 here. This is Charlie Ressing. He's a friend. He's an activist. And he's a wonderful, wonderful singer-songwriter. This is a song from 1809. War between the Irish and the British in 1798. We're on the side of the Irish, by the way. You understand that was JFK's favorite song. Oh, the Minstrel Boy. Yes. Yes, it was, it was very popular. I mean, they used to sing it marching. If you ever see the movie, The Man Who Would Be King, lead characters Sean Connery and Michael Cain, they sing it. A different set of words, though, to some extent. You're keeping track of the time, I hope. I forgot to set up the clock. So how many minutes have I to go? Thank you, young sir. Seed on the bass. Liam. Hi, Leon. This is from Tom Waits. Jimmy Rogers, the first country star who just received your letter. You sat one square to show what you can be. Thank you, Charlie. Thank you. I'll mute myself and put this down. I hope you'll stay for the meeting. You're definitely a citizen. Okay. So welcome, everybody. And thanks to Charlie again. And let me find where my agenda begins. Good. My first task is the introduction of the steering committee members. I'm Barbara McGrew. I saw Patrick Johnson before. Patrick, is your camera back on? The camera is back on. Here you are. Thank you. And is Charlie Ginoni here? I haven't seen him yet. Yes, I just got on. Oh, good. Can we see you? I'm working on it. Okay. And Jessica, who's tremendously helpful to me with tech stuff and letting people in. Molly, Clay Pack is Molly here? Is Molly here? No. Oh, Molly Clay Pack Flanigan. Maybe that would help if I said her whole name. And Tony Reddington is here. And what about is Kevin not coming tonight? Jessica? No? Okay. And Andrew Champagne is on leave. So those are your steering committee members the next meeting, which is the second Thursday in April is April 8th by my calculation. So put that put that in your calendars and hope to see you all and more of you. Recordings can be found on YouTube or CCTVs website. I'm supposed to do an NPA grant reminder applications are due by March 26. And in your agenda, there's a website, I guess, or or e-address to submit them to. Okay. Anything else in the preliminaries except for the public forum is open. 10 minutes. Jessica? Oh, thank you so much, Barbara. I just wanted to add a little more about the community grants and to make sure that everyone knows that these this is how we decide on on how we spend the wards two and three allocations from the city. And so any community member can put in a proposal for something that either benefits the NPA outreach gets more people involved gets more people connected to their communities or is a community is a fun or exciting or useful community event. And so we really encourage community submissions. The application deadline is March 26 and the next meeting April 8 will be very exciting because the applicants will be making presentations about their proposals and will be discussing and voting on them as as a group. So so make sure you get your applications in and they'll be available for review before the April 8 meeting and make and join us for that meeting. And I'm sure it'll be a lively discussion. Thank you. Thank you very much, Jessica. Any other public forum issues announcements? If you see me squinting, it's because I can't Carol. Okay. Hi. I just wanted to say hi. I just got the the thing that said, oh, it's live. I'm like, oh, I'm going to go say hi to everybody. So hi, I'm going to go eat dinner, but I just wanted to say I miss you all and I can't wait to get back in the building for dinners and all that. I love you. Thank you. See you. Bye. Other public announcements? Issues you want to raise? I can only see 16 at a time, Tony. Is this a public forum? Yes. Okay. I think today is an unusual day. For anybody who's been following the news, first the $1,400 checks, which I guess is of interest to a lot of folks are supposedly going to get our checking accounts beginning this weekend. So that's something to look forward to take a look at once in a while to see if that's happened. But more importantly, the bill that the president signed today, it's already signed and he's speaking at eight o'clock tonight, but you know, you can go, I'm sure, look at it after our meeting. The most important thing to me has been the fact that 20,000 children in Vermont and probably over 1,500 children right here in Burlington, mostly in our two wards of the Old North End and the King, plus the King Maple neighborhood, over 1,500 children are going to be lifted out of poverty. 26 percent of our residents live in poverty in Burlington, the second highest in the state, only when Iski is higher. And the bill provides a monthly payment to families with, again, 1,500 kids that will lift them above the poverty level in Vermont. It's something that we've had stagnant numbers nationwide. It's about 10 million for the state is 20,000. This is a monumental change. The biggest, certainly the biggest change in poverty since the Johnson administration 30 or 40 years ago, the most important piece of legislation and change in social policy since Obamacare. It's a big deal as the president once said about Obamacare. So I hope that we get the news out and begin to appreciate that government can actually do something and it's doing something at this moment. Well, good. So thank you very much for that report on how this bill has an impact on Burlington particularly children. Other announcements or issues we brought up? I will just announce that I received something from Parks and Recreation saying that you can register for a meeting on the future of Perkins pier. That's where the ferry comes in, I believe. And it's on March 16th at seven o'clock. So if you haven't gotten that mailing and you're interested, I'm sure you can go to Parks and Recreation and sign up. I have because I'm sort of curious about what they've got planned. Anything else? Just anything that it means cutting half the trees around the area and doing a bunch of building. That's just my prediction. You can ask Vijay later. He's on the agenda. Anything else? Jessica, did you see any other hands? I don't see any other hands. I have another quick announcement if I could. Sure. I just wanted to let everyone know that the month of April is Fair Housing Month. And so, and Fair Housing Month is when we celebrate the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, which enshrined into federal law and also in state law protections against housing discrimination. And so, April will be full of events coordinated by CVOEO, the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity and the Vermont Department of Libraries and CEDO and the Human Rights Commission and Legal Aid and a whole slew of other partners who are putting together events to celebrate the passage of the Fair Housing Act and share information about all of our rights and responsibilities and also to celebrate inclusive communities. And so, there'll be events posted on the Fair Housing Month VT.org website. And these will be art activities, workshops, discussion groups, book discussion groups, and all sorts of wonderful ways to celebrate and educate as well. Thank you. Thank you. I'm ready to move on to the next agenda items if I see no more hands. Good. What is next? As most of you probably know, to get permission to build, developers have to come before the MPA and present their projects. So, we have tonight two presentations, one from Grace Amau from Netty Real Estate, about a 50-unit building at 77 Pine Street, including affordable rental apartments and a public restroom. Yay. Okay. Is Grace here? Hi, Grace. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for having us. My employer and another part of this presentation, Doug Netty, is trying to join this meeting. And I'm hoping for help. He seems to, for some reason not, he's joined without a passcode. And I hadn't seen that there was a passcode. I'm wondering if anybody is able to help me troubleshoot for him. Does he have the Zoom link on the agenda to click? He does. He has a Zoom link. Can I jump in a second? I had this problem today. I had to reload my Zoom, completely uninstall it and reinstall it in order to overcome the problem with that message about the passcode. Might be his problem. On the letter with the passcode, with the Zoom address, excuse me, the Zoom link, right underneath that on the page was the code to get in. So if you just highlighted that and pressed copy, you could, once it opens and asks for it, you could paste it right in without having to memorize it. So it should be easy to get in. Yeah. There is no code to get into the meeting. Not that one? Oh, you don't have that one? No. I just clicked on the link. That was it. Yeah. Oh, boy. Okay. Well, webinar. I think there's a phone number you could try calling in. Yeah, Grace. Yeah, maybe Barbara. Maybe we could have the presentation first while Doug tries to get in. Yeah, that's a great idea. I'll do that. I'm just on here. Oh, and I think John Light and Nate will be here. Okay. Hi, everyone. Nate Digest here. When the time's right, I'll be leading that presentation. Okay. We can also. About 158 South Champlain. Sure. Are you ready for me to present on the project? I'll go ahead with that while Grace's partner tries to get on the call. Well, I have Don Wells. Yes, he's part of the team. He couldn't make it. He has another meeting conflict, but I'm the project manager, so I can certainly walk us through. Okay. So this is Nathan from Don Wells Architecture. It's a 30-unit building at 158 South Champlain. You're on. Okay, great. So I'll just give everyone a brief introduction to the project. So I'm Nate Digest. I'm part of the development team for the project. This is a newly acquired site for us. It's located on South Champlain Street between Main and King. It's just down the street from August 1st Bakery. It's basically a vacant site right now for those that drive by it. It's a very narrow site. It's easy to miss, but it's kind of in between two buildings there. The site, many folks might know the site that it's had a challenging history. It's had many commercial and industrial uses in the past, and it's sat vacant for the better part of the last decade with some of these ground field challenges. So with that, our team looked at the site. Our teams had quite a bit of experience with contaminated sites, so we developed a plan that we think could clean up the site and bring some new housing to the city of Burlington. So, Barbara, are our renderings on here somewhere, or would we have to share a screen? I think you'll have to share a screen. Okay, let me see. Okay, it says I'm disabled. I'm going to make you a co-host right now, and then you'll be able to share your screen. Great. Thank you. So we have several different renderings, but just to give everyone a brief overview of the project and have a high-level view, I'll just show a couple of these 3D renderings. So this is the view of the new building from South Champlain Street looking southwest, and that would be the new front of the building. To the right is the historic Blinhouse, and then just out of view to the right would be August 1st Bakery. So the new building would have roughly 30 housing units. The building would consist of either 4-sale or 4-rat housing. We're still working that out. The building's five stories tall, which is well within the F-5 district's allowed height, and we plan on achieving a high-energy efficiency level with this project. Aside from taking a look at some of the other elevations, this rendering kind of speaks for itself as far as scale and size. We're still working out the specifics on the exterior. We're excited to bring a nice new building to this neighborhood, and the most exciting piece to me, not only to bring more housing to Burlington, is that we think we're able to clean up this site. And I guess I will talk just a little bit more about that piece. We have a team put together with VHB that's been working closely with the DEC, and it's been a very successful process so far. We feel very confident we can clean up this entire footprint of the site and have a building built, and then have kind of a clean build health moving forward. So that's kind of the quick outline. Happy to field any questions that people may have. Okay, if you can stop the screen share, that'll allow me to call on people. I can't see them otherwise. Thank you. Okay, questions. Stephen, unmute yourself. Yes. So, hi. It's always great to hear about people wanting to build housing. I'm thinking that's the same stretch of South Champlain where the pocket park is. Is that correct? It is a block further north, I believe. If it's, yeah, it's a block further north. Okay. Okay. And right now it's an empty lot. It's completely vacant right now. Yep. Thank you. Tony. The little thing, it's just like as big as a backyard, but there's something or has been something on that block itself. Just a quick question. The number of units that are going to be what they call inclusionary zoning or IZ units, usually about 15%. And that means a one-bedroom would go for about $1,200 a month as I think is roughly the current rent. Are any of those units required in your development? We're still working through with Todd in the city on exactly what our affordable housing mix is going to look like. We will be meeting the code. We're just not sure exactly what that mix would look like at this point. Because it could be owner or rental. Roughly, again, what percentage would be involved or do you know that yet? I don't think we're quite there yet. I think it's in the neighborhood of 15 to 20%, but we're still working through how that's going to look with the praised values and that stuff with the city's assessor office. Thank you. Other questions? Barbara Dahlia has her hand up. Go ahead, Dahlia. You're still muted. You are, correct. Thank you, everyone. I live right next door to the site in the Historic Blend House. What is the timeline? I know you're asking for permission right now. What is the remediation going to look like? What is the planned hours for that remediation and what is the built timeframe? Thank you. Sure. We're still pretty early in the process, hoping to go to DRB in the next month or so. The earliest we would break ground on the new project would be right around January of 2022, so a little under a year from now. The remediation is actually pretty straightforward, actually. What we do with the soils is more complicated and more costly, but really it's just a matter of excavating and sampling and knowing what the soils are and then removing them, so it's not going to look that much different than any other project from an outsider's view. Anybody else, Jessica? Okay. I have a few questions myself on that remediation. It's done in a way that keeps the neighbors safe from the contamination, I assume, right? Yeah, absolutely. Our team will put together a plan that protects everyone, including the workers. The type of contamination allows for the handling to not be that dangerous. I mean, there's certain precautions, but it's a site that, certainly for the neighbors, there's not much to worry about. But again, our professional consultants will develop a plan for that. Okay, and two more quick questions. I know you're not now required to provide parking under the ordinance, but are you planning to? That's one question. And also, what's on the ground floor? Is it amenities? Is it apartments or amenities for the residents or retail? Yeah, great question. The lot is really small, so we can't quite fit in commercial space, which we would have liked to. But the ground floor street facing side is lobby and amenity space, bike storage, kind of a little gathering area. So it has a nice presence on the street. Behind that is parking. We have two levels of parking. Right now, we're around 42. It's fluctuating as we refine the design. 42 spaces to 30 to 32 units. So we have what we feel is a nice balance. We know we'll have right around one to 1.1 spaces per unit for the building. Thank you. Barbara, Patrick has a question and then Stephen. So what is the lot coverage of that? It looks pretty close to 100%. And then what about stormwater runoff? You're pretty close to the lake there. Yeah, so we also have VHB, Peter Smeyer, a VHB working through stormwater design with DPW and folks from there, which there are pretty stringent requirements with the city, which we will certainly be meeting. That design's not fully worked through, but we will have quite a bit of storage on site. Because it's almost, as you mentioned, it's not quite 100% build out. It's probably in the neighborhood of 80%. But because it's such a large build out, most of our water is all clean roof water. So it allows for a little bit of a different stormwater approach. It allows us to do more of the storage side than the treatment side. But again, that's being worked through. It's probably, I'd say, 75% complete that design phase. And we've got what we think is a pretty good solution for that. Okay. Thank you. And Stephen, you have another question? Yes, please. So from the illustration, it looks like a very bulky building. And you did just mention it seems you're planning to use 100% of the footprint. I'm concerned that that means that though, in the future, if somebody wants to build the building next door, they're going to have to use some of their footprint to provide space between the buildings or else the buildings are going to be kissing up against each other. I don't know if it seems like a fair thing to do to have a building that is so full to the space that it occupies. Yeah, I think the building actually isn't right to the property line. The building on the north side sits 12 feet off the property line and about eight to 10 feet everywhere out. So it is actually set off a decent amount. And the form-based code in this district does, I think require, I think the max setback is 12 feet. So we're kind of right in that neighborhood that the form-based code is looking for. And we're also working with our immediate neighbors to just make sure we're doing what we can have the building kind of work best with what their future plans may be as well. Okay, well, I certainly advocate for urbanization, concentration of population in the downtown. And that's something that your project accomplishes. It does seem a little bit bulky for the neighborhood, but it's not a major objection, I guess. Yeah, no, I think it's a very fair comment. And we're still refining those facade drawings. And there may be some things we can do to soften and maybe step that approach a little bit. Certainly understand that viewpoint. Thank you. I see a Jacob with his hand up. Yeah, hi. Hey, sorry, I'm a little bit late. I didn't get to see the pictures of it. But one thing I'll advocate for is go for some crazy colors. Don't just do gray, okay? You have a license from me at least to do some crazy colors. Thanks. Great, thank you. Tony? Yeah, just for a comment, perhaps, as you know, that location, in fact, everything, roughly from Pearl Street down to Maple Street is a designated low-income area for development in Vermont and designated by the governor. We have 10% of our households that live below the poverty level. We have 1,000 on the waiting list for the Burlington Housing Authority for assisted housing, of which none of the units as conceivable that perhaps a handful of units could be leased under a affordable housing assistance. But in fact, we have a much greater need for low-income housing than we do for more upper income. I'm not criticizing, I think, the well-to-do deserve housing too, but this project will do very little for the needs of most of the residents in the King Maple neighborhood. Yeah, nobody cares. Thank you, Tony. Anybody else? Yeah, one. Yeah, Stephen, Carrie? It's hard for us. I just know that you mentioned that the for-sale-for-rent percentage in the new building is under discussion. And I'm wondering where you envision that discussion is going to end up. How many of these units will be owned? How many will be perpetually rented? Yeah, great question. I would say at this point, our goal is for this to be a for-sale project. A lot of just things to work through on that, but that's our goal is for the entire project to be a for-sale project. And do you know how much the apartments would go for potentially? Not really. I mean, it is an expensive build-out, so there would be some fairly expensive units that we would need to offset that cost. But obviously, our mix would work with Burlington's affordable housing ordinance and the options that we have there. We are expecting some of our upper-floor units to be some fairly expensive units and then kind of working through the mix that works with the building. Thank you. Any other questions? Robert, Charlie has got a question. Charlie missing? Yeah, it may seem like idle kind of thing, but it's very squared off. The box has been used, bulky has been used. Is there any way to round off the corners? It would be such a relief compared to French Freeman and Freeman and whatever that company is that does identical buildings all over town. I mean, a little decoration, maybe just rounding off the corner at the roof line would be really refreshing. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. I think as you're progressing these projects, the look of the building is always kind of one of the last things that we do, and that's going to be our focus over the next few months is to really tailor that design. We have a design team too that hasn't really touched the project yet, and I'm sure that they'll bring some exciting features. But I think even just myself looking at it, I'm seeing that we could add some parapets in a few spots and some roof overhangs, and the front needs some work. So totally understand that viewpoint, and we're not done by any means refining that. Thank you. Thank you, Charlie. Other questions? And Barbara, it's just about time to move on to the second presentation. I just, you know, if there's one more question, I would take it, but it doesn't seem to be. Nathan, thank you. Good luck with your project. Yeah, thanks everyone so much. Really appreciate it, and nice meeting you. Okay, so back to Grace. How are things going? Please unmute him. Yes, things are good. Things are good. Doug is with us, and so we have a four-person team here tonight. Okay, we have 20 minutes for the presentation in Q&A, so use that any way you want. Okay, thank you. Hi, I think I'll start. My name is Doug Nettie, and I'm the owner of 79 Pine Street. This is a second phase of what I call the People's United Bank project. The first phase, as you might recall, is developing 50 apartments and basically purposing or rebuilding the north side of 77 Pine Street into office space for People's United Bank. So on this project, 79 Pine Street, and I don't know if there's a site map that you can put up. Yes, could I please have screen share, and then I will be able to cast some images? It's a project that I'm really excited about. It's an urban infill project much like Nate's. It's going to be a green project. It's going to have solar. It's going to have 30 or so electric car charging stations. It's going to be a very energy-efficient building with electric heat pumps. We're going to be having chambers on our site for storing stormwater. I just think it's a good urban infill project. These will be apartments. There's going to be 49 of them. I am building a nine-storey building. The building is really quite skinny. It's about 50, well, it is. It's 74 feet by 76 feet. And we zinged right along to the picture. So it's a skinny, what I think is really elegant building. And I've tried to add a lot of green, not only into the construction, but adding some green to the upper levels with trees and other shrubbery. And I'm really trying to build something that's really quite beautiful. And luckily, I've hired a talented architect, Greg Gossens, who's going to talk a little bit more about it. But this is a project that will have 20% affordable. We have some on-site parking, which I mentioned, and we'll be sharing some other infrastructure of the existing project. I guess I've kind of given the summary. I have our civil engineer and our architect to talk a little bit about the site and the building. And I guess we can do questions at the very end, or how would you like to do that? Why don't you leave some time for questions, go through your presentation and then leave some time for questions. Okay, good. I'll jump in. Dave Marshall here. I'm the civil engineer for the project. And what's up on screen right now is a general map of the downtown area, and the red represents the site of the proposed building. And Grace, can you do me the favor of perhaps putting your cursor on top of Pine Street so everybody can understand Pine Street as it runs north-south and then College Street? That is right there. So oops, we're at the intersection just north of the intersection of College Street and Pine Street. Just to the north of this particular site is the Big Dig, Burlington style, relative to the city center project. And as Doug mentioned earlier, as you move south from there is the 77 Pine Street building. That's the People's United Bank, where a portion of that building is being renovated for residential use. So this particular building sits right in between. Two of the large buildings, the one on the south side, the big white top building just to the south, is one Burlington square. And that building was just rebuilt recently. Perhaps now is a good time to go to the landscaping plan, if we can, Grace. And what we want to do is recognize just dragging from the thoughts of the other picture, other site plan is that, again, being located within the downtown area, it's a great walkable community. And again, what we're trying to do is bring people into this particular area to be able to better experience that. This particular site plan north again is straight up and down. And Pine Street is off on the right-hand side. Up in the top portion of this drawing is the 77 Pine Street building. That's the existing People's United Bank facility. And the gray rectangle on the bottom of the drawing represents the one Burlington square building cut off, mind you, but nonetheless, this particular facility building will fit in between the two. The form-based zoning, as Nate mentioned too, does require that these big facilities be located closer to the street. It's intended to create a communication between the building and the street itself. What we've tried to do in the remaining areas is create some of the green space and restore some of the street trees that are along this particular area. We have a combination of both underground parking as well as surface parking. And some of the solar will be placed on top of the carport type of roof or some of that surface parking on the left side of the proposed building. Doug did make mention as far as our stormwater management. We're taking advantage of the sandy soils on the site and doing 100% infiltration of all this stormwater runoff from this particular area back into the ground. In fact, we actually partnered with the city on using that same facility to pick up runoff from the Pine Street area, only because in the big picture, the city was looking to minimize flows that ultimately end up in the bay. And this was another means of basically taking some of that impervious surface runoff and putting it back in the ground as if it was occurring 200 years ago. So that's real, the quick take on the civil site end of things. And perhaps now I can introduce Greg Gossens, the architect for the project. Segway to the next slide, please. Hello, folks. My name is Greg Gossens and I'm from GBA Architects. And please get your input on this project. It's a great one. So here's a rendering looking up Pine Street. And you can see basically we're following the form-based code. We have step backs at the sixth floor and then another step back up at the penthouse level the ninth floor. We tried to integrate landscaping both of the ground level and then the upper levels as you can see which Doug mentioned before. And basically we wanted a building that really animated and livened the street. So you can see we articulated the corners with glass on the lower level. We have the fitness room, the main lobby, a place for hopefully commissioned an artist to do a mural that wraps around the corner into a lobby area, accented with some wood panels, which we can see on the next slide a little bit better. And then as a public restroom off of that kind of recessed entry area, we're using brick with various textures. You can see a kind of a striated texture and just a regular running vod texture. And then computer colored metal panels besides the black windows, black fiber glass windows. So can we go to the next slide, please, Grace? So there's looking down Pine Street at the main lobby and you can see there the wood accent at the lobby level, the mural wall down right at the lobby and we're taking both the wood accents and the mural and drawing them into the building. So we basically want to have a building that kind of reflects the creative vibe of Berlin and have a lively street presence where the building is animated. When you see this building, it's going to be a foxy bulk. It's going to be an animated building that will really hopefully contribute to the street life of Berlin. Can I ask something just about the location? Charlie, let them finish and then ask, okay? Otherwise, people start will never get through it. Yeah, I don't have an idea. Well, I'll finish up. Basically, as Doug mentioned, this can be a highly energy efficient building. It's all electric for HVAC. We have our excellent thermal envelope. We're going through very tight air sealing, which is what really moves the needle when you get into energy savings. And we have all of those PV panels up on the carport roof. So we're really looking for a building that's highly sustainable. Oh, that's I'm ready for questions. Okay, great. Charlie, go ahead. Okay, it does look nice compared to buildings I've seen built around here lately. It's really nice. Now this is replacing, I believe, a gigantic multiple drive-in spot for the bank, right? It's just kind of a ramp, a series of three and a half ramps. This is replacing that. I mean, it's on the spot that is now ramps for the drive-up bank. That's correct, right? Next to it. Yes. It won't have to do much to look better than it looks now. We agree. So yeah, it's going to look much better. Thanks. Tony? I'm a pro developer and I love to see housing built. And so given that, it's clear that people wonder why we have these projects like the hole in the ground and these two housing projects suddenly turn up. They obviously are not going to serve anybody who's on the waiting list for assisted housing and whether you're talking about rentals at $1,200 a month or condos at hundreds of thousands of dollars. The point I'm making is this, is that the hole in the ground, these two projects are in what's called an opportunity zone. It's a tax write-off scheme of the Trump administration. It's a very effective one that allows people to shelter capital gains taxes so they don't have to pay taxes at all if the project is economically successful and they leave the money there for 10 years. The developers know this. This is a good thing because it does get activity going in a low-income area. But it really is the least effective in terms of providing jobs and providing, obviously not providing any housing for anybody on the waiting list of the Burlington Housing Authority. So in that sense, it's a little disappointing. We can't win all the time. Maybe there'll be some kind of project that'll come along that will actually provide some jobs and some opportunities for those who live in the King Maple and the Old North End. But as a tax policy, it's not working very well here in Burlington. Thank you, Tony. Do you have a question? Oh, it was a comment. Okay. Anybody else? Questions? Stephen has a question. Okay, Stephen, go. Yeah, hi. I'm very glad to see that Wasted Lot have a plan for it. I am concerned about the waste of most of the lot on carports and solar panels. It does seem like you could make the building more narrow or else just make it larger and use the property that you have. Stick the carports underneath the building instead of exposing them to the sky. It's a very wasteful way of using urban land. Otherwise, I have to follow on Tony's coattails and say we really, really need affordable housing. And I think it's the social responsibility that you carry to actually provide housing that people can afford in addition to providing housing to the wealthy clients that provide your profits. Thank you, Stephen. Other questions? What do you see, Jessica? Oh, I see the other, Stephen. Stephen, Carrie. Okay, Stephen, Carrie. Yes. I did hear you mentioned 20% affordable housing units projected and that would be about 10 if you're talking 49 apartments. Is that right? That's correct. And so, but the project is exclusively for rentals and no owner occupied. Is that correct? That's all rental. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. Other, I always have questions. I look at People's United Bank, which I guess is about to change soon because somebody bought them. So I see the outside of the construction going on. This building, as I understand it, then would be directly almost behind the free press building under Bank Street, right? Yeah, no, this building will be right on Pine Street and this will building be a little bit south of where People's is right now and a little bit directly north of ICV's building, the dark one on the corner. We called it Darth Vader building, but you might have other names for it. Oh, so it's right on Pine Street. It's just south of the project we're working on right now and it's just north of the ICV building. And the gentleman who described it where we're basically building this building where the access is for the drive-thru. There's a three-bay drive-thru there currently, which will be demolished and a smaller one two-bay drive-thru will be built closer to the bank building and that provides us a little bit of land. Again, it's not a big building, it's 76 feet wide and it gives us a little bit of land to build this building. And how tall? It's 104 feet. The form base allows the code, allows it 105 and we're a bit below that. Okay, and who will maintain the public restroom? We will. Netty real estate will be the property manager and we'll be maintaining all the grounds and both these. Wow, and boy, is that ever needed? I really appreciate that. Thanks. So, Barbara, there's a question from Solvei and that looks, and then Tony. Okay, Solvei. Hi there. I don't know why my camera's not working, but I'm going to talk. What is the plan for the move-in loading dock, loading dock arrangements for tenants to move in and out? There's loading, there's a loading, loading area from the back of the building, which would be a west approach. You'd be coming in off College Street. So, there would be some sort of elevator available for people moving in from the back? Yes, it's fully accessible from the rear. It's also accessible from Pine Street, the elevator, but the loading area is from the back here. One thing that didn't show up very clearly is that site slopes. So, there's a below building parking area that's accessed from the west, as Grace just mentioned. It doesn't have any presence on Pine Street, but that's covered parking and it's elevated. So, people could go in there, move under, totally undercover, get on the elevator and walk to their apartment. Tony, you have a question? Really a comment about the People's United Building. I believe that it's been under construction now for at least a year and a half and they're actually building residential units on the upper floors. I'm not sure of the number of them. So, I just mentioned that that's also housing. Apparently, there was enough to keep the bank didn't need all that space in the upper floors. Second thing is, I want to be clear that I've applied for one of those units at the hole in the ground three or four years ago, one of the affordables, so that I'm not against those units or that kind of housing located in downtown. The problem is that none of those units are going to be serving the needs of the, again, a large number of existing folks who live in these two neighborhoods. Okay, thanks. I'm still a little confused. Where is this building and relationship to the Key Bank Kiosk on Pine and College? It's right across Pine Street. So, it's on the west side of Pine Street. If you were standing at the Key Bank Kiosk and you were looking toward the lake, the building would be looking at the building. Oh, I thought you'd be looking at the Darth Vader building. It's behind the Darth Vader. Sorry. No, it is north of the Darth Vader building. North of the Darth Vader. Okay, thank you. If we're going to call it that. Okay. And it's eight stories tall basically, right? It's nine. Nine stories. Thank you. Is it about the height of the free press building? Right there at the end of Pine? Douglas is talking through my phone here because he was having connection issues. So, it's the free press building is, you know, about 10 feet taller than our building. Thank you. And when do you take this to the Development Review Board? I can't hear. Okay. Well, we're planning to apply in the next couple of weeks. Okay, thank you. And Barbara, I think there's one more question from Christie. Christie, Delphia, go ahead. I'm just curious. Back in the 80s, when they built new buildings and wanted to put housing in them, the requirements used to be at least 32% of that building needed to be affordable housing. When did those requirements change and now only allowed to have 15 or 20% as opposed to 32? Don't know. I unfortunately don't have dates for that information. I don't know, it's Christie. That would be cool. I believe the mayor would like to get rid of those requirements altogether, but that's another story. Oh, well, yeah. We quite well know exactly how he feels about affordable housing for low-income people. Okay, anyway, I'm going to move on unless there is another question. Jessica, yourself. Oh, Barbara, I just wanted to ask, in between these next two items, if we could have a time for just a very quick announcement from Janet Karskaden from Community Dinner, she arrived a little late for community announcements, but she has something very exciting to share about next month's meeting. Okay, that sounds good. Thank you. Hey, thanks everyone. I'll be pretty quick. So we've been on hiatus for about a year. We missed seeing all of you in person and preparing that community meal at the event space. So in April, we decided to do a takeout meal, and we've partnered with Mulu from Mulu's Ethiopian Eritrean Kitchen and Catering, and she is going to prepare a meal for us, and we will be serving it out of the outside of the front door as pickup and as takeout. So Mulu has been doing some meals once a month, and that's been very popular, highly successful. She's the person who has been preparing the injera for our Ethiopian dinners that we've had over the past several years. So it'll be a little different, but it might be a nice way to start to tiptoe our way back into offering something that helps to support the MPA. The website, onecommunitydinner.weebly.com, has the information about the meal and of how you could purchase a ticket. So the dinner is $20, but there are some subsidized meals in there. We're asking if people can help us with that by making a donation to help to buy a meal for a neighbor. That will be wonderful. And there's a ticket site that you can pre-order a meal on. It is live now, and so we'll be doing that for April to help to support the MPA, and then stay tuned for perhaps doing something else in May, and maybe we'll be outside at some point, but we're watching COVID very closely. So more information on our website, and I can put that up in the comments of the website for the community dinner, but... Thank you, Janet. Stay there for a second. I just wanted... I didn't feel I had closure with Grace and her team. Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. That's my fault. No, it's not your fault at all. Is there anything else, Grace, you or the people you're with want to say about the project? I am finished. I think, Doug, was there anything else that you wanted to add? Okay. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much for your presentation, and good luck. Thank you, folks. Okay. Back to you, Janet. Where is the pickup? The pickup will be outside the event hall at the 20 Allam Street, where we usually have, where we usually have the MPA. So we'll have a table set outside. You'll be able to select a pickup time. We're staggered by 15 minutes when you get your ticket, and so that we can, you know, keep some distance with folks, and there are a limited number of meals available, so I'd encourage you if you think you'd like to do it to buy your ticket in advance, and more help to support Mulu, who has a wonderful local business, and also the MPA. Charlie? Hello, Charlie G here. So I have a question for Janet. So are you interested in filing an application for any funding at all this year? I sent you the updated, and you probably saw that most of, what, about half of our money is still available? Yeah. I will be submitting something. I've just been very, very, very busy, but I will be submitting something to you, yes. So did you see the thing that I sent you to give you an idea of how much money is available? Yes. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, and thank you, Charlie. Yes. I'm ready to move on if you are. Can you just tell us again where to buy those tickets or how to? I'll put it up. Maybe we can put it in the chat. It's onecommunitydinner.weebly.com. That's the one community dinner website, and there's a link on that website. It will take you to an event break site that you can buy your tickets. I'll put it in the agenda. Maybe somebody can push it out. I know I don't have a chat on my screen. Well, I haven't put it in there yet. And when is this going to be? It doesn't exist. April 8th. Oh, there's no chat. Okay. April 8th. Okay, and hopefully you'll be advertising at other places as well. Yes. It will go up on our, we have a social media post on our Facebook page and Instagram and any other way that you guys want to, we can put it on front porch form as well. I think that would, our usual advertising. Yeah, we'll put it out. Okay. Thank you very much. Yeah. We're actually on schedule. And the next thing on the agenda is a VJ for spring tree planting in wards two and three and how we can get involved. Is VJ here? I am here Barbara, and thank you. And I'll try to keep you on schedule. Can you all hear me as well? Yes, and we can see you too. Lucky you. My name is VJ Koma. I'm the city arborist. I've been with the city for the last three years. And I'm really happy tonight to be able to have a few minutes talk to you about our tree planting plans in wards two and three this spring. This spring, we will be planting a little over 230 trees in wards two and three. And to give you a little background, about 12 to 15 years ago, the city had a first of a kind urban canopy tree study done on the city by the Spatial Analysis Lab at UVM. And what they did was they did a flyover of the city with drones using a wide our high tech system. And they mapped out the percentage of land area in Burlington that is covered by tree canopy as seen from the air. And what they found at that time was that Burlington had a tree canopy coverage of about 40%, which is very high for communities of our size comparatively around the nation. We recently had them update this study 10 years after they did the first study and we got the results back a couple of years ago. And their technology has gotten even better. And what they showed over that 10 year period was there was actually a 4% increase in the canopy coverage over those 10 years. So now we're at about 44%. This is really bucking the trend nationwide where many, many communities are significantly seeing canopy loss in their cities. So the interesting thing about this information is they broke it down and they actually were able to show us by ward what the relative canopy coverage is in each ward. And with that information, we found that wards two and three have the lowest percentage of canopy coverage in the city. A couple of reasons for that. One obviously is we don't have the wooded areas in that area of the city that you have in the New North End where you have Letty Park Woods and Ethan Allen Park and so forth. And you don't have the larger walks that you have for housing lots in the New North End or the South End or even the Hill section where you have a lot of trees on private property. The houses, excuse me for the most part in wards two and three are very close together. Small backyards, not a lot of room for trees on private property. So in wanting to increase the canopy in wards two and three, we identified all viable planting sites within the city right of way throughout wards two and three, meaning within the green belt between the sidewalk in the road. There are trees on many streets, but there are gaps on many streets. And so we identified all these areas using our inventory system and then we went out and checked them on the ground on foot and identified all these areas, chose trees, selected trees, ordered the trees and they will be coming in this spring and we will be doing this mass planting in wards two and three. I provided Jess with a list of all the available planting sites which I think she's going to make available to you or maybe she's sharing it now. And we're really excited about this effort. You know, the hope would be if we're not restricted by COVID and gatherings would be to in some of these areas where there's a higher concentration of trees being planted to engage some of the local residents to come out and help our crew plant. I don't, we won't know until, you know, probably within a couple weeks of when we actually do this. So, but I wanted to lure you all to this because in early, sometime in early April in the next few weeks, you will, you may see markings out on the green belt on the grass as well as a white hash mark on the curb because we have to identify the planting sites so that all the utilities that can then come along and we have the sites dig safe. So they mark where the underground utilities are, water lines and so forth so we know there's no conflict. And then we would come back about a week to 10 days prior to planting and remove the sod at each planting site. We'll cut a circle and we'll just skim off the sod and we'll take that to compost it. And then sometime probably in the final week of April and into the first week of May we'll be completing the planting in all these areas. We will stake water and mulch each tree at the time of planting. We will attach one of the green watering bags that have become a common site throughout the city the last couple years around each of the trees and our crews will be making the rounds watering. You as residents can help us out if some of these trees get planted right in front of your house and you would like to take on the watering and filling of the bag once a week it would certainly help us a great deal and you could contact me directly and let me know what trees you would like to be responsible for. And it's our hope too that you'll also keep an eye on the trees and you know watch for vandalism and you know take some pride in what we're doing here and and hopefully help us protect these trees. We do lose a number of new trees every year to vandalism. I can't quite understand it. We had some beautiful young trees broken off on Upper College Street this past winter and that that's very frustrating. So you know hopefully we can have some community engagement but you will be seeing us out there and and we're really excited about this. So if any of you have any questions I'm happy to answer them. I have a quick question. So I live on Green Street and you guys planted 100 percent Celtus Occidentalis on the street which turned out to be a really hackberry which turns out to be a really bad idea because all the flies that hackberry attract the hackberry fly actually. Not to mention it's sort of a monocrop so as the trees reach 35 years they're all going to have to go at once and then we won't be such a Green Street on Green Street. So I'm sort of hoping you'll not plant so many of those hackberries because when you put a lot of hackberries together you get a lot of hackberry flies for Celtus Occidentalis. Okay so so I think if I remember correctly on Green Street it's actually a lot of ash on that street. The larger trees are ash on the east side of that street. I could be wrong but I think that's what they're. What what you should know is we are making a concerted effort in our plantings moving forward to greatly diversify what we're planting. We are no longer planting one whole side of a street with the same species of trees and in fact the plantings in wards two and three this spring will include about 25 different species or varieties within the species. So you know in some areas we're very limited on what we can use because we have overhead utilities so we can't plant trees that grow to a you know a mature size of 40 and 50 feet. We have to use smaller stature trees and and you have to understand too the urban environment's very difficult one for trees so we have to contend with road salt and soil compaction and high heat and and the number of species that will withstand all those conditions and can be expected to grow for any amount of time is fairly limited. So we do our best to diversify but that's a good point. We don't put all our eggs in one basket anymore. Those of you who are old enough to remember when all the elms started dying around Burlington now we're dealing with you know a lot of ash trees around the city that are going to succumb to emerald ash for and we've been trying to be proactive in planting no new trees in and amongst those ash so when they have to come down we'll already have replacements in place so very good point about diversity for sure. Thank you I see Jacob and then Greg. Hey just following up on that um ash part um are any of these planned to be interspersed with ash or these just open spots? I live on La Fountain and I know we've got a couple of big ash on our street. That's a good question Jacob all the sites will be planting this spring are open are currently open sites but what we did two years ago was we identified where all the ash are in the city and whether you've noticed this or not in the areas where we had our highest concentration of ash several areas in the city where there was actually like one whole side of a street or both sides of the street where space allowed we've already gone in and planted replacement trees in and amongst the ash and our hope is to get several years of growth out of them and and again we used a diversity of species so that by time we have to start removing ash we've already got our replacements in place. We we have now planted replacements for over 50% of our green belt ash throughout the city not every place there's an ash is there room to plant a new tree nearby at this point without removing the ash first but there are still about 40 sites where we can do that I have that list and that's going to be part of our planting for the fall and I think but don't don't quote me don't count on this for sure but I think La Fountain Street may be one of those areas so you know it's our goal to replace tree for tree where we can and and hopefully get trees in the ground before we have to remove any ash. Thank you I see Greg and then Jeannie. Yeah I think this is a great idea I'm fully supportive of having more street trees and I'm glad you're going to have some diversity in the species I just wanted to make one suggestion and that is in addition to reaching out at the NPA meetings like you're doing here if you haven't already be good to do maybe direct mailings or leave letters on people's doors so that they know that this is going to be happening in front of their house or on their street and they maybe have a better understanding what the green belt is that the the city owns it and the city is going to be putting in these trees and maintaining them but but that of course it'd be nice if they if they'd like to help out so just that's just my suggestion that that is a good point we will use all our social media platforms through through parks and recreation to get the word out facebook and you know twitter and we will do the front porch forum thing and you'll be hearing a lot about it so we will have some press releases as well so it was my hope by by contacting this group that you know you have access to emails or some sort of listserv for residents in wards two and three and get the word out that way as well I don't think we do but that's okay genie um I am really excited to hear this I worked very closely with Warren spinner your predecessor is that what we call and well you know on that last note one thing I knew I had to do was get people to sign on to being okay with having a tree outside of their property because as you probably know as a homeowner you're responsible for what is happening in your green belt um or or maybe this is another conversation but time out for now I also know that there are lots of places that I was so hoping we could plant trees especially on cedar between rose and um noroshan plain but they were those places were deemed and I can see on that map that just showed it looks like it's going to happen but those places were deemed not necessarily viable because the infrastructure of the curbs we're and I'm talking about we still have slate curbs from who knows like the 50s maybe earlier and the the where the green belt stops and where the road starts is a very you know suggested question right so you know you got a wide car you might just like park up a little bit up on that curb which is actually a slight slope at this point and and and and with all of that in mind I also want to let you know the corner of cedar and rose and you know cedar goes around rose down to noroshan plain in between the fountain there's a lot of water stuff going on a lot of traffic um issues going on and we're really looking for a long term um remedies to deal with not just traffic calming and um waste runoff and also implementing more um anything green and of course trees are on that on the radar so what I am saying is I believe there are different hubs of our community that are looking to mitigate several things that include tree planting and it's an overarching goal and I I don't want to have a tree planted at barber two seconds I don't want to have a tree get planted and then we have to mitigate how we're going to solve runoff how we're going to solve traffic stuff later like where is that the infrastructure stuff going to communicate and come up with like a real plan so I I hope you email me separately I've actually emailed you about other stuff before you've got my email I really hope that we like make a real plan to move forward and know that I will bring a bucket load of volunteers to make it happen okay thank you jean yes steven carry events thank you can you hear me yep thank you so much for your uh work around town I've seen people in action they've done do an incredible job like pruning trees that needed to be pruned recently there was one that was removed outside I live in the corner of elmwood and spring and there was a linden tree that had finally met its end this past year that was cut and then I was told that the stump would be grounded so I think that's part of the plan probably to grind the stump and then put the new tree right where that one was is that is that the case typically the the even if we grind the stump the new tree does not go directly in the exact same spot because the grinding can't go low enough to remove an to get it in there um but I will what I will tell you briefly about stump grinding is we don't own our own stump grinding equipment and budget and what they are right now we're kind of waiting until we get a backlog of them and then we sub it out to a a private company to do it and it's more cost-effective that way so yeah the guy the guys told me that mentioned something about that just the idea that it will be eventually ground down because it's there's mold and mushrooms and things to grow in there and then I had another question about you know I I do remember the the stump I remember that I've seen the beautiful photos of Burlington when the elms were in full you know maturity and of course I live on Elmwood Avenue and uh when I moved here I've been here for 33 years and I remember the stumps of the elm trees that had been had been cut years earlier were still you know still there you could see them and it was kind of tragic that we've lost those beautiful elm trees and I swear I've seen a couple of elm trees planted one on the corner of Elmwood and Pearl maybe and then I've seen one down on on St. Paul Street so I was excited that I believe that there's a new species of elm that's disease resistant and I'm hoping that there's some effort to replenish you know to replant some of the elm trees or in and around Burlington of course specifically on Elmwood Avenue but that was my comment I was gonna I've been trying to reach people separately about that I'll pay for it if I need it but I think the idea of re replenishing the elms is uh is a really good one thank you okay I'll just comment quick on that we are planting a lot of elms they're not necessarily American elm varieties because I'm not finding them to be resistant they're Asian elm crosses but we're planting a lot of them right now okay we're really running over Polly I see your hand can you make it quick so quick I promise thank you I'm really passionate about trees and I'm really excited to hear your planting more and I'm wondering how we could maybe bring this to the school board or to the superintendent as a way of getting neighborhood children involved of the caretaking of these trees like I'm thinking this is just a great opportunity for them to have awareness about the trees in their neighborhood and how frequently they need to be watered and species and have you reached out to the superintendent or is that something you would like help with from the school board where we could say hey in wards two and three we have a really cool opportunity here to like take care of our neighborhood um great idea in the interest of time Polly please feel free to contact me and we can talk more about it I think COVID is making things difficult right now to do any sort of an interaction with anybody so as we can see from this meeting tonight well we we have learned that when we get a chance to have the city arborist here we should give him a lot more than 10 minutes there's lots of in what you do happy to join you at any time please invite me back okay thank you I think like a virtual adopt a tree thing there you go out of my theater role to just say that not one of these just looks like it's going to be in the downtown and I was you know if you have any plans for trees in the downtown we would love to hear it do you want me to comment on that quickly sure um you we were just down there today fixing tree grates around some of these trees in the downtown core I can tell you that that is that is almost a losing battle when trees die to try to replant those tree pits the soil volume in those tree pits is so minimal that it's very very difficult under those conditions to grow healthy trees what you see on st paul street the two blocks rebuilt of st paul street we incorporated new innovations underneath the paving where we provided up to 1500 cubic feet of soil for each tree wow the use of these soil cells so although the trees there that's what needs to happen throughout the downtown core to really have healthy canopy where you have hits in the sidewalk and no green belt strip and that's the long-term goal with these great street upgrades so okay thanks for that answer and thanks for coming and we'll definitely have you back all right thank you good night good night so um next we have um john vickery I hope the city assessor to talk about citywide appraisals and what the new property valuations mean for you hi everybody I'm john vickery the burlington assessor thank you for inviting me to speak before you I'm going to talk about the citywide revaluation which is underway right now and we're getting very close to making it public with our new valuations the last valuation reappraisal that we had was in 2005 effective 2006 so it's been many years what I have is I have a presentation that I'll walk I'll walk through that presentation and then we'll take time to I'll answer any questions that anybody has regarding our process the new valuations how to appeal and that sort of thing so if you don't mind I'll pull up my presentation okay and if you could keep the whole thing with a q and a to about 20 minutes that would be great absolutely happy to do that see if I can figure this thing out here this thing it's just going to take just a minute okay so does everybody see the what's up on screen yes if you could make it larger that would be great oh yes yeah I yep I will I just wanted to make sure that there you go how is that is that better yes much better okay um as I said this is the burlington citywide revaluation project the first one since 2005 I we've had a fair amount of market change especially as of late the the market in Burlington here's a graph of the median home value in 2006 you'll see that 295,000 and in 2021 it's projected to be 392,000 so we've had some incredible market appreciation very similar to like 2006 2007 2008 in that period we are doing this revaluation because it's mandated by the state tax department and the reason why it's mandated is because we are not meeting or did not meet statistical measures uh that the state requires and as well as national guidelines of taxation equity the purpose of the reappraisal is equity it is to put values back at their market value because that's the measure of equity and over time you lose that you'll have certain types of properties that'll be undervalued and other properties that'll be overvalued in other words some folks may not be paying their fair share of the taxes while others are are taking on that burden that's the purpose of the revaluation um our tables are outdated and they're being updated now and I already mentioned that the last reappraisal project was done 15 years ago the timeline uh I want to put this out we are going to send out that change or valuation notice letters to all the property owners is approximately 11,000 property owners in Burlington and that'll be either the third or fourth week of March uh let's hope this is the third week but it might be the fourth week of March the letters that we send out will have all the information that someone needs to to do a review of their own property um it'll also give them information about how to meet with a board of assessor appraiser uh and those meetings will be held virtually just as this meeting is right now um someone will be able to file their their grievance or their appeal electronically like the process that we've had currently for several years now um and then the meetings because of COVID it will be held virtually for safety safety reasons that'll be the entire month of April in May and June the team of the Tyler technology appraisal division and my own staff will be doing reviews and will be resolving many appraisal issues in July is when our tax bills come out no change there but that's the the time frame uh from now until tax bills uh a little bit of information um the new values will be based on current local real estate market as of April 1st 2021 uh i'll introduce myself again i'm john vickery the city assessor Tyler technologies is do is conducting the general reappraisal and safeguard organic analytics uh our specialist in commercial property valuation and we hired them because we thought that they could do a fantastic job um i told you about the letters that are coming out pretty soon i want to encourage everyone to read the letter through uh go on to our website and look at their property which will be posted on the website so that they can gather information about their property we want to make sure that information is correct and then in addition to that they can look at other folks properties as a check to see if they are fairly assessed and um we've had property data on our on our website for over 10 years now many people are familiar with it and it's a it's a great resource i think for folks to look at their assessment compare comparison to others our job is to make sure values are fair and equitable and it starts off with having the correct information so um i believe about a year ago we we mailed out data mailers and asked people to send them in if they had a a change if they they felt that we had some data that was incorrect well that data should by now be in the system correct and updated to today's market value um but we want the public this is the the public process is coming in um in april and we want uh public taxpayers property owners to be involved in this process um if you are appealing your property value it's really a three-step process you would um file your appeal electronically from our website and the letter that we mail out will give that guidance um step two a tyler technologies administrator will email or call everyone that files electronically and if you don't file electronically you'll be able to call a 1-800 number step three is uh you'll be attending your hearing with an appraiser a certified appraiser from tyler technologies and or someone from our staff and my entire staff are appraisers that is my quick presentation and i am will be delighted to answer any questions that anybody may have okay if you could stop the share screen then i can see the group and see who has okay i'm sorry that's still up that's right i gotta pull that down okay thank you questions from the group thank you um uh chris christie yes my curiosity seeing this is now a good thing for one that this is this appraisal is going on um how does this information impact the renters in the city of brilliance and because i know one building next to another one building may be dilapidated that may affect the taxes or the value of the building surrounding it so how does this affect the renters in the city of brilliance and for reappraisal of property you think that might possibly raise the rents well it would affect the the the the tenets indirectly because they don't own the property but they live in the property so the um the valuations are are based on the fair market value of a particular property so if there is a property that is well kept compared to a property that is not well kept the property that is in better shape will likely have a higher valuation uh because it's worth more in the open market and therefore uh would the higher valuation would probably mean a higher tax amount um we did in 2015 and 2016 we did a revaluation uh to have apartment properties that were undervalued um equalized to the level that other properties were raised at which was really important and so uh the apartments overall have pretty darn good equity already now we're just bringing them to market right the other question that i had was how reappraising these buildings affect the way that the city enforces the cold ordinances to make sure that property is maintained in habitable forms so that they can actually you know get better tax revenue out of the surrounding buildings well it's your question is is um a little bit difficult to answer because we're not code enforcement so the code enforcement office exercises their their their rules they do have a process for where they've conducted inspections and if a property is in good condition for the tenants it gets fewer inspections and that therefore they can focus their work on properties that are in not such great shape because they visit those properties more often so but that's a that's a different city department i hope that helps could you please uh send me a copy of your report to the brillington tenant tuning at gmail.com so that we can review this information well what we're going to be doing is we're still working on the on the property data right now so the reports is not ready and it won't be ready for a little bit but we are going to be putting out valuations uh our goal is to put it out before April April 1st and then we will post that information online and uh you would be able to look at every single property online that way it's not a book report like you think it is it's um the database gets every property is put online electronically thank you thank you i see jacob and then tony and then we'll be out of time we're already out of time but that's okay jacob thanks hey i got two things i'll start with the my frustration one first is um you mentioned that properties that are well maintained are going to have a higher value and then they're going to get tax more which it seems frustrating to disincentivize our communities to not maintain their buildings i understand it's probably because we want to tax who we think has more money to make it a progressive tax which is great is there a way can we can we get a progressive property tax that doesn't disincentivize people maintaining their places um yeah so there's the first one well i i always just want to tell it like it is um even if i agree with your sentiment um because you do want to it would be nice to have a system that encourages people to improve their property of course um the system that we have for evaluating of of of what they feel is a fair way to uh to tax someone is based on value and when you improve your property it increases your value so my office is just abiding by by state law uh unless they change the rules in in some way we would valuation properties based on the law so right now it's based on fair market value um and when a property is improved it's there's that's it helps the value of that property yeah thank you and i i see a couple of senators and let us play cheers here so if i tickled your brain at all uh let me know um my second question is just more of a process thing we got um i think it i think we got a reassessment this summer and then we got a reassessment two years prior to that is this going to be a new one on top of that or if we got a assessment this summer is that part of the same process well it's um it's a different process um we are doing a revaluation mandated by the state of vermont to correct inequities of property valuations which results in taxes so um this is putting all properties at an estimated fair market value as of April 1st 2021 the if you were assessed a year ago or even three years ago it was based on an earlier assessment but it did recognize the new improvements you might have made but it didn't bring your value to market value it brought your market to the level of appraisal that other properties were were at a year ago or when you when you were reassessed okay thank you and i will clarify that if you'd like no i think that makes sense thanks okay there's a few more hands tony tony briefly please yeah um john i uh quickly took your median price for a single family home in 2006 and what it is uh today or you know in 2021 and it turns out there was a 33 percent increase and 33 percent over the is actually the same amount as the background inflation that that we face so in other words there was no increase in real value but i want to get a christie delphius question from a a different standpoint uh what you didn't show you showed ownership you know most burlington doesn't own homes we're all redders most of us and particularly in wards two and three um and and what you didn't show i'd like to see a graph of a part of a median middle apartment building that's two or three years old sort of like the redstone apartments up on north monoski or even the ones that look out over the the lake what that valuation was in say 2006 which is where where we started and what it is today so that that we and that that work and are concerned about how things are changing in wards two and three would have an understanding of our rental properties have they gone up more than this is what christie delphi was asking have their value gone up more than um say ownership or less and that would have an obviously a um an impact on what the taxes are that the apartment that i'm living in right now would pay could you do that at some point i'll help you out right now that's a i actually love that question and i'm sorry christie and uh maybe i needed a little more elaboration on that um the the apartments were uh when we when we ran tests before the whole project started uh and we run the relationship between the market and the assessed values the ratio for apartments overall was about 69 percent 70 percent right it ran that that range there so the change is going to be from that percent to 200 percent of market um which is right in line with the single family homes um they're very equitably assessed okay among those two property groups uh so uh i think they'll see more of a level of adjustment and then you know there's other sectors of the market that uh were around that but not not so tightly just one last item there's that during that same period the now dow jones went up 284 percent so if you're going to put your money anywhere apparently you would not put it into either a home ownership or even into rental housing um and the only question then would be have incomes of you know the average median income for a household in burlington who rents has that also increased roughly 30 30 33 percent i'll take a look at that but uh that answers my question and it does at least say uh that the apartment uh pricing um has not gone up beyond certainly the beyond what the single family uh inflation has been over the last 15 to 16 years from what you're indicating okay thank you to oh you want do you want to respond to that john yes um we had to we had to um readjust the apartments in 2015 uh because they were unequivocally assessed so um their appreciation was actually if we didn't do anything their appreciation would it would have been a bigger adjustment so um the the move that we made in in 2015 was helpful on a equitable purpose for equitable purposes for basically for what landlords were underpaying and now this adjustment is going to be more equally when it goes from the the prior value to to now that makes sense um a question is my original question was and what christie was trying to get at what was the value of the apartment difficult fairly new apartment in 2006 and what is it expected to be in 2021 so you can make a comparison whether uh basically whether the whether the value has gone up greater or less than say the median family house that's the question yeah i can't answer that right now because um you have four plexus you have 20 plus 20 unit plexus so it's i can't if you told me what what's the average four plex or what's the average 10 plex i could dig into that and find that information for you but i can't i i can't do it because they're very so much right i would say maybe a 10 plex would be yeah tonic we don't have time for this level okay um i i saw your hand gene is it a quick question it's it's it's an addition to this for example when jake and i and i'm saying sweat equity wise improve our homes as homeowners we essentially up the market value and therefore all of the absentee landlords get to ask for more rent and that is all i'm gonna say okay thank you good comment um john thank you very much for coming it was very informative i dread getting that letter in the mail but i guess i'm gonna get one okay thank you thank you and um put the word out that'd be really wonderful and there is a process of review so bear that in mind everyone please thank you thanks moving right on we're about 10 minutes behind schedule but we have an embarrassment of riches we have so many legislators and and counselors and commissioners it's really wonderful to see you all thank you for coming um this is the we've made history this is the first time we have had four out of no five out of six state senators wanting to appear before the mpa so thank you for coming and i'll call on each one of you maybe you can build off um the previous one and and be economical with your comments the first one is philber philber is uh hey everybody i will just give you a quick update on my two committees judiciary and appropriations um in judiciary we've been continuing a lot of work uh under the heading of what we call justice reinvestment too so um trying to reduce the amount we're spending on out of state prisoners reinvest that money in programs uh to shorten people's probation periods make sure they don't reoffend etc um transitional housing is a part of that um but in addition trying to increase expungement and sealing as possibilities to make people's lives that lives once they get out of prison uh more viable and allow them to earn the income that they deserve for their work then the last thing i'll mention there is we are um going back at the cannabis legislation and trying to do some social equity work there as well as strengthen the position of small growers um in in the new order for recreational um cannabis on appropriations there you you used the phrase an embarrassment of riches you saw that president biden just hours ago signed the american rescue plan that's going to direct to uh over two and a half billion dollars into the vermon economy in one way or another um from unemployment and rental assistance to things like you know hundreds of millions of dollars into the school system for increased hvac work ppe all of the things that we need to allow students back in full time um by the way i just um helped to open the new uh school downtown vhs downtown um that was in part through a three and a half million dollar appropriation that we were able to move in advance of the budget so that's just a little snapshot there's a lot of other people um happy to answer questions later okay thank you next i have tom chitenden thank you for having me tonight so i'm tom chitenden i live over in south brolin tonight serve on our uh city council here and we're going to reappraise on the city as well so i can commiserate with all of you with the questions and the the issues and questions that come up with that uh i'm new to the senate i keep saying that but it's certainly relevant and top of mind for me i serve on transportation uh as well as senate ed on transportation we are very close to to putting to the senate floor um new legislation that will allow zero emission vehicles to sell direct to consumer effectively allowing companies like tesla to be able to operate and service their their vehicles here in the state i think that's a going to be a good piece of legislation we're also looking at passing in e-bikes classification so that across the state we have a common understanding of what a class one class two or class three uh ped assist e-bike is uh so as to help municipalities be able to govern and structure different rules for those we're also looking at allowing blue lights on fire apparatus as well as dmb changes and other things um senate ed is wrestling some topics that might be in the press more we're looking we're going to move forward an implementation plan for senator baruch's great work on uh adjusting our waiting formula for how we calculate taxes and fund equitably schools so that's something we are hoping to pass out a committee tomorrow and i expect the real progress on that in the years to come we're looking at literacy programs and then we'll also i'll be presenting which is exciting for a new senator i'll be reporting out my first bill next week and i really hope the other senators on the call don't give me any any grief i hear there's sometimes hazing for new senators i'm hoping that i will coast through this one but it'll be on libraries uh a library uh study committee as well as some changes to the library language in our statutes i will will be um asking every public school in the state to provide uh free of charge and all bathrooms uh menstrual products to in that area and then also we will in part of that is to make it so that community liaisons so multicultural liaisons can be funded through municipal and school partnerships i think i've used up more than a minute and i will now turn it back to whoever is running this meeting thanks for having me tonight hi tom nice to meet you i'm barbra that's who's running the meeting thank you um i didn't see jenny jenny lions is she here barbra i i don't know what word do you have people in it could be people who emailed you back it's senator keisha rum i'm actually in my fiancé sugarhouse in charlotte and we're boiling syrup and i just wondered if i could go next um yes keisha you may thank you i i apologize to um to others just finding a quiet space right now um so uh first i just want to um thank tom um actually he and i are both reporting our first bills tomorrow in the senate and i'm a co-sponsor of the tesla related bills so really appreciate that moving and i was the sponsor of the original bill around multicultural liaisons so um i will not give you a hard time tomorrow tom and i'm grateful you're reporting that um i just wanted to add uh a couple other things um so i uh was a little bit late because i just got off the phone with uh chairman michael sorok and i'm not sure if he's with us i can't see from my phone but if he has not responded so i assume he is not well i i'm happy to speak um a little bit on behalf of senate economic development and he's probably not here because we are about to potentially vote out a major unemployment bill tomorrow um and he and i were just on the phone about it um it you know we had the uh the governor approach us about um asking for rate relief for businesses and we're absolutely happy to provide that knowing that we had a half a billion dollar cushion in our unemployment reserve fund specifically for an emergency like the ongoing one that we've seen this past year um but it's really important to us that if we're helping our small businesses we're also helping their employees who are still you know um unemployed still at home still waiting to hopefully get their jobs back and so um we've created a kind of second grand bargain since the great recession acknowledging that often um you know when you uh have a recession like this it has a very long tail and just because you get your job back it doesn't mean you're not digging yourself out of pre-recession income levels and a deep financial hole and so we've added provisions to increase the overall um amount of state support for unemployment as well as a provision that is an amendment of mine that i'm very um proud of and attached to that would um in allow for dependence any any families on unemployment with dependence to get 50 extra dollars a week in their unemployment as folks may or may not know vermont has a 70 percent of unemployment rate for women the people on unemployment 70 percent are women and most other states are maybe at 5545 in what has been dubbed a she-session because of women leaving the workforce but vermont is an incredible outlier and a lot of that has to do with long-term effects in the economy of a lack of access to child care and service industry jobs and so um we are just really trying to do everything we can to focus on those who would otherwise be most left behind in our unemployment system we look forward to voting that out either tomorrow or um shortly thereafter and i just wanted to give people that update on unemployment and appreciate you letting me jump the line a little bit okay keisha thanks for coming um uh chris piercen thanks barbara good evening everybody um lots going on in the state house this is a busy couple of weeks but uh one of the things i'm the proudest of is that i've been working on is uh around school lunches um during the pandemic we have as a state uh had universal lunches so every school has uh just made every student eligible to get uh so-called free and reduced lunch and um any given year we have about 70 of our schools there's some 280 schools in vermont that have free and reduced lunch for everybody universal meals we're taking advantage of this moment to see if we can't expand that to make every school have universal lunch and pair that with an incentive to buy local products the data is pretty stark and in a normal time pre-pandemic we had about one in ten vermont are expressing so-called food insecurity so one in ten vermont are would self-report to being hungry now um the data suggests it's closer to one in three or one in four and this is not a dynamic that's going to evaporate you know a month after the pandemic and so it's really scary one of the most straightforward we've done a lot of assistance for food banks um and other strategies but one of the most successful enduring and straightforward ways we can help our families is by getting good food into our schools removing the stigma for students not having some kids you know punching a card number while other kids are paying with cash just take all of that out of the equation for actually what ends up being fractions on the dollar of our overall school spending so we're we're putting vermont on a path and this bill is advanced out of my committee senate ag i think it's coming out of senate ed where senator chitman and senator lyon sit tomorrow um and then then it moves on so it's it's underway puts us on a five-year plan to get every student in the state covered by a universal meals program and it also puts a local incentive building on examples in michigan and new york oregon to get local food into schools that has been really really good to reverberate money around our local economy get good products produce good quality food into schools and create markets for farmers that are dependable you know these are big institutions after all so i'm really really excited about that there's a lot of momentum and it seems like a good year for us to be able to take advantage of the great work our schools have done during the pandemic to to get food into into hungry bellies so i'm really pleased on that one 100 it's s thomas s 102 s 100 s 100 i should be able to remember that so watch for that thanks very much thank you very much um it's jenny lions here we thought she was going to be but i don't see her on the list of participants okay so i have to take it back we only have four out of six and five out of six senators thank you all for coming please stay for questions um if you can okay let me go to uh vermont state house reps next um jill is jill here jessica do you see her on the list i didn't know barbara i don't see jill today and what about curt mccormick i know he's been ill so he's not here either currently okay next person is brian all right hi everybody i'm representative brian china from the old north and yes all right and um and uh let's see let's talk about the legislature um it is crossover week what is crossover week crossover week is the week where bills have to make it out of their policy committee in the house in order to survive the year if they don't make it out by friday by tomorrow then they have to wait a year before action can well that's not true we could take action on them and they'll just sit in the rules committee but it's it's an important date to get bills out of policy committee so all of the policy committees are working really hard i will give you an update on my policy committee in the house we only have one committee that wrong i'm on the health care committee being a health care provider um they put me in the right place and in the health care committee um we we took a lot of testimony about the impact of the pandemic and about you know what you know what we need to do we made some recommendations on money but not a lot of bills have passed out of the health care committee however um there is one exciting bill that's on the way of passing out of the health care committee tomorrow and it's called h210 it's an act relating to addressing this health disparities and promoting health equity and what the bill does is it creates and uh it gives funding to the office of racial equity director to assemble a health equity advisory commission to begin looking at the inequities in our health care system during the pandemic so that we can start to address them before the pandemic is over and that commission is given a bunch of powers and duties looking at various aspects of the health care system like training of providers um grants to be used um looking at data collection there's more that the bill does i don't need to tell you all the details but the gist of it is that um it's headed out of committee it will probably pass and come over to the senate so we'll be looking to our senator friends to take up that bill to make sure it passes through and it's a really important bill because um something we've seen during this coronavirus pandemic is that the existing inequity and disparities in our social and economic system have been amplified by the pandemic and so just a few numbers for you that non-white vermonters have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 nearly one in five COVID-19 cases in Vermont is a non-white vermoner and what is non-white well that's how the data's aggregated or disaggregated so i'm sorry to use that term but it basically means BIPOC black indigenous and people of color so i'll say BIPOC moving forward so nearly one in every five cases nearly one in every five twenty percent is BIPOC yet only six percent of vermoners are BIPOC so that means six percent of vermoners are BIPOC twenty percent of people with COVID are BIPOC that's a disparity three times as much so that's just one example of the many disparities we see in our healthcare system um that exist and hopefully this health equity bill will create a structure in the government you know eventually that commission will move over to the department of health when they can take that workload on after the pandemic we're building a structure into the government to monitor health equity issues and to engage impacted communities that commission has 20 something people from the black community the indigenous community people of color it's also for LGBTQ people and for people with disabilities because those groups also see a disparity this commission will be advising the state moving forward so as we come out of the pandemic hopefully we can make some progress in the area of health equity so that'll be my my main update there's something else i want to talk about but i'm going to like wait and see where this goes so thanks i really appreciate that because we have about eight more people to talk so maybe um but we'll be back to you um please stay around saline hello um thanks so much everybody and um let's see i serve on the house judiciary committee and we have a number of bills um coming out uh this week for the deadline that brian mentioned and a lot of them have to do with equity in some form or another so i'll just share maybe a little sampling what those are um actually today we had a bill that passed the house that bans the use of what's sometimes called the gay trans panic defense or the lgbtq plus panic defense um i got to report that bill which was really wonderful and uh we sent it over to our colleagues in the senate um with a really strong vote i think there were four maybe uh one one person went on record voting against it a few other a few others just simply didn't out vote um we also uh had a second reading today for a bill that um um clarifies court procedures allowing judges to order relinquishment of firearms in domestic violence proceedings when emergency orders or what are sometimes called relief from abuse orders are being emergency relief from abuse orders are being issued um which is there's a huge link between homicide by uh sorry firearm homicides and domestic violence and so although this is already essentially uh something courts are able to do it just clarifies it and makes it consistent across the state um we also just passed out of my committee today a bill that looks at um makes some very small modifications to how vermont um creates hate crime sentencing enhancements so we've removed um a word that created a slightly higher bar um for folks to have to prove um those kinds of crimes and and motivations um and we're also trying to collect a great deal more data about the bias incidents that are being reported nationally in the state so we can have clear transparent local data about that um and I couldn't go on on and on there's actually we're we're trying to meet that crossover deadline and plowing a lot of bills out the um the other thing i'll say unrelated to that is that we had in the house progressive caucus at the beginning of the week a really um powerful conversation with a number of lawyers from vermont legal aid who are working with folks on the front line um of the crisis and and who are trying to access benefits and just we're telling us about the many many glitches and barriers that folks are continuing to face sometimes a year in especially in our unemployment insurance system so I and some of my colleagues are going to be pushing to have um we hope something like a public hearing to really bring those stories forward and try to once and for all get um more capacity for our UI system to actually help people out thank you very much um perhaps we'll be some questions in a little bit Emma hi Barbara hi thanks everyone uh this is like hour 14 of my zoom day so I am going to try to say something articulate so bear with me folks um I just want to really just say hi I've had children calling all over me because we've been in quarantine this week so it's been fun let's just real talk it's been super fun this week um I just want to really echo two very brief things and then tell you a little bit about house commerce which is that my um committee assignment in the house I really want to just emphasize the gay um the gay trans panic defense bill is momentous and I want to just echo um representative taylor small who represents a small portion of burlington this is her first bill and it passed through the house and it is historic and I'm very proud that we had nearly unanimous support from the house so challenge on senate I hope you pass it quickly and um dutifully because it is an important move for LGBTQ and human rights in vermont so that is a big one I want to just underline and also the progressive um caucus that Selena mentioned I encourage you all to go and watch it if you're interested it's less than an hour you can find it on the vermont progressive party website facebook page and it's just so insightful the folks at vermont legal aid do um serious really compelling work for low income vermonters but the byproduct of it impacts and benefits all vermonters because they're in the case of unemployment so many vermonters 27 I believe thousand vermonters are still on unemployment um and it's only continuing and there is some more policy work coming forward that representative raw mentioned earlier and will come to my committee and I hope to do as much as possible to center workers because there's been a lot for business in this session so far on pandemic relief and we need to do a whole lot more for workers so in that spirit the biggest thing that our committee works on is basically a very large omnibus bill before crossover which seems like everything in the kitchen sink goes into this economic development bill and there's a couple pieces I just want to highlight if you're can't sleep at night you can find h 159 it has a a misnomer kind of label because it is called better places which is one piece of probably 10 different policy ideas in this massive bill um but I just want to highlight uh around the theme of equity I've been working hard on the aspect around resourcing and centering BIPOC business development and economic well-being for BIPOC folks in the state and it's towards the end of the bill if you want to look it up on the legislative website but it's a it's a first time thing for the agency of commerce and community development to intentionally fund two things one would be money for BIPOC community leaders to come together and figure out how to create a system that works for them the system now is very much built to benefit white white folks white for monitors white business owners etc so it's a resourcing to seed the seed if you will an effort to state what is needed to support BIPOC businesses and then hopefully springboard a few years of further funding for BIPOC communities to help them do startups help them expand help them be able to get a customer base marketing etc the second portion of that is to create a new position within ACCD I know the governor doesn't like creating new positions but it's about time that we at minimum dedicate a staffer who would be informed and an expert on BIPOC business needs and from inside state government really up up the state's game frankly on being responsive and you know pointing out points of bias with all the various nonprofits and business agencies that sort of do work around the state that are not for the part of the state but get funded and partner with the state as well as doing technical support and helping with contract procurement for state and federal contracts etc the list goes on so you can find that in the bill it's going to that part's going to pass I'm very proud of that because I didn't know if anyone on the committee would even be interested in that that concept so look for more soon but really trying to up the equity conversation within house commerce I hope that made sense I am so tired today so thanks all for hanging in there I know this is a long NPA meeting this is my favorite NPA don't tell words four and seven but I appreciate that and I'll try to stay on for questions that folks can always email me and find information on legislative website in terms of contacting me thanks all thank you Emma okay I'd like to move on to city council I'm going to go in reverse alphabetical order this time so Brian fine hi I like that I'm sort of in the middle I think I get to go second no matter what but that's okay the items I'll cover real quickly charter changes they all passed with flying colors it was really quite inspiring for those of us who like them all so the I'll just quickly touch on airport commission expanded by one from Winooski one more from Burlington added to that group to get it to an odd number keep it at an odd number of seven the thermal energy question is rather than summarize the question I'll just say the thermal energy question rank choice voting just cause eviction in the airport question all get essentially brought through the legislative process because they will be either one package bill or individual bills depending on the best way to advance them through the legislative process that our delegation will discuss among themselves and figure out what is the best way to bring those forward so stay tuned there will be no action any of any substance perhaps you would say in this session other than maybe some committee hearings it's will miss crossover so none of the none of the charter changes will meet crossover which means they need to be brought back through the process in the next half of the biennium so that means next january but we can do a lot of groundwork to to get these in a good position so that they're well resourced well we have all the information needed to to advance them and also determine the best strategy to ensure they get through the legislature come back to Burlington with as few changes as possible since that's what Burlington wants and the voters of Burlington you get you overwhelmingly approve these so we'll let you know how you can be involved there will be a place for people to engage in this process but right now we need to sort of respect the legislative process that we need to go through thank you thank you brian you're right you should have been in the middle but my list is screwed up so max sure thank you so much appreciate it so a couple things we're kind of in between in terms of our council this is kind of the the the part where we have new councils you have to be sworn in we have one more meeting with this council and then we'll all have organization day again on the 5th of april which is when the new council is sworn in and the state of the city address is given um i um just want to thank everybody for participating in the election certainly didn't didn't go my way and uh it was frustrating to have it be as as close as it was but i just really appreciate all the support i felt especially from you know from this neighborhood and from the old north end and just the way that people showed up was absolutely incredible so that was just something that i wanted to just relate everybody and just thank you all for the support i really appreciated just that everything that you all have done over the years to support me in the context of this mpa so i just wanted to thank you for that um in terms of the council two things i'll touch on briefly i'm at our last council meeting we had a first reading of an ordinance change that i think will be um helpful both in terms of addressing our climate um goals as a city and specifically reducing carbon emissions related to heating and cooling um as we talked about as or as has been discussed in this meeting so much of our city our rental units and older ones at that and so um what the council has um done is start the adoption process and a process that will continue and uh culminate at the next meeting um to mandate weatherization of rental properties this sets a standard across rental properties and as well as an implementation schedule starting with the properties that um we have reason to believe have the least level of efficiency to them so the the leakiest properties if you will and then those prop and then over time they'll get phased in um so that additional properties are covered um there's um there are certain provisions within the ordinance um so things like that you know that there's a cap on in terms of spending um on the the property owners part um to twenty five hundred dollars that doesn't include any subsidy that they would receive so that could actually be far greater um given all the different incentive programs that vermont has um so this is just really a way for us to to to move towards requiring folks to do um weatherization on properties in a much more expeditious faction fashion replacing um what was a prior ordinance that required um that work to take place at the time of sale which um oftentimes given um how some properties really don't turn over would would really be um very seldom so um that's a i think a meaningful improvement something that's going to be exciting the other piece that i do want to also touch on is just the city budget that will be something that the new council will be will be diving into relatively quickly um with the federal stimulus berlington um is estimated to receive about 19 million dollars from what i understand at this point um which will take a very challenging budget and make it a lot more manageable um berlington has about a six million dollars budget shortfall that comes largely um from um decreases in some of our largest revenue categories um though not the largest that being property taxes where people have continued to pay on time um and have continued to just pay in general but rather other other areas of the city budget like rooms and meals tax so restaurant meals and hotels um local option taxes and then there were some other other revenue sources that um or taxes that were we chose not to implement this year namely an increase to the housing trust fund as well as a an increase to um a public safety tax to fund the ambulances in the in the new north end and so um this will take that budget and make it i think a lot more manageable one thing that i'm going to be interested to understand is the degree of flexibility that we have with that and the degree to which we're able to to actually solicit community feedback in that i from what i generally understand about the about it is that we will have greater flexibility um to a certain degree than i guess previous rounds of stimulus so i'm hoping that that will create opportunities for the city to really deploy that in um in different ways than we have thus far um and to really also include community more in that decision making process around how some of that is spent if in fact we do end up having more than um than we need to cover the shortfall which it looks like again that that that will be the case so that's much better position for us to to be in than than we otherwise thought we might be okay thanks max perry yes thank you by rat um i wanted to give an update on a few of the um items around um sort of policing and police transformation that have been going on um specifically um i just wanted to touch quickly on oversight um you know i've basically this is the more um i don't know frustrating answer right it's i i i don't love giving like a non update update where the update is just that there's not really an update but that's what this is sort of turned into um i did have some communication from the mayor's office that they were um going to be bringing something forward for the council meeting on the eighth and then again on the 22nd um once that got pushed back um this has been pushed back several times i haven't seen anything um so i'm still just waiting for information on that i think there are um certainly folks in our progressive caucus who are interested in continuing to work on this and there are community groups that are still meeting around it and i anticipate that will be coming to the mpa's um you know continuing to be sort of brought up at um you know sort of through uh sort of the policy channels but um right now it just feels a little bit stalled out so um i'm just it's sort of in a wait and see moment um and are folks familiar with talitha the the public engagement and so he's going to appear at a subsequent meeting right so the so there are two um consultants um that we're working with around sort of the police transformation issue one is a public engagement consultant and then the which is talitha and then the other is um cna which is doing more of like the audit and assessment of the department and that contract is also kind of in like a limbo stage right now so um it hasn't been finalized at least that's the most recent update that i've gotten um and so still working through that but talitha um has started the public engagement process there were stakeholder meetings um on february 23rd and 25th um with um a whole bunch of organizations and i'll i'll throw all the works that participated in the chat um in a second it was about two dozen organizations um participated in those and then they were at the one eight meeting on yesterday and then um i have the list of the other um they'll be at four and seven on march 24th they're going to be at award five meeting on april fifth and they'll i believe they're coming to the april meeting for awards two and three is that tentatively sound correct the steering committee members um i'm not sure if we would maybe talking about having a special meeting i think for them we'll see okay so yeah so that um that is a you know an opportunity for the public to continue to engage on this issue i think um you know some of what we saw when um you know as we've been having a lot of these conversations people just felt like they wanted more opportunities to give input and also have that be a more sort of clear process and so that's really where talitha is stepping in um and working with the city um so there's the stakeholder workshops there's the npa meetings and then there also will be at some point um a public survey that's generated um and so i'm looking forward to that i didn't i did go to both of the stakeholder workshops i did not get a chance to go to the npa meeting yesterday um but i'll you know chat with one of the um east district counselors to hear how that went but um you know i won't like i think and also i should wrap up but um i'm i'll hold my thoughts basically on the process until the process is over but i'm excited that they'll be um coming to the npa shortly thank you everyone okay thank you very much um it's now a quarter to nine we were supposed to have ended at 8 30 and our school commissioners have been waiting patiently to um talk to us so i hope that we can get a nine is that okay with everybody thanks okay so um are all three of you gonna speak or um i'm gonna go okay jean Barbara i really i want to go really quick i i don't want to give an update but having been a part of the vermont coalition for equity in education which is a statewide effort to support um updating the weighted pupil um i'm i'm looking at senator chitin not his head and what i want to say is thank you to you and also i'm bummed that left early but i'm thanking our senators right now for supporting s13 and i hope that our house reps look forward to hearing from me in supporting it after crossover and that's all keep an insert okay thank you keep in barbara happy yeah so um who's gonna talk next i'll go very quickly also go steven thank you okay i just also want to thank everyone for the work that they did um voting for the school budget you know we had a tremendous output again of a support which uh it makes me proud of being a burlingtonian because in the many years i've been here you know the citizens have almost every single time supported the school budget and i really it's really a statement for the community support and the um involvement of burlington into the school system but in particular you know again i'm going to go really quickly the downtown opening was really fantastic with jill corinsky and um and phil baruth were there among many other dignitaries for the city this the school is up and functioning you know there was a question last meeting about the covid protocol for the downtown and i just want to clarify what that is the kids come uh and their temperatures are taken when they arrive they go to their classes that when they leave they don't come back so there's no coming and going throughout the day parents are responsible for making sure that the uh the kids are arriving to school healthy and there are a couple of different entrances for the building right now there have been um complaints about the noise that's going on the inside and we heard the last night on two nights ago on tuesday that um there are some mitigation factors that could come into play as we continue to get funding from the state and federal levels about for education but there's a so much information going on right now i'll stop there i just wanted to update people on that covid protocol and then maybe poly has something to say as well thank you thank you steven poly do you have something to add no just thanks for supporting the budget and so excited about downtown bhs and stay tuned about the future of our high school okay thank you so the floor is open for questions to to any of our legislators or commissioners and counselors and hopefully jessica can help me recognize people because i can't see everybody uh there's a handout from jacob jacob go ahead it's amazing at hand so much um first thing is i i heard senator chitin and talk about e-bikes and um i've been thinking about alternative transportation and i've been thinking and i've recently realized that we have different rules for two three-wheeled vehicles versus four-wheeled vehicles and i'm trying to get up to speed on that and i've been seen we talk about bike slot and we but i've been seeing you know electric um wheelchairs i even saw go kart park in front of the hardware store the other day so i just really want to advocate i love i love this work and i really want to advocate for making us think about our roads differently and trying to allow a lot more of these alternative means of transportation the other thing i want to touch on is i don't know if you guys heard we had the city assessor here and there was a little discussion about how can we have a progressive property tax but that doesn't discourage people from working and fixing up their buildings because it's based the property tax is based on valuation so if you make your if you fix up your apartment building or your house you're going to have a higher tax so i just want to plug that into your ears and see if you guys have any thoughts about that do you have you want to direct it to somebody specific that's hard sorry there's a lot of you if anybody's really passionate about it that would be great but yeah sorry okay it seems to me it's maybe the city counselors that have something to do with the code both code enforcement and people upgrading their properties versus being taxed more for doing so and also selena i think had i don't know selena wanted to jump in okay i'm not seeing everybody so i can't see who wants to selena i want you to go first i'm sure there's multiple people but i just wanted to make sure that you saw selena barber okay selene do you want to say something about this yeah and i would just and maybe senator pierce does too because i know he's worked on this issue a lot but i think the the way to get to that progressive education funding model that i think i heard you asked for is to start to shift away from using property and to look at income and asking folks to pay a percentage of their income so we're not you know putting all the burden on the low and especially like middle income folks but that we're we're asking people to proportionally support our and equitably support our education system and i know senator pierce has introduced a bunch of legislation on that in the past um i have rep the house ski and cordis are working on a have been working on a bill to implement some recommendations from our recent tax commission study along these lines working with public assets and the vermont nea and others so there's there there continues to be interest in this at state level thank you brian did you want to weigh in on this fine yeah there is some exciting work happening as well and maybe selena was referring to this as well i just want to mention um deb brighton did a pretty amazing piece of work around how we can shift away from um a tax that really does kind of discourage and penalize people for improving and maintaining their properties doing what we want them to do and instead shifts more to one that essentially taxes owners who hold property for sort of building its speculative value hoping that down the road they're going to reap a great big benefit from that and so um that's not really doing justice to what that report says but that's basically how i understood um this new way of thinking about how to fund both schools and municipal services in the last 40 years burlington has built alternatives to the property tax as a way to move away from this but we haven't been able to do enough because state controls what municipalities can do and we have not succeeded in in moving further away from a very regressive tax system which doesn't reflect the ability to pay but reflects just what you happen to own and assumes you therefore you then have the ability to pay which is just completely a flawed model thank you um chris i'll just say quickly that there was as folks have referenced this uh study committee that was independent legislators that came out and said this is a good way to go it's a big lift right for us to to do in the middle of everything so what i'm pushing for and i don't know if i'll succeed yet it is to give the finance committee it's a tax committee in the senate among others some ability to meet over the summer and fall and see if we can't hammer out some of the details here and bring it back next year i'm really eager for us to take advantage of this work that is a little different from a few of us legislators pushing it forward and people dismiss us for whatever reason but um so i'm hopeful um sometimes historically these kinds of reports have taken a few years to get into law uh mostly though over time they do get borne out um so uh there's fresh reason to hope thank you who else has a question christie has a question barbara okay christie we have five minutes okay so this is kind of a preemptive strike to just cause evictions when it comes out even though i know this is still a little ways away um it goes to the enforcement section of just cause when it comes back to the charter um we as we know code enforcement is notoriously horrible to tenants in the city of burlington so we were looking at maybe improving the housing board of review is a way to kind of sidetrack from uh the enforcement issue of this when it comes back to burlington to be written as a charter um how much of a possibility would it be to improve the housing board of review to substantively help with the code enforcement issues so the way they treat tenants in the city of burlington anybody want to take that on i think i'll attempt it christie i think when i'm when i'm hearing you uh speak about we've talked about before and i think it does it merits it merits much further conversation about what we can do to give tenants more direct access to an appeal process really is what you're asking for i think and a a body that will hear the case when you feel that code enforcement has not lived up to their obligation is that is that fair well it's more as long as the lines of uh improving the housing board of review and giving it more powers to force code enforcement to do their job in recognizing and enforcing the core ordinances because right now they do a very horrible job and they treat tenants like absolute there and we need to stop that from happening because they're not buying the landlords for not keeping their buildings up to code and we think uh the housing board of review can be improved to the point where they would have more powers to force code enforcement to do their jobs correctly basically i think it's something we have to we have to take it as a council to spend some time on and find out what we could could do in that respect because we do have housing board of review which is i think even in our charter so we do need to to look at what those duties are and whether we can expand them and put a little bit more teeth into the process we do have a new department permitting inspections which also has no appeal process by the way for a property owner who's going to do a project and feels that the code uh shall we say the inspector is overextending their reach right now there's really nothing other than to complain to the director but there's no appeal body so that's something i was just reminded by property owners today we're going through a very difficult experience with our building inspection system that you need to have a way for citizens to have recourse or redress at least ability to appeal and that that's an issue that we have to grapple with as well but i'll work with you on that for sure we have both we have so vague and then brian left okay if people want to stay i'm happy to recognize them so they i didn't have a question i just wanted to comment on jacob's question about various different modes of transportation and bicycles and and the public works commission at their last meeting actually it's in the consent agenda so it's buried but we discussed ordinance changes to just to add quite a few varieties of different mobility definitions to the city ordinance so that's that's available at page 12 if you want to look at the packet of materials that were put out and discussed at the public works commission meeting february 17th so it's quite interesting the names that we came up with so i just wanted to share that information with people if they're interested in that so thank you thank you so the um who else patrick did you say well we have brian here hi i just have something to add on based on the conversation um so i've discovered uh something that doesn't seem to be widely known about charter changes um it was thought it had been said recently in city council meetings that you know these charter changes have to wait a year and but i discovered just recently that in the house uh bills relating to charters are exempt from deadlines um and i discovered this because i was working on a different charter change issue so that means that our city charter changes do not have to wait until next year it doesn't mean they're going to happen this year but it means they don't have to wait so i think the burlington delegation we are planning on meeting and strategizing so we will take that into account as we move forward but i just wanted people to know um because i think now that i know that we need to get that out there because certain people were using that as an argument saying oh we can't do this thing it'll never happen before crossover well guess what you're wrong so and so now we so now let's all you know and i was wrong because i thought it was true too so you live and you learn thank you thank you brian um other comments i would like to say it's really nice to see all our senators and i hope that the redistricting uh doesn't affect our current lot of senators too much because they are awful nice to have local well i i'll say that and say it for all of the legislators that appear tonight from the city to the school board to the to the house to the senate thank you for appearing i do have one comment for steve carry uh i you know i i appreciate the covid protocols that you that you outlined however students are you know um there's a lot of asymptomatic spreading of the virus taking temperatures and having parents say they're healthy is not enough there are plenty of text tests around i think the kids should be tested weekly at least so i look i just had my second vaccine so i'll be okay but they're coming into the downtown and they should be tested hey barbara i have one last announcement that i almost forgot and someone just texted me and asked me if i would please make it quickly okay please do speaking of charter changes um some of you may have heard of the the proposition zero campaign that's happening in burlington proposition zero campaign is an effort to change the charter of the city of burlington to have binding ballot items and and recalls of elected officials on the local level so tomorrow night there's going to be like a webinar event where we're going to talk about this concept and we're going to try out some different polling and we're going to hear from i think the tenants union and the battery park movement and some others about um their concerns but ultimately it's about how to create more direct one of the topics is going to be how to um increase the power of the npa's so people are interested um infinite co-closure is going to be posting on social media the information i don't have it available right now but it's tomorrow night from seven to eight p.m and please that he couldn't make it tonight but please feel free to join us if you're interested thank you that's an important announcement thank you very much and with that um are people ready to adjourn seeing no objection the meeting is adjourned thank you everybody just before everybody splits real real quick the proposition you can find find that link to that video for tomorrow night for the proposition zero on it spelled out proposition zero dot orc thank you that meeting on that link thank you thank you christie bye everyone love you bye night hater thank you