out somebody you were out there or somebody else got the apartment. The only way you would know that you were actually discriminated against is if somebody else, you knew about other people who applied, who had the same kind of income and qualifications for the housing, but were white. And that's the kind of investigation that we do at Legal Aid, it's one of the things we do is try to assess whether discrimination happened because especially for people of color, it is most common to have that type of discrimination, that kind that you really would not know that it happened unless you do that testing. It's much more common for other kinds of discrimination, they all are sort of a little bit different, but for example, people are much more likely to say over things about children or about people with disabilities, like I don't think this is really a good place for you because I don't know if you can live on your own or I'm concerned about your safety or I'm concerned about your children's safety. So it comes in the form and maybe is well-meaning and maybe that's a cover, but it comes in a form that's more in a patronizing way, but nonetheless, it's denying housing. But for people of color, it's much more common to have this really silent version and that's why testing is important. So for people who hear about housing discrimination happening, they can call us at Legal Aid, they can call CBOYO and they can also file a complaint with the Human Rights Commission or with directly with the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Thank you, Rachel. And so with Fair Housing Month, so as Todd shared in the proclamation, it celebrates the anniversary of the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968 and it was a long time coming. There, we have a long history of systemic discrimination and segregation in housing in this country and it took a lot of work and a lot of fighting to get the Fair Housing Act passed. And in fact, it wasn't passed until after Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated where there was enough pressure to get the legislation passed. And but just because that law is on the books doesn't mean of course that the discrimination isn't happening and you, Rachel mentioned the 100 or so complaints that come into Legal Aid each year. Well, we know that there's far more instances that happen out there than that get reported. And so Fair Housing Month is a time to celebrate the passage of the Fair Housing Act and these incredible protections that were put into law and also the efforts to redress systemic discrimination and harassment. And it's also a time to recognize that we're still not there yet and that these inequities still exist and that we need to keep fighting for safe and stable and accessible and affordable homes for everybody. So we use this month to educate and celebrate and we also wanna make it fun too because it's all about celebrating what makes our community great and what we want our communities to be and the role of vibrant and diverse and inclusive communities. So we have a whole month long series of events put together in partnership with Legal Aid with the Human Rights Commission, with CEDO, with the Vermont Department of Housing Community Development and knew this year a partnership with the Department of Libraries and the Vermont Library Association. And so there are educational workshops, there are library events, book discussions, film discussions, community housing discussions, a fun art project called the Heart and Home Art, a community art project where people are invited to share what home and community mean to them. Oh, and I had intended to share my screen while I talked about this. I'm just gonna share this right now and folks see my screen. Hey, wonderful. So this is the website where you can find out more about the events is fairhousingmonthvt.org and there's some basic information. There's an event calendar, which goes over all the different events that are happening in the libraries, in the communities. Most of these events are online, which is pretty wonderful. So you can join them from all over the state. We also have a series of discussion events called Fairhousing Fridays, which are an opportunity to have guest speakers but to also have some really deep community discussions. So last Friday, we had a presentation by a South Burlington High School student who talked about racial discrimination in housing and how it impacts our communities. This Friday coming up will be a conversation on equity and choice in Vermont housing. And the following of Friday will be a look at housing in the wake of COVID. So there's lots of ways to get involved. The Heart and Home Art project is there. There are prompts that you can download and do art at home. You can pick up art kits and do them with your kids, with your community, and then join us for online workshops and our reception as well. And then there are also resources. So I would draw your attention to the resource sheet and there's a lot of really good information about what to do if you experience housing discrimination, who to call, where to learn, how to learn more and then just some basic fair housing information too. So I would really encourage you to visit the website and join us for these events because it's a really nice way to bring people together to discuss these important issues and to celebrate our diverse and inclusive communities and the importance of housing. Because as we all know and what was made abundantly clear during this past year is that the role that our homes play in our lives and where we live determines where our kids go to school, how easy it is to get to work, what type of environment we live in, access to opportunities of all type and so making sure that everyone has access to safe, stable, accessible and affordable homes is so important, especially now. So that's what we wanted to share and we would love to if there's time and if you have questions, we'd be happy to answer any questions that you might have about either fair housing month and activities or fair housing in general or anything else related to housing. Are there questions for any of the three speakers? Same hand raised. Is it there or hurt? I'm looking up. It looks like Sandy has a hand raised. Okay, thank you. Hi, that was a great presentation. I'd highly recommend that everybody read the new book called The Color of Law. It's just absolutely mind blowing. I'm in real estate and I am horrified reading that. So a big shout out for that. I do think that just housing in general, the crisis, we need to look at it regionally. Just to give you an idea, I just checked on MLS just now, there are nine homes in all of Chittenden County or sale under 300,000. Nine homes in the entire county. So it's a countywide problem, it's a statewide problem. Burlington should not be the solution to a massive problem like this. So I hope that my leaders in Burlington will view this on a countywide level that we have to. We cannot solve it alone. In Burlington we have right now about 40 properties for sale, but 72% of them are over 400,000 and seven of them are over a million and many of these deals today are all cash. And I mean, whether it's 200 or 2 million cash deals. So it's a very tough market. I've never seen it before in my 35 years in the business and we have to approach it from a countywide at least. We need to at least cooperate with other towns. I don't know if other towns have inclusionary zoning, but if they don't, I'd love to see the state push that more on a lot of these towns that like Shelburne that are just building as many multimillion dollar homes as they can. So anyway, just a couple of little tidbits for a great presentation. You're heard. Thanks Sandy and thanks folks for the presentation. I sure wish more realtors felt the way you did about inclusionary zoning. You're a rare, a rare, a rare realtor in that regard. I just wanted to add in, Jess, I think you guys are in cooperation with the library showing the film owned, am I correct in that? So for folks, Sandy mentioned color of law, I think of it as the movie equivalent of color of law is the movie called owned that is showing at the library. It gives a really great visual representation of how government policies for the last, well, since the 20s and 30s have really created the racial divide and the wealth divide in our country sadly and a lot, it's government policies have done it and both the book and the movie show that pretty convincingly. So if you don't want to read the book, I urge you to see the movie. And thank you, your heart. And so the movie's available for streaming through Fletcher Free Library's canopy service. So if you have a library card, you can stream it. And then the movie discussion will be April 21st from at 6.30, hosted by the library. And there's information on the fairhousingbt.org website. The right. Yeah, I just wanted to say a huge thank you to Jess and the Fairhousing Project and Vermont Legal Aid just because I know that as we work on these housing issues, I think so often, I know Jack's been hearing this with me on ordinance and also on CDNR, we just have so many people say like, we don't even think this is a problem. And so just the work of doing research on this, like you said, like so much of a silent and I'm just so appreciative of the work you all do because it's really hard for us to push ordinances when we don't have evidence that it's a problem because people don't see it and so they assume it's not real. And so I'm just really grateful for the work that you all are doing. And I think it creates a great basis for us to do our job. Thank you. Yeah, and that's why the investigation and the testing and the work that Legal Aid does is so important to gather that data so that we can tell the story of what's really happening out there. I just wanted to mention real quick that there's another couple of videos. The one that I'm thinking of is segregated by design which is actually a half an hour video, kind of infographic style that goes through the color of law. It's narrated by Richard Rothstein. So if you don't have time to read the book it's half an hour well spent. Other questions or comments? If not, thank you very much. That was very interesting. Thank you. Thank you Frank for having us tonight. Thank you. We're running out of time. We have one more item on the agenda and that is to talk about the budget for the NPAs. And I think we can do this quickly. I'm gonna share my screen. The group is smaller than it was and so we aren't gonna come to any conclusions tonight but we wanted to share with you the things that the budget committee has been working on as ways of potentially spending the money that the city gives the NPAs. The city gives each NPA $1,500 to spend in a year and so there's $5,000 between wards one and eight. And this is kind of a proposal and it's split down the line between the wards. And we kind of focus on the outreach component of the conditions behind the funding. And so I wanna just kind of go through the things that we've talked about. We put out signs every month. We wanna put out more signs so we wanna buy some more signs. And along with putting out or having more signs would be looking for more volunteers to actually put the signs up in their front yards or on their health strips in the week before the meeting. But we think that the signs are reasonably effective to remind people when the meeting is and would like to continue doing that but increase our communication that way. We're very grateful to Front Forge Forum and to Town Meeting TV and we want to support them with some funding. So that's the next item. We've spent some money on translators and interpreters for voter information events and that came to about $900 and that's been spent already. We wanna continue to spend money where interpreters are needed. We think that the city is gonna contribute to some of that. I think in the last to Letha, Town Hall, the city paid for that. But we wanna make, we wanted to continue to do this sort of thing when needed but this is what we think we needed for this year. The next two are a little new and a little different. There are a surprisingly large number of restaurants and eateries in boards one and eight and we'd like to support them but we'd also like to have a little entertainment. And so what we're thinking about is to, and this is through local board, get coupons from a variety of the restaurants in our district and then raffle them off at the end of a meeting. Maybe folks who stick around till most of the way through the meeting would get their name in the hat and we raffle off coupons at the end of the meeting so we'd start doing that in May or in June. There are other ways we can do this in terms of distributing coupons or something but somehow feeding people which is what the traditional thing money is spent on at NPAs but also supporting our local restaurants. And then the next one is thinking about a movie night and this would be a Zoom movie night or a Vimeo movie night. And one of the possible films that could be shown is the film that was put together by one of our Ward 1 residents, a rich price who is a member of a band called The Suite Remains and it's a movie that he and his other, his two partners in crime have made and we could possibly have a showing like with owned, we could have a showing and then have a Q and A afterwards with the artists. So this is one possible film, there may be some other ones we could do if people have ideas, we would welcome that but just to have a movie night it would bring the community together even if it isn't all sitting in the same place. And then finally magnets and what these are is these would just be informative magnets a little like our signs and what our intention would be is to get a bunch of these enough pretty much for every residence in Wards 1 and 8 and then sometime in the mid-summer toward the end of the summer we would actually drop them off door to door. So that people would know people could put them on their fridge they'd know when our meetings are they'd know where the website is where the links are and it would just be a little thing that people could have in their house to remind them when the NPA meets. So that is the list that comes to $3,400 out of the $5,000. We might consider spending a little bit of this money like adding signs and so forth but we don't really wanna spend any of the big amounts until we have approval and we'll probably save that till next month and do it at the beginning of the meeting. We'll post this on our website and probably send something like this out in front porch forum so that people can look at it. But in the meanwhile with the group of people who are left if we would welcome a few minutes of comment you may be a kind of vague show of hands as to whether you like them you don't like them or say you really hate if you knew any other ones that you really think should be on there we could talk about it now or you could send us notes about it afterwards. Zariah. Yeah, sorry. And I'm keeping my camera because I'm doing my hair but I just yeah, I think the budget is great. This isn't really, this is kind of an aside but the the signs and the magnets I just think it would be great if we put something less formal than Ward one and eight NPA and some of them just something like you know, do you wanna know what's going on in your neighborhood or like do you have ideas about what you wanna do with your neighborhood just because I think Ward one and eight NPA doesn't resonate with a lot of people who don't know what that is. So just in terms of getting new folks out having a little bit more about what that means like some kind of tidbit around that. Okay. If you don't mind maybe we could talk offline as to what might be a good thing to put on them. Sounds great. Okay, that sounds good. Glenn. Yeah, you can save my magnet because it won't fit on it. It won't adhere to the stainless fridge, but. It's kind of tight. Yeah. Great. Just this probably isn't a budget item necessarily because it might be able to be done by the city but I'm just concerned we do all this publicity we do all this outreach we have 30 to 40 people at every meeting. It is essentially it'd be interesting to do a little analysis to say is it the same 30 or 40 people showing up and showing up is an important thing but if we really want to expand who is participating if we say this shouldn't be a 1% group of the households in Ward one and eight and I'd say this is about one well probably less than 1% how do we make a more concerted effort at understanding why people don't participate why they don't sign in particularly long before COVID I had been advocating for having some kind of streaming for the NPA to make it accessible to people particularly around dinner time, people who have kids there's a lot of reasons people can't or don't make it but I think figuring out how do we pull the neighborhood pull the wards, do some kind of more scientific outreach that helps us understand why people don't what are the obstacles how much of it simply as they don't know about it so something like that would I think really be helpful more so magnets and the signs are fine but I'm not sure that's gonna necessarily be money spent that is going to result in more squares on the computer screen here. Thank you, Jack. Yeah, I think those were a lot of good points by Glenn and I agree with Zariah too I think the lawn signs are really like if you know what it is it's a little bit of a reminder about NPA but if you don't know what that means I don't think the lawn sign really does anything and I think we want people who don't know what that means and so I think the door to door that you mentioned around the magnets could be a huge opportunity to just have that brief conversation with people and hopefully that's potentially a way to really explain to people what this actually is and try to get them there or we could do yeah, maybe like Glenn said, a survey just to understand why people aren't coming or maybe it's like a small stipender payment for a couple like key community leaders in different segments of the community to do outreach and get folks to show up so like you could have a student organizer pay them a small amount to get 30 students to show up or whatever community it is that you wanted more people from like small stipend to someone in that community to turn folks out, I don't know just a couple of ideas but I really appreciate the steering committee and the budget committee for grappling with this and working on this and happy to talk further about it offline. Thank you, yeah, we tend to be we tend to think in a kind of a, in a rut in a set of tracks and it's very useful to hear more people talking about it and where we might be able to go. Other comments? Jane had her hand. Yeah, thank you, Jonathan. Yeah, just super quickly, two separate thoughts one, I think we're all kind of somewhat in social media in one way or another. I feel like a lot of people use Facebook and I think using those mediums are really important when it comes to younger folks on and off campus and I think, you know not to jump back to the beach situation but I feel like when people are invested and really understand their community things tend to be better and I think just being kind of informative through those modes of media will be helpful just because in my experience that's how we kind of get news out that's how we turn people out to public forum and council and even just inform people that there are council meetings or committee meetings. Social media has been so helpful to me as a counselor and I think that would be helpful for us to really kind of, you know a lot of it's free, most of it's free and I think if we can kind of maximize it there's a lot that can come out of it. Another whole aspect is I have historically thought this ever since moving to Burlington but I thought the NPAs were very like severely underfunded and I do intend to kind of have a really you know, good conversation with the mayor and the administration about maybe upping that because I know historically we haven't been able to and I just, I don't know why because we're growing as a city and I think there's just more diversity and there's just so many different voices that we're just leaving out by default just because we don't have the access and the resources to really do that really fine tune good outreach. So I really do wanna focus on getting that and I would love to again offline or whenever anyone's comfortable and would feel it's appropriate I'd love to kind of get some feedback as to like how much more money do we need? Like as a community, like whatever it is like if there's a need there then there's justification to ask for it and therefore make that change because again, like we to many degrees can afford it and justify it. So I think that's a real conversation we need to have as an NPA. What do we need? What do we need to build ourselves up and bring in those voices? Cause that's 2,500 for years is nothing. I mean, you do a really wonderful job with it and I commend all of you for being so responsible and frugal in many ways and kind of making that efficient but I just, I think that that's, I want you to have more flexibility. I want us to kind of thrive in that way and get you the resources we need to build and grow and accomplish these things and yes, support people who wanna kind of delve in deeper and maybe be those kind of community organizers that will be maybe maintaining the media or something like that. Brainstorming for another day. Sorry, that was long. Okay, I'm good. Thank you. No, that's good. Thank you. I think that's a really key point. I think from a steering committee standpoint we don't have the skills and let's say we have limited skills and we really could use more folks who are more in tune or engaged. It's not that we're old square people but we're not as good at it and we can pretend we understand some of the paths but we don't really understand how best to reach out to a lot of people. So I think we need folks who can help us with that but I think it'll be wonderful. Karen? Thank you. Yeah, I agree. I helped, tried to help with the budget committee. I felt like we didn't really know how to spend it especially cause we're doing Zoom meetings. I mean, I guess my goal is to have hundreds of people like one, two, three has but it's really their community dinner. I think that draws the community and we, you know, that's what actually we planned a dinner just before COVID. That's what we're working on. We were gonna have a community dinner for our awards one and eight MPA and then we've had to be, you know, by Zoom for over a year now. But yeah, I think it's really hard and I agree we need some ideas on how do the, you're supposed to use the money to increase the attendance but it's really hard when we're doing this all by Zoom. And I mean, I was hoping maybe with vaccinations maybe we would all be done by next month but maybe not now but coming up soon maybe by June we'll be in person and outdoor dinner or outdoor community dinner might be great. To me that would be like a really wonderful event. But yeah, I feel like people like to socialize and food is great for socializing. Anyway, thank you. Okay, are there other comments, other hands that I've missed? If not, I really wanna thank everybody for coming tonight. We can bemoan that we don't have more people but it's wonderful the people we have and I really appreciate your spending the time here tonight. So with that, have a pleasant rest of your evening. Thanks everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for hosting. Thanks for coming. Good night everybody.