 we're going to get started soon. We have a few members of the public here in person and a few joining virtually as well. I'm going to mute that first so welcome everybody we're just going to wait a minute before we open up that public forum. If anyone wants to speak you get to sit close to a microphone. Okay all right with that we're going to get started I think we have our sound all working so welcome everybody to the October meeting of the Ward 5 NPA. My name is Nate Lanterri and I'll be moderating today. This is our second meeting in the hybrid format so welcome everybody who's joining in person as well as the folks who are joining virtually. It's kind of a funny setup that we have here what folks can't see who are just looking at the meeting room in general is that we have really it's like a probably a 75 inch screen now that sits on one end of the DPW conference room with an adjustable camera and we have the ability to zoom in on people you know kind of focus things it's just a little tech demonstration but so that's what we're working with so we're really thankful to have this hybrid space and have these hybrid meetings getting a sense of you know this sense of community that you can have in person but also still providing this virtual opportunity so really glad to be here. We will start out with just a quick slideshow as an introduction to a little bit of what's going on in our welcome. Welcome everybody that's the first slide. I'm going to talk a little bit about you know kind of what is the NPA what we're always trying to do is trying to create a safe accessible respectful vital valuable and you know to a lesser degree but also importantly non-partisan environment for you know our neighbors are ward five neighbors south end neighbors Burlington neighbors and you know folks from around the state to come hear a little bit about what's going on in the south end get some opportunity to interface with you know each other our neighbors as well as some elected officials and you know folks with particular topic area knowledge got a few buttons I thought it was on the end remote here's steering committee won't stay too long on that but these are the folks that help plan these meetings and do a lot for the logistics to make it happen especially the folks over at CEDO and at CCTV for really being the ones that are able to make this virtual stuff happen so we send a lot of kudos to our partners over there I'm sorry for coming late are you Nate yes I am yeah yeah right and yeah for anybody who you know has joined my name is Nate and I'll be moderating tonight very good right so anybody who is joining from zoom you you know many folks have been doing this for a while so you might remember but if you'd like to you know speak in public forum or if you'd like to ask any presenters a question please use the raise hand function and we'll have somebody on the tech side move you over to be a panelist so we just had the first raised hand recording in progress and now we're recording so here's our a quick overview of our agenda oh it's a little bit of a time lag that's funny so anyways we're going to start with our public forum we'll get into that as pretty much as soon as this update is over moving to some updates about Champlain Street Park over on the northern edge of edge of Ward 5 we'll have a conversation about redistricting in the city both from two different perspectives from the state level with Senator Keisha Ram Hinstale and with the Ward 5 representative to the I'd Hawk committee on redistricting Greg Shepler then we have two final items one from the Burlington Electric Department on the net energy net zero energy revenue bond and and update on the CSWD drop-off center on Flynn Ave come next month but really only in about two weeks we're going to have a special meeting same location to be determined on the specific timing as well as the final agenda for that but we will be having a special meeting on public safety and justice basically in the south end kind of discussing you know there have been a lot of situations coming up a lot of discussion about some of these topics so we figured it would be a great idea to convene some different perspectives you know different folks that interact with these concepts a lot and just provide an opportunity for neighbors to hear a little bit of those perspectives and also ask some questions too so be on the lookout for more information about that we really want to be a lively discussion and a well-attended one so so we hope that you'll join us and and follow for updates as they're coming and I think that is all I have for an introduction now I'll stop sharing and open up the public forum so as a reminder anybody who is virtually joining us please raise your hand and we will we will get to you but yeah and in person you're gonna raise your hand in person so yeah we have a comment from the room so I'll let you introduce yourself and are these live I don't think so yes they are hello they don't amplify oh they just go into it okay uh yeah I'm Spencer Smith I live in the flint avenue co-op they're on flint avenue just sort of across pretty much across from city market and we've been there for about 35 years and recently one of our founding members Richard kemp died I don't know some of you probably knew Richard and there was a good story of his life in this week's seven days I've been working the last couple of years hanging out with and discussing with the pines street coalition actually I first started some of you knew uh Charles Simpson and he he was very concerned about the green space that's between our co-op and a parking lot put it that way and then the Howard center and then also that building which we think is a morgue for uh University of Vermont but we haven't confirmed that absolutely so uh uh pines street coalition uh Charles was very concerned especially about the Inglesby brook do you know about that and uh some of you may or may not it actually runs behind our property and the plan originally that the city of the state had was to uh put in a culvert and basically get rid of the woods and and run a paved road uh probably not four lane but two lane road through there so uh we also have families 35 families and at least 20 children living in our co-op and so that would put having cars go through that section would put a lot of extra pollution into the neighborhood especially because now when this was originally conceived in the 60s and I'll try to keep this really short um it was uh going to be a four lane road that was part of the old sirk highway idea that people would just go to around downtown burlington but now people want to go to downtown burlington so there's most traffic now actually on both shelburn road and pine street is the north south traffic we've been at the south end and um oh yeah the doors was locked when I came uh so I'm thinking next month I can have some more information I'm beginning to think that I need to mobilize our co-op on this a lot of people are sort of interested in it but they haven't been involved and we do have a lawyer who's been through a bunch of um meetings with uh judges and so on and we're we're working through the legal issues the city is very I guess you could say typified by our mayor is not interested in listening to these ideas I'm not sure if they want to kill the whole project because the money is still there for it but we would like to make it a more harmonious experience and then it could be we could put a bridge through that forest there's one like that at the very end in uh Colchester there's a bridge out if it goes over the Waduski it would be a bridge like that but not as big and uh it's a way to keep the forest uh the animals can the wildlife can go underneath the bridge and we wouldn't you know have to review a few trees to get the bridge through but so that's sort of the upshot and uh hope people will be interested in learning more about this maybe next month thank you thank you Spencer and um yeah I guess we had a question from the audience immediately not a question to have another public comment all right so Spencer if you send um us information we can include it in our minutes um like like an email address or something along those lines I'm sorry I didn't hear what she's fully what you said so if you send an email address or some way to get in contact if you'd like people to contact to you just let us know okay sure yeah I will thank you public service announcement I you can reach us always at um ward five npa underscore dash btv at uh I think it's at google groups.com yeah so if you ever need to reach the steering committee that's the best way to do it um I will actually go to you after we had one hand raised from the audience so I'm going to pass it over to representative uh Gabrielle Stevens uh can you hear me yes yes excellent thank you um thanks so much for hosting these I I love the the level of effort and and coordination and even just the comments that were just made are are critical uh angle speak broke is a gorgeous book and um well it's it's it's not entirely gorgeous but it could be more gorgeous uh but it does have a lot of life to it and um I wanted to just say thank you for hosting this I wanted to let everybody know also I'm here just listening um myself representative Stevens as well as representative tiff gloomy um and I wanted to let you know that on thursday november 4th 536 30 uh you can if you if you like uh raise your concerns your comments on how you would like some of the federal dollars uh that are available through covid uh to be spent here in our county as well as in vermont um and you would be speaking to both the leader of the house uh our speaker jill croinski as well as the leader of the senate the pro tem uh back of balance and just one other fyi is that on november 15th from 6 p.m to 7 15 p.m the burlington house democratic representatives there are about six of us i believe uh we're going to be hosting a zoom event you hear from you it's sometimes confusing you know what is city uh what is the city jurisdiction as compared to what is that house like state rep or state senator jurisdiction but um if you're interested in attending please reach out i'll share my contact details and thanks for hosting this and i'm here to listen and as always please reach out to either myself and thank you thank you Gabrielle and that was really cool the way you popped up on our screen i'm really enamored with this yeah it was kind of like you're in the room um but also futuristic so thank you again and um you know we can include some some information from that as well and there was one other public comment in the room so i'll pass it to you who i i don't know your name so my name is terry rivers and i live on lucas terrace and i don't have a lot to say other than a concern to be expressed about the budget that's being uh suggested for the new burlington high school um i was seeing a price tag of 250 million dollars which i guess in the some financial circles would be called a quarter of a billion dollars um and when i compare that to the suggested budget for the replacement of the south burlington high school which was about 70 or 80 million i don't understand why we would be spending that much money for a new high school and the other concern i have about the burlington school system is that year after year there have been very sizable increases in its budget and uh i you know i i care about the education of our children i think i have no question that i'm in favor of education for our kids um but i also know that uh government has to be a prudent steward of public money and so i i'm expressing great concern actually about that so thank you for letting me share yeah for sharing um are there any other uh comments for for public forum tonight can i respond to her uh and we don't even have to buy the land the city already owns the land they're saying they want to put it on the high school land so all right we're seeing no other comments oh yeah yeah yeah there is one additional comment in the room so thank you please let us know who you are and uh comment away sure uh my name is christopher castello long time ward five resident uh very new uh homeowner in ward five so proud to be attending my first ward five mpa meeting as a homeowner um i was coming to these meetings a handful of years ago but haven't been in attendance recently so i'm trying to make it a habit of being back more actively so thanks for keeping it up and keeping it going for the people that are on the committee appreciate that um kind of as a segue to the um high school conversation i've i sent an email to uh jones shannon and to chip mason and also to mike fisher just kind of expressing an idea that i've been thinking of for a while um and i know that the gateway block is now kind of i think probably off the table for the high school um but as soon as i saw that idea pop up um my my my thought was to kind of get the word out of something that i've been thinking about which is um as we all know the housing um crisis in the city is very real the vacancy rate is extremely low um and when the city owns property like the gateway block um it's incredibly valuable to the community and so i wanted to kind of put it out there to my fellow residents and so maybe some of our reps to start exploring the option of trying to sell that property to the champlain housing trust to um build permanently affordable housing in broenton um to me it's the number one priority for the city um memorial auditorium i know a lot of people are very fond of that space it's historic um however i do think that that parcel of land if put to use in developing as many permanently affordable housing units as possible would do much more service to city of broenton especially considering what um in the past week we've been seeing with with what's what the mayor's proposing to do down at sears lane the first thing we need to do is take care of people's needs here in broenton so i would encourage all of you to consider maybe um adopting that um that thought process and in using that parcel for um creating um permanently affordable housing in broenton and um you know maybe maybe you know joining with me in a grassroots effort to at least explore that option i know that there's a lot of challenges there there's a lot of things that need to be done but um as far as i know the champlain housing trust is open to every possible scenario to increase affordable housing in chinden county and building it so they have a lot of capital they have a lot of leeway um in accessing funds and financing projects like that so just something to consider and um you know maybe we can get some other folks interested in that uh in that idea question yes is the gateway block what most of us call the whole the gateway i don't know what the gateway block is so it's it's where it's where memorial auditorium is and where the city parking lot is and where the library is and where the fire station is so that whole block excluding the church and two properties which could be a challenge there those properties are owned by a gentleman i think his name is jeff nick he's the chair of the church church street marketplace he works for a real estate company i think he owns those two properties he's a community member i'm sure he would entertain selling those properties to the city to to make such an uh incredible impact um but yeah that that's the gateway block there on main street in monoski great well thank you chris yeah and uh thank you all for for joining us for public forum um seeing no other comments we will get into our our uh uh scheduled agenda and we will start with max madalinsky of the parks and rec department of berlington he's going to be sharing an update on um some happenings in the champlain three park so i will pass it over to max awesome thanks nate and thanks everyone for having me here tonight and i'm very great to be here i'm just going to pull up a presentation chair screen here excuse me one second all right can everybody see this all right yes yeah all right so i'm here today as nate said to talk to you about champlain street park i'm just going to jump right into it um so just as a quick reminder since usually whenever i tell people i'm going to talk to them about champlain street park i'm going to do a quick overview of where this is in case you don't know uh champlain street park is one of our city's pocket parks it's a small like probably about a quarter acre city lot that's uh just here on south champlain street right where this green dot is at my cursor is sort of hovering over here up on the north you've got king street on the south you've got maple and it's tucked in there there's a residential building it's about four stories tall here and then there's some vacant lots to the south of it it's on the bottom you're kind of seeing your google street view here in the front of the park there's a few raised with garden beds here some other planting areas that are in rubber shape now a lot of the folks we had who were taking care of this worked in all these buildings that are vacant now and thanks to the pandemic um and then some older wooden benches and landscaping and little playground in here we know the playground for our maintenance staff is coming to the end of its 30-year lifespan and we know that this park just generally needs some uh thrushening hub and some good old fashioned tlc so about a little over a year ago in the fall and winter of 2020 we started doing some outreach about champlain street park trying to get the ball rolling to get some improvements going forward we held an event in basically the king street youth center we'll get some attendees there we held another event unfortunately it turned out to be a very cold day in february but we had hot chocolate we got like a good like 20 people out to the farm to play with some snow sculptures and sit around the bonfire that kind of thing um and then the pandemic it's sort of shortly after that this whole project got put on hold we did also during that time an online survey but now that our sort of staff capacity is kind of open back up we still have those budget funds allocated for improvements here we are jumping back into outreach and trying to get an outreach portion of this project wrapped up in the fall so really what i'm here today to talk to you about is here from you about ideas you might have at the park any contacts you might have from that neighborhood or people you might know if i want to help think about the design think about what goes into it talk about taking care of it all those kinds of things and the ideas for other places we could be doing outreach and then also i want to point you towards our online survey the likes here and i'll make sure this gets shared in the meeting minutes on these presentation slides and please if you could help us spread the word this is going on so thank you that's my short presentation and i'd like to just open things up now for questions and then i'm going to stop sharing screen all right i see a one-hand raise and again as a reminder to folks in zumbland if you would like to ask a question he's the raised hand function but i saw one in in real life so andy hi max um i i'm wondering whether there's are there still plans for a big building to be built next to the park because there for a while there was a a proposal that was floated at least on front porch forum for some pretty large construction that was going on right next to the park is that still happening i haven't heard a definitive update on that and i honestly don't know what the limits are on this zoning permit if you haven't taken action on that um we have been in touch with the owner of landowner i should say and this comes to the south and the last time i suppose to her which was several months ago she said things were still on track and she was getting ready to break ground but then nothing materialized from that we don't totally know and i've been trying to get her back on the mark to find out like how soon are you thinking about doing this are you still thinking about doing this that kind of thing it's definitely something we consider a lot because three-story building goes up on the south side of that park and gardening is going to be a part of the program in there that really changes things quite a bit so yeah we're keeping an ear out on it trying to feel out what that might be and how it might affect what we can do there all right so one hand in the audience um yes hi folks my name is rob favalli and i live at 62 maple which is the home the single family home that backs up to the the parking lot that is on the corner of of south shane plain in maple so my wife and i have lived in this home for over 20 years we purchased it back in 99 and um just a few facts just to bring some things up to date it's it's not an abandoned lot or empty lot it's a parking lot that's owned by stone store holdings they that's chrux cullins and all the properties up there those folks park there we've had conversations with stone store there have no even though they're asked apparently every day to sell the lot they really have no intentions of selling it because they don't have parking and's property which is the little property to the south of the park was determined by survey to be half as big as she originally thought it was so she lost about 50 percent of her build area so i don't know what she's going to do i know that individuals on maple strew had approached her and asked asked her to donate it to the city to expand the park um that's beyond my conversation at that point but that's still i think worth shall we say pressing towards that um because the park needs to be preserved the park needs to be green um the one thing i need to point out however is right now today that's a very dangerous park that's a very dangerous parking lot particularly on weekends for the 20 years that we've lived there i've observed some of the most peculiar and bizarre behaviors that occur in that and the l shape of the parking lot and the backside of the park which is not lit so whatever participant whatever work gets done back there i would encourage and current the fence is broken the back the western side of the fence is broke so it's safety concern that i've expressed to the to the city um we've had a homeless encampment back there we've had drugs drugs exchange back there which i've seen we've had people vomiting back there we've had people dumping their trash back there we've had just a whole host of behaviors that occur back there on weekends because on weekends nobody's there it's a basically a free lot they used to lock it down but they don't anymore they used to tow they don't anymore so it's become a free a free law so i realized this is not the park but that the parking lot but it does have a collateral effect of whatever you plan on the park to recognize that there will be for as for as long as that remains an unsecured parking lot there will always be concerns that we have as neighbors that that is going to be somewhat of a threat to anybody who goes to that park particularly this time of the year in winter when it gets dark early um we have we have since they found a homeless person living on the backside there and they've a warf lane now we're up to 21 syringes that were found last month on the in the parking lot of warf lane we've we've expressed our concern to the folks who park at the parking lot that if ever they're under concern please come to come to our house because with whatever the city is doing to destroy the the the police staff here there's no protection for these people and they are concerned so this whole thing has to be taken as a holistic conversation it's the park it's aunt's property it's the parking lot and it's the security that is not there right now and i drive by this place many many times a day many times a week for 20 years and in the deep western end of that park there are people there there was there's been tents back there there's stuff that goes on back there so it's a wonderful park my neighbor helped do the raised beds the mural is great everything about that park is wonderful so it has to be preserved in its green estate possible but there's a bigger question that is contained around that and i've had Joan over my house Joan and i've sat on the front porch and we've talked through these things so when i saw that this was on the agenda for tonight i felt it just important that you hear from a neighbor i live right there and i can tell you stories that are very very unfortunate but it's a concern that i have when i see that you're going to change the park that they'd be made not only better which i trust you will do but it would be made safer i don't know how we do that folks i just don't know but we have to think that through because that's a key part of this thank you thank you for sharing and and thanks again for for coming tonight um max would do you have anything you'd like to share or if not i have another question as well um just a personal question as a neighbor but um if you if you'd like to say anything hear shots um i do want to have a ton more to share i would say thank you so much for those uh i thought that thorough thorough feedback i think it's really helpful and i would say that unfortunately that it's sorry i'm being zoom bombed by a seven-year-old yeah unfortunately that i've talked to a number of other neighbors at the park too and that similar stories of just very um i'm trying to think of the best way for example and not great behaviors going on in that park at nighttime and safety concerns and uh requests for lighting and opening up site lines are kind of the big issues that seem to be coming up around uh what can we do uh on a more immediate basis in there um but yeah go ahead and what's your question sure yeah i mean not so much a question as much as um yeah i live on pine street as well um i and i work on south shamblin yeah that's south shamblin there um so pass by it a lot and uh also i'm on the parks and rec commission so if you'd like any assistance please let me know um i'd be happy to help out with some of the outreach but kind of some of my immediate immediate thoughts are yeah i definitely agree with some of the the shading of the way just the layout of the park you know there it does feel like light doesn't get into certain areas in it um and i think that opening that up you know it sounds like that's already a consideration um but would definitely go a lot towards just opening up and kind of creating a new space there also something like that that doesn't really exist over in that side of town is um just like a publicly accessible flat hard space um you know there's it's mostly either a parking lot or a sidewalk um there's not really anywhere for someone say to put a grill and use it for an afternoon or something along those lines so um i don't know if that's something that you know fits within the confines of the park but just something that comes to mind so that is my thoughts are there any other thoughts for max before uh before we move on to our next item yeah i see a question yeah i was just wondering if uh there was some way to lock the place the park up at night it sounds like if it were closed at night it would it's it would not be having all these drug deals but i don't i can't i've been by that little park and it is small but uh right that's that to max that's a good question i would have to look into that um there are very few things in our city that we are legally allowed to completely lock off and in terms of our park spaces i shouldn't say not in our city but uh that would be a little bit of a question for me to talk to our attorneys about and at this point it would mean working into the design some additional fencing on one side or something like that i know there's precedent for those kinds of things in some bigger cities like in la and um i don't think they're in new york but uh i've heard of places where they do have sort of timed gates and things like that where you know somebody can come in and you know it's sort of freely up until about 10 p.m and then there's a timer that triggers a gate to basically only let people out i mean you still get people who are don't have the best intentions who hop the fence push the gate open from the inside you know because you can't trap somebody inside the space right and then they're letting people into the park but that's certainly something we could look into um and research a little bit all right well thank you max and uh we will include your contact info in our minutes so folks want to reach out to you for you know helping doctor neighbors they'll know where to find you and uh yeah thanks again for for joining us tonight yeah awesome thank you so much cohen i did forget my co-worker is helping me out here so i'm gonna make sure i mentioned that for those of you who are there in person there are a few activity posters taped in the wall feel free to just write any thoughts or anything that comes up on those and take a look at them and thank you so much thank you max and we are going to move on to our next agenda item which is a update on uh our redistricting process both at the state and the city level and we're going to start with uh senator keisha ramhinsdale so thank you senator for joining us tonight and the floor is yours well thanks for having me um i wonder if greg is in the room there yes so i mean i he was gracious enough to send me a preview of his powerpoint and i think it's a great framing opportunity and has great visuals for the broader conversation greg and i haven't had a chance to talk about this i probably should have emailed but if he and i could just tag team i think that would give people something to kind of refer to and the ability to go back and forth i think you know understandably that presentation focuses a lot on the context for the city wards as opposed to the legislative districts in burlington and the chitin county seats um but i think we could probably kind of leave back and forth if he's up for it i don't know what he's thinking that sounds fine with me great all right so i can i'll screen share the uh the presentation y'all can advance it or unless you would like to share doesn't it doesn't actually particularly matter to me i'll share it right okay yeah i got it all right great okay and you know from what i can see i know jone has been through redistricting i know bill kehoe has been through redistricting um you know it's a process where you can look at the words on paper and think okay what what could you know what could be so hard about that and it's one of the most emotional processes we go through every 10 years which is why i thought it mattered you know conversation with various um npa's and and folks around the county um it's one of the reasons that i asked to be on the senate government operations committee as a new senator they have not had a chitin county senator in a while and that that committee in the house of the senate is the one that ultimately holds the responsibility to pass the final um the final district borders and i would say at the same time in the house if very much disliked by that committee in the senate it you know every senator kind of gets to put their their hands on this and then make the final decisions but chitin county as folks may know is going to be broken up um per legislative action that was taken before i got their last biennium that i support and many other support that makes it a little less daunting to consider running in chitin county we have six at-large seats which is actually quite a large at-large district for a rural state um representing as folks may know about a fifth of the overall primary vote or general election vote and about a quarter of the democratic primary vote so it's it's a really large population to represent um you know some people feel fortunate to have six senators to represent them um but for others it's a barrier to feeling like they can access their senator it can be challenging for us though that's not a great concern to me i i find the job wonderful and privileged and manageable but i think it's also a challenge to run in that large of a district and we don't get as many diverse candidates so that's what i would say for you know why i wanted to be here to talk to you all about the senate seats the house seats you know are also often um in contention ten years ago burlington was due to have another seat per the important constitutional right to one person one vote and that was still a battle i mean it had to involve the attorney general so i don't think we're in the same vote this year um with uh burlington specifically getting another house seat but you know still a lot of considerations about how the house districts align with the city uh map for city council so with that i'd allow Greg to start walking through the presentation i'll just chime in as needed thank you uh representative hindsdale um could you go go to the next slide you can see that uh some of the informant my name is greg shuffler by the way and uh live here in the south end uh and i was not supposed to be on this committee okay there was a much better person that was supposed to be on this committee mr south end to bill keo but um when the resolution adopted by the city council was put forth in its language it prevented uh any city councilor uh present or former city councilor and present or former school board member because this redistricting uh is a complicated and very political process when we talk about uh exercising our democratic rights it really begins with how we vote and where we vote and um as nate mentioned early on the goal of the npa is to be non partisan and the goal of this ad hoc committee which bill had to step down from because of his past involvement uh in uh in those other political organizations left me as the alternate and speaking of alternates one of the things that we may want to do with uh near the end that the npa can consider is selecting another uh alternate just in case i slip and fall or or anything like that that would happen uh we still want some representation uh for ward five so that's something that uh we might uh sort of consider in the future you can see the committee charge here in terms of the ad hoc committee is simply to elicit some public uh to have some uh public meetings and get some information from the public on what sort of changes uh they think would make sense to increase democratic involvement slide uh and one of the first steps is to have this ad hoc committee on redistricting and that's my involvement uh and uh the under part two the committee is supposed to uh set up a report uh and uh to share that with the council the dates on this uh slide presentation are inaccurate because i can tell you right now one of the first things that took place during the orientation meeting is we realize we could not set we could not meet the the charge of the city council to have this completed by town meeting day that was their initial goal was to have public meetings to draft a report to have the city council vote on the report to warn all that for town meeting and to have the voters vote on it it just was not possible and the most important step in that process is to elicit the information from the public and we didn't want to short change that uh in order to have an um sort of an expedient political process slide if i could just add you know that that um board that helps make recommendations does have significant power in it there was a little bit of a tussle i don't think it was overly emotional but um there was a tussle between mayor ball kiss and actually myself and uh at the time my colleague represented in chris pierce and we're both now in the senate um you know over the lines that bordered wanouski um there we call it the river sliver but there's the sliver of burlington that it is in the wanouski voting district and um you know we had thought there was a solution that left that brought that neighborhood back in and left more of burlington intact while giving a couple housing complexes um one that's mixed income and one that was uh low income housing um because they're sort of discrete units unto themselves over to the wanouski district um right or wrong you know mayor kiss felt that was discriminatory to those particular housing complexes it just makes the area around the river very confusing about where they're represented um i hope we can remedy that this time i think the population numbers have changed and i would just argue some folks may not realize but we have little parts of burlington are the edges that you know are very confusingly not in burlington thank you senator and one of the things that did change from the last redistricting which again uh it was 10 years ago after uh every 10 years the constitution requires a re examination of population in order to move towards this gold standard of one person one vote and one of the things that the committee and the voters approved 10 years ago was to increase the wards from seven to eight that sounds like a relatively easy thing but it does have ramifications for city council because uh there are eight people and you can have tie votes and so that's one of the consequences of what took place and again people are going to have different views on the number of wards and even the representatives therein but that's our job is to sort of get public input and let the decision the decision makers um you do the best job with that information um that slide sort of speaks for itself so maybe we can go to the next slide all this information is going to be shared later on and and it will i believe nate is going to put it on uh the minutes and such and so i just don't want to get bogged down in the weeds here when uh when we uh have limited amount of time you can see some of the things that i just spoke about in terms of the 2010 evaluation criteria i'll draw your attention to the very last bullet and this is a very important one that is going to have impacts this time because according to past practice and the way that courts examine some of this information you don't want to have an overall deviation of more than 10% in your voting districts or as we call them wards and the reason for that is that it moves away from that gold standard of one person one vote if if one ward has 10% more people then their vote is diminished by that mathematical equation and so you can you're never going to have a perfect a perfect number but courts do sort of look at that as a red flag if your deviation is higher than 10% and i will sort of mention that we are higher than 10% in a couple of the wards and we'll give you that information in a moment and so slide please and so these are some of the questions that our ad hoc committee would like some input on and you can see again not down near the bottom maybe in the whole idea that even versus odd city counselors there's a question about incumbency i again don't want to get bogged down in too much of this information but just pointing out that there are some real issues here that impact democracy and that and that we can enlighten people about that in some of the future public meetings okay slide please that the timeline here i'll just sort of say you can see those dates that was the end goal for under number five the voter approval by town meeting day we passed a a motion at our orientation meeting to ask city council for an extension and i believe that they're entertaining that over the next couple of days and so we hope those dates are going to be changed otherwise i don't know what we're going to do the the end goal at this point is to have that process finalized and have the voters of berlington vote on redistricting in november of 2022 so it's not it's going to be a year from now before this process takes place but again it's important process it's going to last for 10 years and so it's a journey it's not a race you can see that the governor and legislators as a senator has noted do need to approve the voters decision and that is the last step here's just a some more visual slides that show again this is based upon the recent census and it focuses on the change in population over the last few years and you can see this we're starting to get into some important slides here in terms of the difference with wards and you can see that ward the first ward increased by a sizable amount many were about the same including ward five and you can see that there is one that has decreased in population ward seven and therein lies the rub the difference between the increase in ward one and the decrease in ward seven has caused the deviation of more than 10 percent and you can see that again with the dotted lines here in terms of the where we would project to be in terms of the center dotted line you want as many of those wards sort of rubbing elbows with that line as possible and we have one that is greater than that dotted line and we have one that's substantially less ward seven you can see the difference there I will I like to wait at least one more slide and and although we can't totally see this because of the zoom individuals you can see you can just barely see number seven down there and it's touching the 10 percent difference and so really we almost have a difference of 20 percent because one is 10 percent above and one is 10 percent below and again these are just some of the considerations I think that is that the last slide okay good so I'll take some questions now and then maybe in the meantime Nate if we could just bring the next steps one up and then we'll be good to go okay questions that's a that's a good question and by students we're assuming that you're talking about students mostly college students yeah that's that's a big issue according to supreme court decision in 2016 that students need to be counted for purposes of your census even though they may not vote in that area the rationale by the court was that anyone who lives in a location participates has the opportunity to participate in democracy in a number of ways that might just be attending meetings that might be sort of being impacted by decisions that that run anything from parks to to housing and so they're impacted by that democratic process so they count in terms of the actual census numbers regardless of where they may actually vote one of the if I could just add you know I represented board one for a long time in the house that actually since I was a student um and you know I would just add it's uh as folks hopefully or may know you know it's a point in time census count on April 1st so you know it's complicated for students because they often get mixed messages about where to say they physically are present on April 1st and many want to be as honest as possible about where they actually are located and what their household size and you know etc is and for other purposes around programming social services age you know understanding the age demographics and sort of trends in Burlington it is helpful when they fill out the census for their location here in Burlington um but again you know they you know as Greg said they that does not require that they vote here but you probably see from the ward one number going up 10 percent you know that's essentially a lot of the building that has happened on the main campus and the Trinity campus would be my guess there's just been a lot of new housing development um close to or on campus um and that is separate from you know the ward eight district so you know that's the ward one tends to climb a lot between ward one and eight um you probably have the densest population in the state even if some of the lowest voter turnout depending on the election so you know that's essentially how students figured in and it's important I think it was noted somewhere you know to not kind of pack too much or dilute too much the student voice and really treat them as full human beings thank you senator yeah and I see a question from Spencer so Spencer yeah you were concerned about having a tie vote if we had eight counselors but doesn't the mayor vote also yeah I brought that as a concern that has been mentioned by other people and other committee members so it's not a personal concern of mine yeah but um but a concern that the committee um feels that other people may have reminder to anybody in zoomland if you would like to ask a question please use the raise hand function um does anybody else in the the room here have any questions so I could just add context for the state redistricting process that happens at the same time number one you know I prefer to stay in close touch with um you know local leaders because I think one of the principles that shouldn't be overlooked is limiting confusion to the extent possible between the city wards and the state districts it comes up you know often that it creates a lot of confusion for people who don't pay as much attention as we do um you know that when the boundaries are significantly different so you know I think it's worth staying in touch about the cohesion of both city and state boundaries the state commission that does redistricting tends to every time draw single seat house districts um the legislature has tended to do a mix of single and double seat districts because in addition to our charge to maintain one person one vote our other significant charge is to maintain the kind of character of neighborhoods and towns um so you know instead of having two separate districts in manuski you know having a two seat district that covers all of the new scandals that sort of cut up little pieces around the edges has always been preferable to the legislature similarly the senate has always been uh you know always lived by county so you know every county elects a certain number of senators based on population um you know there is some ways in which that like the national boundaries you know creates a little bit of an over representation for our rural areas but um it is in in my view and grew up increasingly in the view of other senators very likely that chippin county deserves a seventh senate seat um Rutland county has lost population winter county has lost population the northeast kingdom has lost population franklin and chippin county have gained population um this time it hasn't been as concentrated in the greater burlington area it's been a lot in willis did south burlington etc um but probably still merits a seventh senate seat for chippin county so that is um i think people are really interested in the senate boundaries at some point i'm happy to take feedback but i think again some people say why not six individual senate seats in the county then you're kind of becoming a house district instead of a senate district the idea is that in the senate you know you really should be aggregating um feedback from several towns and you know you have a very different charge with 30 people to take a broader view of the issues i would just say that someone who's been in the house of the senate i'm sure bill po is somewhere rolling his eyes but um you know i think it makes sense to have some character understanding around the different parts of chippin county and then keep those areas a bit intact and have either a two seat district or a three seat district for different parts of the county yeah thank you senator greg um and uh yeah this is going to be a tricky process but it really is a process that should be as transparent as possible and a process that should be as nonpartisan as possible i just saw um in my news feed today uh something that mentioned that uh new hampshire is just beginning this process and you can sort of imagine in new hampshire it might uh be a little divisive uh and uh and i think the senator hinsdale uh indicated that you know that this process is going on everywhere sometimes it's been known as uh gerrymandering uh and some states have had a rather notorious process with that i think there was a situation down in north carolina where someone sponsored a marathon that followed the boundaries of one uh voting district and people got lost it just didn't make sense the way it was just divided up you do want to balance the need for one person one vote with other important aspects for your neighborhood and um that's again part of that difficult process speaking of process you can see on the screen that uh some of the next steps that are involved and one of the first things that you will see here in ward five and other wards are duplicating this process is that there's going to be a survey and the survey might be a little complicated especially for people that haven't heard that much about this will give some background information as needed in order to help complete the survey but anything that you can do to encourage people remind people hey did you see that survey um you know if you can complete it they can contact me if they have questions but that's one of the first steps towards getting public input is for people to complete that survey there will be three upcoming community meetings and you can see the dates there that the locations and times are to be announced but there will be at least one probably right here in this room and there'll be another one on the north end and there'll be one in the central section of burlington you can go to any or all of those meetings uh and uh under number four there there's a final thought that maybe ward five should pick an alternative uh an alternate for this committee uh and then there's also some information down on the bottom just uh for the likely timeline as i mentioned that this is uh we're going to get public input and then the ad hoc committee doesn't make decisions we just get information give that information we we will do a report based upon that public input give that to the city council but but they make those they they're the group that makes the final decision that then the voters have a check and balance on that decision and the governor and the legislators also vote in that process that vote by the people again under number three there you can see will take place in november of 2022 so sorry for the rushed approach in that just trying to stay within the timeline but if anyone has any additional questions then the senator and i will try to answer them yeah we we have two questions actually um and again if you have if anybody else has any questions please either raise your hand on the zoom screen or uh you know just indicate to me in the room but the first one is from charlie our great rep from cctv so we are going to start with his comment so hello my name is charlie g charlie ginoni i live in ward three i wanted to be make make sure we were clear about a couple of the things uh we're talking about redistricting tonight so there's two levels of redistricting so most of the time tonight when keisha's been talking she's talking about um legislative redistricting in the state of her mot for the legislature so mostly that's what she's talking about and then mixed in we've had greg talking about redistricting the wards in burlington so those are two different things and they got a little they got a little mixed tonight so i just wanted to be clear about that um the second thing i wanted to mention is that um on one of the earlier slides it mentioned the fact that uh redistricting is to be undertaken as soon as possible after their census is taken so their census data is usually available in the month of march so um and it is true that the state does do redistricting very quickly historically the state of Vermont redistricts for the legislature in the first year or very soon after the census data is available however in burlington that is not the case from what i'm told the city of burlington has never redistricted in the same year that the census data is available that the city of burlington has always waited for the second year um waiting for the legislature to do their redistricting first and for one of the reasons they do that is because think about if you were living in one of the sections of burlington that kisha was talking about earlier you could actually get redistricted twice in the at the same moment at the same time and so normally and from what i'm told the city of burlington has never redistricted its wards in the same year that read that the census data has been available so normally the city the city council has never approved of a redistricting formula for the wards in the same year as the census data is available so if you do the math the city of burlington has never redistricted in less than 21 months the city council has always always taken at least 21 months to determine to put something on the march ballot so if you do the math the march the census data is available in march the city council doesn't do anything with it the first year but in by the following december the city council oftentimes could decide to put something on the following march ballot the reason i'm saying this is because this year for whatever reason the city council has decided to push this through in the first year despite the fact the census data was six months late so if you do the math the city council is trying to push this thing through in three months when historically in the history of the city of burlington redistricting has never been approved by the city council for for a march question in less than 21 months so i just want to make people aware of that this is a very rushed process this year unlike any other time in the history of burlington so those are the two things i wanted to mention the first thing is that there's two district districtings redistricting is happening here one is for the legislature for the most part and one is for cities like burlington which has multiple voting districts within its boundaries and the second one is i think it's a rushed process thank you is ready no it's just a majority the city council has to decide to get it on this approaching march ballot which they still insist they want to do in order for them to do that they have to vote on the city council before christmas to put that question some formula that they come up with some very confusing formula they have to decide before christmas to put that on this coming march is ballot which means they're trying to squeeze this whole thing into three months september to october october to november november to december they're trying to squeeze because that's when the census data was available in september so that's when the clock starts because obviously the public hasn't been educated on any of this over the summer right so no one's been educated so the process started in september with gray being appointed by an mpa so that's why i'm saying this thing is like going at like a rocket pace that has never been done in burlington before and i'm totally opposed to that happen i'm not really here to answer questions but i'll use that well charlie you're not only a whiz with the technology you're also quite aware of the whole political process and i agree with you that it that the process did seem rushed to the ad hoc committee that's why we tried to put the brakes on it and but you but you're also right in in the sense and i tried to allude to this is that that timeline i shared with you that has not been approved by the city council i mean they could come back and say no we want the original timeline and that i think is something that would really bother charlie and and would bother me because we're rushing the most important piece and that's the political input and charlie is also correct i can't go back in terms of the history books and identify every single year but we did get information on the last process which took place in 2010 and he's correct that that took that took you know almost two years it wasn't by doing it in november of 2022 we would have done it faster than most any other redistricting process because that's normally done during town meeting thank you both i am seeing two comments remaining and they actually one is from from representative sevens and the other one is from council shannon so i'll say after these two considering just looking at our time we'll end this conversation here but thankfully there's a lot more opportunities for engagement throughout this process so i'll pass it over to representative sevens first thank you i i just feel it um incumbent to be very very clear uh that if one looks at the maps currently um if the way the maps are drawn um representative blimly and myself we live about four houses away so you would end up having um you know a distinctly different experience um in terms of right now uh words five and six share to see this is this is on behalf of the house not the senate um but you have words five and six with two seats and before um there was a word six representative joey donovan and a warm five representative uh mary sullivan and it happened to be that uh this time around two people living on the same street one the two seats um but i feel like it's it's important for folks to understand um how quickly things can shift and for you know for better and for worse um if it becomes one more one uh district as currently drawn out um then it's you know either tiff or me and that's okay i just i think it's important for folks to understand the the type of uh impact and why it's so important uh to be aware of how lines are redrawn and and the value of that redrawing of those lines and and the impact so i just thought i should raise that because we are your two state reps and um yeah i'm not going to pass any more judgment but i just wanted to raise that thank you yeah thank you representative stevens that's it can get pretty confusing with the two maps that are you know really happening simultaneously um and very slightly differently um but uh we had another hand raised from from ashley goodrum uh she put her hand down and then raised it back up so i'll i'll uh you know ask her to unmute and then uh after that we'll have councillor shannon and then and then we'll move on so so ashley i i think i have asked you to unmute if you could do that um give your comment well as we are waiting for ashley i will uh i'll i'll pass it over to councillor shannon um to uh have her share her input hi there yeah we can we can hear you you know me yes so i just wanted to say that i think that um charlie was exactly right as well as greg this timeline was never workable and i had pointed that out before we voted on it but that didn't seem important to people so uh we ended up with what we have um i don't think it's going to be news to the council that this type timeline isn't workable and i hope that they will um support what you have um what you have proposed and also you know to reiterate what kasha said this is one of the most painful things that a legislative body does because we're talking about our own districts and as gabrielle just pointed out um you have choices like redistricting yourself out of a seat um and i think that we have very altruistic people serving but that's hard to do so but aside from that i would i would also say that if we really went with one member seats in burlington those districts would be ridiculously small and i don't think that they would really um benefit representation um we want to have a decent size pool of people to to choose from and i certainly think that um people living in five sisters can fairly represent people who live on bayview where joey used to come from you know there's not they're not there is not such a big difference so i i hope the legislature will stay with um mostly two person seats in burlington it seems to make sense um yeah so i just wanted to really let you know i i do fully support the longer timeline and charlie's history on redistricting was helpful thank you uh councilor shannon um it's it's great to get some perspectives from you know a lot a lot of different elected officials here so we you know appreciate your comment sure yeah indy you all are muted at the point oh i muted us all thank you senator i was saying thank you to councilor shannon it's great to have um such representation here um just just a quick question sure one one follow-up question from from a little more confused than i was when we clarified things so i just want to unclarify them or clarify them a little more does the the redistricting at the state level have impact on the redistricting at the city level or vice versa if we is our decisions in the city have an impact on how the state redistricting goes or or the other way around or is there they're absolutely separate just in terms of only related in terms of census data so i was i may have added to the confusion but the city council and the mayor do you get to weigh in on the legislative districts in burlington that generally is the piece that comes first that this year the legislature will have to uh approve legislative districts for your house seats your 10 house seats in burlington and your participation in the chicken county senate districts with the 10 house seats burlington the board of civil authority which in burlington is the city council and the mayor get to weigh in on that in other communities their board of civil authority is a separate body that may weigh in so you can have input and you can have input through your legislators on the house districts um and of course the senate breakdown that is kind of historically coming for chicken county as charlie quickening out that's often given the city council and the city the opportunity to look at it and say do we want to align the city wards in some way further with the approved house districts it could feel a little different because we have the one seat like barba rachelson for examples in a one seat district um you know you you all have uh gabrielle and tiff to gabrielle you know is absolutely right and i just would say that often the state election you know kind of redistricting commission that looks at this they do things in a kind of thought bubble way like it's a very interesting thought exercise um last time they put the speaker of the house shaft smith in the same district as three other incumbents they created a four-way race one of the one of the single seat districts they created so it gets very um you know hard to to graft on a single seat district um proposal with many seats that you know would be impacted where you have popular incumbents that people elected and you'd be kind of using a kind of database process to vote them to get them out of their seat so it's not often that we listen to the single seat piece of things when we want to keep communities intact um so i personally don't think um representative stevens has anything to worry about i think it's always an interesting thought exercise but we have not made a lot of single seat districts out of double seat districts in the last process yeah just uh real quick i would uh suggest that you look at them as separate tracks but there is a lot of commingling that is possible for example it's my understanding that the redistricting committee in 2010 took the four house districts and said why don't we make two wards within each of those districts that's it's my understanding that's how we got to eight wards all right and our last thought from from ashley ashley looks like you're unmuted so you are uh you're good to start going whenever yes i am sorry for the technical difficulty before and keeping you all waiting um i just wanted to thank everyone for the information um i appreciate hearing about this and i um i'm willing to volunteer to be the redistricting alternate if if need be but i would um be interested in knowing more about the process great well well thanks for for sharing that um i don't know if we will officially you know do a vote and ratify that today or if that's even necessarily something that we need to do but um yeah again this is a this is a pitch to our our best contact it's ward five let me tell you the right thing it is but of course i can't find it but it's ward five npa underscore btv something along those lines reach out to us we'll we'll put it in the chat and and also we'll have greg and and senator ram hinstell's contact information in the minutes and we can do that but thank you all the any any last thoughts from from greg or oh okay okay so i just got the confirmation we can't do a vote today we would have to warn it and push it off to next meeting so um we'll look into that and we can make that that happen over the next course of the month or so but any last thoughts from from greg or from senator thank you ashley for stepping up on that great might have shared it in his presentation but if not i can try to find the link and send it out you can look at the maps you can move the borders of the maps yourselves if you want to really nerd out on redistricting you know it's a process where you can see how challenging it is to you know follow census tracks and come up with the right population to maintain this fundamental building block of our democracy so as everyone has said it can be an emotional process because it is really critical to our most fundamental constitutional right to vote so thanks everyone for listening hopefully you gain something from it and we'll stay in touch all right and thank you both um we will provide some contact info in our minutes if folks would like to follow up with either of you or follow along with this process and we'll follow up with ashley as well um and looking at the time quick questions sure thing um i wonder greg uh if you're looking for an alternate on this the time is kind of short um and i'm not sure what the what the process has been in the past or if that is something that could be voted on tonight i i believe that uh it would need to be warned so other people would have an opportunity to uh to join in um so i'll defer to to nate but i do believe that it's something that can be on the next agenda and that's probably sufficient time we just don't since it's possible that this process could last a year we just want to make sure that there's an alternate uh if need be okay all right so looking at the time we're a little bit over on this uh you know i apologize to the folks that from bed who have joined us um garen springer and and emily sevens wheelock um but it was a great conversation on redistricting it's definitely a pretty confusing process so it's great to have a lot of different perspectives here to to share on that so with that um we will uh we'll move on to to darin and to to emily uh you both are ready to unmute yourselves and and join us i can pull up the presentation uh that was shared as well but uh darin and emily the floor is yours good evening everybody uh darin springer general manager with proletariat electric here and joined by my colleague uh emily sevens wheelock um nate i'm just going to share a screen to run the slides yeah that's perfect yeah that's perfect i can go ahead and do that just give me one moment here we're going to pull these up we're going to be talking with you tonight about our net zero energy revenue bond proposal which was approved unanimously by our electric commission and city council and is going to be on the ballot uh in december i think folks are familiar with us this is just a background slide about growing electric we're in municipal public power utility 100% renewable uh since 2014 and um we had gone 12 years without any kind of rate increased right up until the pandemic and as folks are likely aware we had our first spring increase in 12 years uh that took effect just this past august in terms of the revenue bond proposal a few specifics here uh it requires a majority approval by the voters of burlington um it's payable exclusively and solely from burlington electric revenues this is not payable from the city general fund this does not impact on your property taxes in any way it's not going to affect the city's debt ratio or debt policy this is specifically a burlington electric obligation if it's approved and as noted here we've used this uh financing tool for a number of important investments in the past everything from constructing the mcneill uh wood chip plant to investing in energy efficiency and purchasing the muski one hydropower plant among other purposes and just speaking about energy efficiency that's really the foundation on which we're building here uh back in 1990 that the city had uh or burlington electric had a 11.3 million dollar revenue bond for energy efficiency and since that time burlington electric and our customers have invested over 70 million in efficiency and customers are saving uh our estimate is about 10 million a year in avoided costs on bills thanks to those efficiency investments we're using as a community about 8.6 less electricity today than we were in 1989 and that doesn't even count the pandemic impacts which have further lowered sales but we're hopeful that that will actually rebound as the economy fully reopens and so what the net zero energy revenue bond is intended to do is provide similar progress towards our net zero goal which is a 2030 goal one of the biggest and most ambitious climate goals for any community in the nation and the revenue bond would do a number of things to invest in continued reliability of our system and and climate progress at the same time so specifically the 20 million dollar proposal about 12.3 million would go into the electric grid both for reliability projects average customer for growing to electric sees about one outage on average per year with a duration of typically less than an hour that's really good reliability for for us in Burlington and we want to keep it that way continue to improve it and then also we want to upgrade our system because we have a number of customers who are switching over to electric vehicles cold climate heat pumps we have electric transit buses and electric bikes and other clean energy technologies that rely on the grid so we want to invest in continued capacity to serve those types of technologies we would have about 3.9 million going into our technology systems we have some aging systems apparel and electric currently we would replace those with newer systems that would also offer us the opportunity to create beneficial rates for our customers we already have an overnight charging rate for our electric vehicle customers that could be as cheap as 60 cents a gallon equivalent we want to create additional options for customers to help manage their energy use and be able to take advantage of cheaper energy and so these systems will help us do that in terms of our renewable plants about 2.2 million would go into the renewable generation facilities and also we would invest in converting our gas turbine which is currently capable of running on oil over to run on renewable biodiesel instead and then lastly about 1.5 million different net zero capital investments new charging stations new demand response technologies a new electric bucket truck to replace a fossil fuel bucket truck in our for our line crew those types of investments would be made there this just summarizes some of what I just said so I won't linger on this slide but another key piece of our proposal here is using annual on funding as a part of this effort we can double the incentive funds that we offer our customers during the next three fiscal years we launched a green stimulus during the pandemic we increased our incentives our customers have really tried to move with us on this technology we've seen for example 10x increase in tea pump installations during the past year compared to a year prior we've seen about a doubling of our electric vehicle and plug-in hybrid incentives over the last year and overall we have 1400 Burlington electric customers that have taken advantage of these rebates everything from electric lawn equipment to induction cooking to e-bikes and key pumps and EVs and and more so we want to double the funding to help our customers continue to make progress on reducing fossil fuel use in the community what this would achieve is an additional emissions reduction above me on business as usual 47,000 tons of lifetime which is roughly what went to a hundred thousand barrels of oil that would not be burned or consumed so that's a key portion of the revenue bond proposal as well and this chart speaks to what I was just getting at which is the dotted line there on the bottom the lighter green dotted line is the state renewable energy standard requirement for utilities to help customers switch off the fossil fuels and over to EVs and heat pumps and other technologies as you can see when we launched the green stimulus effort in the middle of the year last year we really saw technology really take off in Burlington that darker blue line is our actual achievements since that time we basically tripled the state requirement last year we're on track to beat it again this year and by doubling the funding through this proposal we'll be able to help our customers with accelerating climate progress as we work towards that very important community goal of that zero under G uh 2030 I'm going to hand it over to my colleague Emily to talk through some of the financial pieces of the revenue fund and then we'll be glad to answer questions thanks Darren and good evening everybody um so I like to think of um the revenue bond really as one piece of a long-term five-year capital and financial plan that we at the ED have developed to to make to you know to accomplish all of the investments that Darren just mentioned in our grid um in our renewable generation and our technology as well as advance our net zero goal by increasing the incentives we offer to customers to take advantage of strategic electrification incentives that help them switch off the fossil fuels and so when we looked at all of those needs and goals that we had we then looked at okay how are we going to pay for that how are we going to fund this and the revenue bond is part of the strategy that we put together what this slide shows is what if we wanted to do all that and try to do all that without the revenue bond what would be the impact on our rate payers and you can see there's a really dramatic difference um with the revenue bond we're projecting and this is again just a projection for next year um a rate pressure on the order of 4.9 percent without the revenue bond you know if we were to still try to do all of those things we would be facing rate pressure at a really unthinkable level of 23.7 percent which of course we would never um you know contemplate for a moment but it does illustrate how important the revenue bond is as a source of capital to fund all of the projects and initiatives that we want to be able to deliver to growing to customers give that slide please darn thanks um so in terms of how we are going to pay for the revenue bond a couple of things of note there's really two main strategies here the first is when we take a look at all of our past revenue bonds that we've issued and the debt service schedules you know how much principal and interest are we going to owe over the next 10 years we have some maturities coming of previous revenue bonds that's going to free up around 684 thousand dollars beginning in fiscal year 26 so we'll have some additional room there for more debt service and then um to continue Darren please we will structure we've structured or we'll seek to structure the debt service schedule on the new revenue bond if approved so that we would defer principal payments to align and take advantage of those previous uh revenue bond maturities so that we would align the new principal debt service coming online with the retirement of the prior bonds that are maturing next slide please Darren and then the second piece of how we would pay the debt service um relates to those strategic electrification initiatives that Darren mentioned that we're we'd like to double the customer incentives for so when people switch from fossil fuel heat to heat pumps or from a conventional gasoline car to the electric vehicle or electric bike or a e-longmore that brings more revenue into Burlington Electric which therefore gives us more capacity to pay expenses like debt service and reduces rate pressure for customers um and we believe that um the net revenues from these strategic electrification projects will support about 40 percent of the combined debt service not only on the new revenue bond but on the general application bonds that we would um repurpose basically for strategic electrification so that's sort of a summary of the financial plan in terms of how it reduces rate pressure for customers over the long term while also allowing BED to make critical progress not only on our safety and reliability goals but also on our net zero goal for Burlington. Thanks Emily um just wanted to mention as well some good news that we recently had Moody's affirmed our A3 credit rating which is a good development as we're going to look at issuing potentially new revenue bonds and with all that I've stopped sharing so we come back to the screen here and answer any questions that you may have. Yeah again anybody who is joining us from Zoom please use the raise hand function um if you are joining us here also use the raise hand function of your body um ha ha ha um are there any questions for uh yeah I'm seeing one in the room so this is about I'm not sure I followed you exactly Emily but this is a question about your um what you're basing your um your plan that there will be a 40 percent increase in revenue from utilization I guess of electrical power through EV or EV vehicles and other ways that people would be using electricity what are you basing that on what history are you basing on that projected increase? So I think um it's not a 40 percent increase in revenue it would be that the increased marginal revenue would cover approximately 40 percent of the debt service so and then what in terms of what we're basing that on we're basing that on projections um for uptake of the strategic electrification programs considering the additional incentive money and the increased demand that we predict that that will um cause and we as Darren pointed out have are coming off of a really strong uh more than a year almost 18 months of strong strong uptake of those incentives and so we have some history here to see how increasing incentives for the with the Green Stimulus program really had a cause and effect relationship and the uptake of customer incentives and we also have we have um you know metrics about sort of how much you know an EV right is sort of per EV or per heat pump or per measure right is projected to contribute to increased electric sales. Thank you. Are there are there any other questions for yeah I have one from Andy so um when you talk about maintaining renewable generation as part of the the money that you're raising for the bond what what exactly are you maintaining what is the renewable generation that you're maintaining? Sure I can answer that um so we have a number of renewable energy plants that we own and operate in addition to contracts that we have for energy from renewable plants and so specifically here we'd be looking at potential maintenance costs related to our reduced E1 hydro facility and also our McNeil Woodship plant. All right thank you. I just have one other question a follow-up um you're delaying the payment of the principle it looks like five years or thereabouts um in order because you're having other bonds mature how does that impact any future bonds that you might want to um put before the the citizens to vote on for other kind of projects? Yeah you're right that you know by deferring the principle it increases the principal payments right in the out years um but we have you know um and we look out on the revenue bond schedule we will continue to have additional prior revenue bonds mature um and roll off. Yeah we have I would just add we have when we've looked at our schedule some significant um maturities in the kind of 10 to 20 year period that would also free up additional capacity if we want to do another revenue bond that up to years down the road we could potentially have the opportunity to do that I think that the biggest point that I would want to make on the financial piece is the proposal between the maturity savings and the revenue return is you know in this this being a revenue bond that pays partly for itself um overall this will put very minimal upward rate pressure on our budget and we're looking to hold rate increases lower in the future I don't think we're going to go another 12 years again with no rate increases I think we're going to look to have more regular rate adjustments but have them be increasingly more modest as opposed to the rate adjustment that we had this past year coming out of the pandemic we want to create as much predictability for our customers and have very modest adjustments going forward. Thank you for those answers are there any other questions I'm not seeing any in the room or on zoom so I'll uh I'll give our presenters one last chance how can folks continue to engage with this find out more information you know yeah well certainly visit our website burlingtonelectric.com if you're interested to learn more about any of our programs or any of our incentives that you might want to take advantage of we have some information on the revenue bond up on the website as well and then feel free to reach out to us I think Nate you've got my email and I'm happy to coordinate any breeze that anybody might have feel free to to share it with folks at the FDA who might have questions in the future we'd be happy to answer them. Yeah and I can I can place that contact info in our minutes and we have a hand raised from representative seven so have a mute. I also just feel like I should be fully on the record that I'm also chair of the Burlington Electric Commission so if any of my neighbors have questions you know as you're walking your dog or rolling through your run I'm happy to answer them as well you know I attended once a month as a volunteer role so I'm not quite at the level of Darren and Emily but happy to answer your questions as well so here is a resource. Great and thank you representative Stevens. Thank you both for joining us tonight. It's great to hear a little bit more about this and yeah we'll put your contact info in the minutes and direct people there. Thanks so much we appreciate it. Have a great evening. Thank you. Good night. You as well and we are just about moving into our last agenda item we are joined by the director of the Department of Public Works Chapin Spencer so Chapin is joining us in person today and all right do you want to run through your slides? Why not if that works for you I only have five slides and I am very quick because I am knowledgeable of the time here so yeah feel free to share screen and I can get this camera trained on you too. Great one moment please it says host is disabled screen sharing well I can share it okay oh that that worked thank you excellent all right here we are great thank you everybody I'm Chapin Spencer director of public works really pleased to be here this evening I have a very quick topic that I want to present to you all which relates to a property on Flynn Avenue it's a three acre property at 195201 Flynn Avenue and what the community should want to do with this parcel so three acre parcel this is Flynn Avenue that folks are seeing on the screen here this is the rail line of Vermont Rail and behind the Metal Works building on Flynn Avenue is a three acre parcel owned by the Chittenden Solid Waste District purchased 20 years ago with the intention of building a modern safe community drop-off center for trash recycling and other wastes so I'm here tonight to just tell you a little bit about next steps as we're planning to go to the city council this coming Monday night we had a public meeting last week to talk about this but wanted to make sure that the NPA was familiar with our proposal and that is basically that we are proposing and let me I don't know if I remove that well I will go over the key points here which is that our organization Public Works is going to be going to council to seek a three-month extension with a memorandum of understanding with Chittenden Solid Waste District for to give us time to negotiate a lease purchase agreement with them for the city to purchase those three acres as a potential location for a drop-off center and we're recommending doing this now for three main reasons one is we have asked for CSWD's patients for 20 years as we have worked to figure out the trajectory of the Champlain Parkway as the Parkway really provides the on and off access to this facility without entering residential neighborhoods we have paid $83,000 to date towards the purchase price as an option to hold an option over the last five years the CSWD board is really wanting us to make a decision at this point so if we do not go ahead and exercise the option we will lose the $83,000 and lose a chance of a drop-off center being in this location so the second reason we're interested in advancing is that we've recently developed a south end construction coordination plan how do we build all the transportation projects that we collectively have worked on together in the next five to seven years in a way that minimizes impacts that's provided a roadmap before constructing the Parkway into two construction phases I'll show that in the next slide and as a result we have a pragmatic roadmap to figure out how to move forward and CSWD has said they will not open this facility until the Parkway is under construction and definitely going to happen third the existing Pine Street drop-off center as many of you may know is now limited only to compost which we've heard from many residents is insufficient causing people to have to drive to other communities to drop off waste Chittins Hall Waste District is concerned this is their smallest site it has no tipping wall they really struggle to operate this site in a safe manner it is because of that reason that they've really limited what they can do on that site and so what we want to offer the public is a broader drop off center so I won't go over this all in in detail but this is the south end construction coordination plan that I discussed on how to limit impacts in the south end all of the projects major transportation projects are listed on the left with fiscal years on the right and we are looking to construct the Parkway and salmon color in two construction contracts the first one being the top three lines and the second one being the bottom three lines to break it into an easier way to understand it it's always helpful to have a map and basically the first phase of the Parkway would be constructed from home avenue up to Kilburn which is being cut off right now by the by zoom and the second phase would be the red areas which would be the connection to the interstate and the king and maple neighborhood so the the Champlain Parkway first phase that would be under construction we're projecting next year would be available and accessible to the drop off center here in the next couple of years that's it I promised five slides happy to answer questions there's more information on the website there by asking the council on Monday night to give us a three month extension on the MOU it does not bind the city to opening up a drop off center at that location it preserves an opportunity if we do not exercise the opportunity and CSWD sells that property on the private market we have much less control over what happens there and when it happens there CSWD on the other hand has said if we purchase it they will work on our timeline to open up a drop off center if it is permitted through the development review board so happy to answer any questions I know it's complex thanks for your time why do you only have three months I mean I don't see that you're going to be ready for that in three months this is three months to extend the MOU we've had this MOU this option for five years they want to give us a little bit of time and we want some time in which to negotiate the lease purchase agreement the lease purchase agreement would be a 20 year agreement where we would pay a zero percent loan to purchase the property outright from the district so the city would then own that piece of land but the drop off center now on pine street is not owned by the city is that what you're saying it is owned by the city so the chit and solid waste district a little complicated I'll say it quickly yeah their policy is that they want their drop off centers owned by the host municipality that's what happens in every other drop off center in chit and county municipality contributes the land CSWD does the upgrades and there's a 20 year lease they want us to purchase the property give them a 20 year lease and then they will build the drop off center so the city is ready to purchase that in three months the city would be ready to enter a lease purchase agreement it's a 20 year payment process the city wouldn't own it outright actually until the end of 20 years but it's a very small annual payment of $25,000 a year at zero percent interest heavy on to that is the completion of the the Champlain Parkway yes and so if the parkway does not get constructed or for whatever reason the public decides that a drop off center at this location is not supported then the city would have a choice under the terms of the lease purchase agreement to decide to go ahead and purchase the property anyway or to get out of the lease purchase agreement if we get out of the lease purchase agreement CSWD's basically said your option payments are gone so you know you've asked for this five-year permission to keep us not doing anything with the property they want us to actually do something with the property good questions is there any other property in Burlington that would be entertained besides this one it seems fairly ideal but is there another property that's a backup or is this kind of our only shot sure I will say Burlington is is a mixed-use vibrant community and there is not a lot of extra parcels that are two acres or more in size that are zoned commercial that do not have immediately adjacent residential uses we definitely heard at the public meeting some residents of Flynn Avenue who wanted to make sure that you know the traffic wouldn't be congested that wouldn't spill out of the drop off center onto Flynn Avenue that you know we limited noise from the neighborhood so they're definitely interested in making sure this is done right we had about 20 people attend the public forum that said we have really struggled in Burlington the 339 pine street site is limited by institutional controls because of the pine street barge canal so there are very few or expensive things that we can do on that site and it would make a drop off center with a tip wall much more expensive because there's limitations about excavation at 339 in order to limit pollution entering lake Champlain so one more question um I'm visualizing that site because I live right in the neighborhood and it's right near the railroad crossing we're just going to be used more especially with the Amtrak um and that's a very tight situation the tracks and it's not very far to that plot I don't know how far but it's just very close and so if there are a lot of trucks going in and out and they have to be held up by the trains and I don't know it's at the co-op is there with a lot of traffic coming in and out it just seems like if there were another site it would be that was further from the center perhaps but right it's good question so through the DRB process we and Sydney Solid Waste District we need to demonstrate that circulation is safe the Champlain Parkway will be upgrading the railroad crossing get getting rid of those mid street bumps and putting in quad gates four gates for every corner to close off the crossing the entrance for the drop off center is on the far side of the parcel up next to the storage units I know where the storage units are and the drop off center is behind metal works so it's about a hundred you know it's a couple hundred feet beyond the street which creates a nice queuing driveway for customers coming to the drop off center still would need to be permitted plans would need to be presented to DRB really what we're doing right now is preserving the option to consider this in the future instead of having CSWD sell the property and then we're back to square one with trying to find two acres somewhere in the city I just want to be a cognizant of the folks in zoom I saw Fred Schmidt had raised his hand previously and it's asked him to unmute Fred are you still interested in um you make it I have asking a question all right well never mind that does are there any questions coming in from zoom if if so remember just uh use the raise hand function and I'm not seeing any so I'll pass it back to the room are there are there any other questions in the room yeah yeah I'm one from Charlie so my name again is Charlie Gianoni and Ward 3 and at the the risk of inciting the wrath of the city council or the mayor or Chapin here or the Chittin solid waste district let me ask one question or at least make a comment so that people can think about it does that part of Burlington what is the greatest need of that part of Burlington is is the greatest need to have a drop off center or is the greatest need to have a parking lot because every time on the weekend when I go down Pine Street which is basically where this is that place is a mob scene there's no parking down there for all the activity that occurs down there and every time I go down there I get caught in a traffic jam on Saturdays and Sundays being where the current site is for the right where the current site is and do I have this correct so I'm just saying would people in Ward 5 prefer to have a parking lot there for have the city buy it and put a parking lot there or were the people of Ward 5 prefer to have the city buy it and put up a recycling center a drop off center sorry to cause a problem but thanks Charlie it's never a problem I think the opportunity is if we sign the lease purchase agreement then we have time to have that conversation ultimately the city if if that we were to develop a drop off center CSWD estimates only needing two acres of the three acre parcel that would leave the city with an acre on to consider a bunch of things there's currently artists using a garage out back we could preserve that for the artist community we could do soil management for DPW we are struggling to find good places to manage soils this is off the beaten path and not visible from the street there's a whole host of things we could consider to Charlie's point potentially public parking in that closer to the street one acre portion so look forward to the conversation if the council approves this we'll have more time to have that conversation we have one other question coming in from zoom from Joe Geolan Ellis so Joe I just asked you to unmute if you could unmute yourself you can ask your question yes I can Joe thanks thanks for being here quick question for you should just move forward and CSWD moves down the street any early discussions or thoughts on what might backbill the current site good question Joe the quick answer is that a portion of the site about a fifth of the parcel of 339 pine street will be needed for the rail yard enterprise project that would be the connection from pine street to battery street to allow traffic to avoid the king maple neighborhood but still go north south so that traffic could go through an industrial area instead of a residential neighborhood the remaining 80 percent of 339 pine street could be reused in some fashion resources there the artists are there ultimately that historic building which is historic will need to be re-envisioned in some fashion so those are the options Joe nothing's been hard and fast other than a very strong and broad political consensus that a street grid connection between pine and battery would be in the best interest of the city overall makes sense thank you thanks Joe i'm not seeing any other questions on zoom any any other questions in the room no well all right well taping i'll give you the last word how can uh folks stay involved in in this process we're going to council on Monday night there's a public forum folks are welcome to uh to speak there there is a page on the public works website that talks about this project and has resources we wrote a five or six page memo if you care to the council which goes into all the 20 year history on this parcel but thank you for your time all right and thank you for for Sharon and we'll we'll make sure to put that in our minutes as well great thanks yeah all right and just like that we ended up right on time one minute early actually so uh thank you all for joining tonight uh just want a quick reminder that we will be having a special meeting let's see if i can get the share up on my screen we'll be having a special meeting on November 4th around specifically you know public safety and justice in the south end is that 5 30 did i hear uh we haven't locked in the specific time we'll be here i think it's going to be seven o'clock we're meeting here we're meeting schedule here till 6 30 okay we have to take you back on that so it'll be some time after 6 30 on November 4th um that's not replacing our our standard meeting in November that is in addition to so uh be on the lookout for those updates and uh we hope to see many of you there on the 4th all right thank you all for coming and thank you to cctv and cito and and everybody for helping make this happen as well as all the presenters have a good night so as part of the public forum a number of the tenants came to the meeting yeah yeah you know their future yes and one of the there was some yeah there was some there's some communication with your community about the wd a hundred and two acres urgently for the drop off center one acre definitely wouldn't include that structure there's still to be at least 30 minutes see when i can almost set up the camera how we are going to have far greater equity to control our destiny you see owns it then if csv sells it then maybe the artist put together an offer about that so my sense it's no you know nothing's been really fully fleshed out but i did immediately hit uh it was good for us on dcx after that public meeting and said here's what we heard at the public meeting you know you should think about if this is a priority pretty awesome the reason i mentioned it is how do we move ahead in a way we'd obviously love soil man yeah we can't do excavations and repair water okay upside walk unless we have a place to put soil