 So I think we'll get started. We had a quieter start to our meeting than usual. No music this month, but we'll line up some music for the next one. Thank you all for being here. I'm Jess Hyman on the board three NPA Steering Committee, and we're so glad that you're spending this glorious evening with us tonight. I'm sure that everyone else is going to be watching later when they're not sitting outside in the sunshine. So here tonight with many of our boards, two and three Steering Committee members. So if you could just give a wave. So Barbara and Molly and Tony and Charlie. We have a few people out today. Patrick will be joining us later, and Kevin isn't available tonight, but we'll see him next time. So let's see. So the next meeting will be June. I don't have the calendar ready here. It is the second Thursday. Yeah. June 10th will be our next meeting. So mark your calendars. We're already starting to line up, line up items for that agenda. It's sure to be a good meeting. And just a reminder that all of our meetings, recordings can be found on YouTube and on the CCTVs website. So those links are in the agenda. So if you missed part of the meeting tonight, you can watch the recording. We have a one NPA announcement, which is that we made the decisions about the community grant funding. So if you'll remember from last month, we had some fantastic applications for all sorts of projects that'll benefit the community and bring folks together. And so we had a vote at the last meeting where all planning assembly participants were able to vote on their choices for the projects. And then we took all that data together and looked at the funding available and then the steering committee made some decisions. And so we ended up fully funding or partially funding all the applicants, which was really exciting. And so the grants will go to the Old North End Neighborhood Band, the Repair Cafe, Vermont Multicultural Festival, the Walk Your Own Path mural, the Wireless Sensor Network Community Workshop, and then some funding for NPA operations and outreach and community dinner. And we anticipate that with the next round of funding that'll start with the next fiscal year in July that we'll be doing allocations earlier in the year next year. And so if you wanna learn more about these fantastic projects, if you look on the agenda, there's a link to a spreadsheet with descriptions and the folks who were funded are already working on their projects. They have until the beginning of June to make their expenses and submit their receipts and we'll be checking in with them to make sure they're all on track. And if any of the projects aren't coming along or fall through, then we'll reallocate those funds. And are there any more steering committee announcements? No? Okay. Well, then we'll open it up to public forum. And if you'd like to speak at public forum, please unmute yourself or raise your hand and we'll call on you. Tony. If there's nobody else eager to jump in, I just wanna just say a couple of words about the housing situation. As you know, our NPA some weeks, two, three months ago endorsed a request of the developers of city plays to include about 80 units of Section 8 or what's really affordable housing assistance which is 30% of income max rent for any recipient. We have about 1500, 1500 families and individuals in the city of Burlington who receive Section 8 type assistance either in public housing buildings or in rental rentals of private apartments. We right now have 1000 additional individuals and families on the Burlington Housing Authority wait list. And I kept waiting as the city gets about $12 or $14 million and the state gets, the legislature is just allocated roughly a half a billion dollars. I keep expecting to see the state or the city to have its first unit of 30% income rent help. And that just has not happened. We are hopeful that the federal people will add another one of 2000 units. We need about 16,000 statewide. One in five renters in Burlington enjoy this 30% income rent. They're happy, they have no payment worries for their rent and they have shelter security but we have an equal number, another one out of five renters who are desperate today. And the city has, is basically in the mayor and in 10 years and the state are all equally unwilling or unable to understand that there's people who need rent assistance today and the security that a Section 8 can provide. And we should be budgeting at least a few units, a handful of units even, but in the Burlington budget coming up and the state should get it stick together and start a program. We have in addition to the ordinary renters, we've got a lot of old folks who own mobile homes who have high rents. There's some areas that the federal people do not cover and a program here in the state could begin to fill some of the gaps. You've got the folks who can't get out of prison because there's no apartments that they can afford. You've got folks in mental health institutions, you've got people in the hospital who can't leave because there's not an affordable place or a rent for them available. We have to recognize that housing is the biggest problem. Yes, thank you, Tony. Yes, housing is a huge issue and we have a housing crisis here in Vermont. There are some vouchers that have been released by HUD statewide, including some to Vermont State Housing Authority as well as certain municipalities, though not specifically to Burlington. And I'll just add to that comment to make sure that folks know that the Vermont Emergency Rental Assistance Program is open through VSHA, and this will provide a back rent and current rent support, utilities, back utilities and current utilities support and more. And the website for that is erap.vsa.org. And there are some requirements, but it's a very essential COVID-related rental support. So thank you. So next up we have Alana from the city of South Burlington. Hi, good evening. I appreciate being able to speak at your meeting tonight. My name is Alana Blanchard and I work for the city of South Burlington. I'm here tonight because the city is preparing an application for a grant to build a pedestrian bicycle bridge over I-89 at exit 14. So this will be a South Burlington led project, all the funding that we're applying for will be administered by South Burlington and will be matched by South Burlington. Really, I'm here tonight because the bridge is within the bike shed for your NPA. And so I wanted to see if the NPA would be willing to write a letter of support for our grant application. It's to the federal government, but it's to Secretary Buttigieg and the grant application is for a $14 million grant. And our intention is to build an attractive bridge that actually makes people wanna walk across the interstate or bike across the interstate, which right now, even though there are facilities, they can be very intimidating. So we're putting the application together to submit in at the beginning of July, but we would like to gather letters towards the end of June in order to incorporate any great comments that communities might have into our application area. So, and I can send additional information via email and I'm also happy to answer any questions. One thing that has changed under the Biden administration, different from prior years is that they are interested in any equity impacts. So if the NPA has any comments related to equity, that would be appreciated. Thank you. Thank you very much. So how we could do this is that with the assembled NPA members now, we could do a quick vote to see whether folks are in favor of writing a letter of support. And then the steering committee could draft this letter and present it in advance of the June meeting and the membership could approve it or not then. And then we can pass it along to the city. How do folks feel about that? Tony. I saw a move that we do exactly what you described and that we could take a vote tonight and unless there's some objection, so I saw a move. Do we have a second? How second? Seconded by Charlie and Barbara at the same time. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? The ayes have it. Wonderful, we'll draft a letter and we'll probably be looking for some more information from you to frame that. But it sounds like a fantastic project and it'll definitely benefit folks in our ward, many of whom rely on foot and bicycle transportation. Thank you very much, I appreciate it. Thanks. Do we have any other public comments? Seeing none, I'll make a quick announcement. On May 21st, CVOEO is holding its annual garden day and this is free seeds and starts for gardeners who are in need of free seeds and starts. It'll be held up in the Burlington High School parking lot in a physically distanced way. It'll be set up as a drive-through. The hours, I'm not sure of the exact hours, it'll be about between 11 and two. So that's at Burlington High School parking lot on May 21st, CVOEO garden day. So I encourage you to attend and spread the word. Do we have any other public forum? Okay, we'll move on to the first item on our agenda. We have Bob Goulding from Public Works and also Lee Perry as well. So I'll turn the floor over to you. Thank you, Jess and thank you to the members of the steering committee for word two and three and everyone else for having us here. As Jess said, I am joined by my colleague Lee Perry, the division director for maintenance at Public Works. He'll be taking over for me about halfway through this presentation. We did a very gratefully make a request or received the okay to present to you about our construction season plans for the year, kind of pinpoint where we are in implementation of the sustainable infrastructure plan, which was funded by some big bond votes about five years ago. And we were gonna update you a little bit on the consolidated collection studies that the city has been looking at for about a year now. So I'm gonna share my screen and talk to you a little bit about construction and hopefully if we can get through this quick enough, we'd love to leave time for questions. Can you see the title slide of the presentation? Perfect. So we have already begun our construction season here in Burlington. We've started with some sidewalk work around the city and we're well underway with getting bids and finding the rest of the city. As I think most folks know, DPW manages quite a bit around the city. Resources are always limited, but we have been implementing a couple of different plans which I'll talk more about, which have given more resources to the department to take on more work. That first plan is the 2016 Sustainable Infrastructure Plan which was passed overwhelmingly by voters in 2016 with really three focuses our department, which was sidewalk work, paving work and really one of the first proactive efforts at water main repairs in the city rather than the kind of reactive waiting for things to break. In that time and about the five years of implementation, we've almost been able to triple sidewalk reconstruction, nearly double paving with about 20% of the city covered and we've made some significant progress on water mains. Now that being said, we know there is never enough work that's been done. There's always more that can be done. There's a chart on the right of this screen. I'm not gonna go too far into details on that. Just present some of the numbers that you've done year by year with an update on the kind of cumulative and we'll be happy to share that down the line if you'd like to post it. I did wanna give you an update on kind of this big picture on where we are with funding right now. As I've said, we've had more funding than we traditionally have had over the last five years. However, we are at the end of that 2016 bond funding. Ran out a little bit last year. We still have some funds we are relying on for this year in addition to the normal amount of work that the city can take on. To sustain that work of the last four or five years, more funding will be necessary if as a city we make that decision that that level of effort is needed to keep our. The mayor and the council are having that discussion right now, including and especially on the use of the American rescue plan funds. So if you have any dialogue you wanna open up or have already had with your city councilors, you know, that that's an opportune time to either advocate for more or say go back to them. We do have plans in place to pivot to a more robust list if that funding does become available. I'll touch on some of what that means in this presentation. This is a conversation that's going to evolve. However, additional funding does or doesn't take place. Certainly gonna be a part of the budget conversation with city and where with the mayor and the council over the next few weeks, potentially further conversations down the line. And with that said, we still look at other ways to maximize city dollars and get work done for the city, such as the Shelburne Street roundabout, which I think some of you folks may be familiar with and I'll touch on a little bit later, but that's a very heavily funded, very heavily federally and state funded project would make a significant difference at a rather unsafe location in the city. And that's something we're able to do kind of in addition to all the other work that I will talk about with these plans that we have. You know, first thing, paving, I said we've pretty much doubled the historic average. Our contract is out to bid right now. We'll be taking mostly a whole plate of pallet of mill and fill streets, which is milling off the top course of pavement, kind of putting a new course of pavement back down. Not much if any reconstruction, which is full depth, very invasive, but also kind of some of the more significant work. We've done quite a bit of that over the last four years on pine, on maple, some of the most deteriorated streets. You can see the list we have available here, two streets I think, you know, pretty much inwards, two and three, and then a couple alternates, one of which, maybe two of which actually are directly in your ward. If and when funding does become available, those streets in yellow would likely then make the list. Now this is all dependent on getting, you know, normal bids back in place. COVID clearly has disrupted some of the construction industry, we're expecting normal bids to a degree and they all come back in line and additional funding is available. We will be moving those yellow streets forward. Here I wanna share a little bit about our sidewalk reconstruction plan. We've done about 13 miles over the last four years. Normal four year stretch is four miles. Sidewalks tend to have a 40 year life cycle. So these recent trends are really the necessary trend to maintain that sustainable cycle of being able to replace sidewalks every 40 years if you're taking. So this current funding allows short run repairs, typically, you know, 20 feet to 100 or so feet of sidewalk, including parts of what you see in front of you right there. I noted in red that Ward Street is one of the bigger segments of sidewalk will be taken on this year and that'll be happening in a couple of weeks. Now these are all, again, short segments. I have a list or I have the map to the right. You're really interested in exactly what kind of segment of street if you live on that street or really curious, you more than welcome to reach out to me and I can let you know the exact parameters. But I at least wanted to let you know what streets we'd be working on this year. Again, in yellow, you can see if additional funding does become available, the couple more streets in your wards, we will be adding parts of Russell, parts of Charles and a part of Willard. Again, just to underscore, these are all parts of these streets. The funding isn't in place to do long, long segments this year as it has been in years. I mentioned that we are putting an emphasis on water mains. Traditionally, we have waited for reactive needs to fix a broken pipe. We've done nearly eight miles of our 100-mile network where we've either replaced the full main or relined the full main, which kind of adds structural integrity and decades of life to that pipe. We have more work planned this year which will represent the end of that 2016 funding on the water work. We had a pause last year due to COVID. A lot of times this work requires the need to work with a homeowner, enter their houses, 2020 was not the right time for that. We have some challenged segments that we'll be working on, mostly in the south end where the soil conditions are among the worst in the city and tends to lead to the most disruptive kind of effect on our underground infrastructure. I do wanna touch base on a different plan we're working through. I think most folks at least remember, if not very familiar with the 2018 Clean Water Resiliency Plan which the mayor directed us and we put forward in light of some challenging times that summer with disruptions at our wastewater treatment plan. There were seven key areas we are focused on with that plan to upgrade a significant amount of money, time, and modernization for our stormwater and wastewater systems. Quickly go to the next page just in the interest of time, those are seven areas. Here are some updates as to the progress we are making or have made in those key areas. Some of the most challenging issues we had with the age of our wastewater treatment plants has been corrected. These typically are what led to those five major issues we had in 2018 at the wastewater treatment plants. That includes a full-on replacement of the disinfection systems at the three wastewater treatment plants and a replacement and upgrade of the computer controls and the communications at main plant. These should and could prevent the kinds of things that happened in 2018. We can never say it will fully prevent any issue from going forward, but the system now at the wastewater treatment plants is much more modernized and in a much better place and we've had some significant rains since the end of this work or where it has given us some confidence in how well the system is performing. On Flynn Avenue, we do have a pump station replacement project underway. There'll be some traffic control that's visible may lead to some very minor delays. We still want you to go to Oakledge Park if that's a beach or a park that you like going to. Just be aware there could be a three, five, 10 minute delay depending on the day, depending on the work we're doing. We currently have out to bid miles of sewer and storm pipe repair. These are critical to prevent any sanitary overflows. In the city, these are critical for the health of the 100 plus mile system that we have. We have green infrastructure planned in the south end, which will consist of above ground rain gardens because of the soil type they have. I can go into more detail if there are questions or in the future. And certainly our water resources team would love to come talk about that. But I just want to point that out. That's our most challenging area for combined sewer overflows, which is in above the Pine Street CSO area, as they say. We are making with grant funding from the state a significant amount of headway with trying to capture impervious runoff in one concentrated part of the city. We're actually exploring projects in the old north end right now, which will likely be subsurface systems. So the construction could be disruptive. That would be a year or so in the future, but it wouldn't be as disruptive from any loss of parking or any other kind of challenges the way a rain garden could present. So be mindful of that. And certainly our water resources team will be in touch with more on those projects. Just want to touch base quickly on two projects in the heart of words, two and three. North Champlain, there was a public meeting a few weeks ago in March. Our plans right now are to construct a two-way protected bike lane in place of the bike lane and one of the travel lanes that exists on North Champlain. This will be done with a significant amount of grant funding as well, going back to how we try to scratch the dollars. It will include an additional series of improvements on Manhattan Drive, including new traffic signals and pedestrian signals at North Champlain and Manhattan Drive. Smaller footprint intersection and visibility improvements at Park and Manhattan, which has been a challenged intersection and over students and parents crossing as well as narrower travel lanes for slower traffic. All that said, design is currently underway. I can't present you with any final plans or 100% plan details at this time. We did have a public meeting. There's a video available, which we can circulate that link that's on the screen on our Facebook page. You don't need to be a Facebook member to watch that. We just hosted it live via Facebook and Zoom. We have a second one scheduled or a to be scheduled for summer. We have a project website, which will be undergoing a refresh in the next few days. So keep all this in mind if you have interest in that project. The other project and these plan sets are always harder to see. We made sure to use more interesting colors to kind of make it pop more, but we do have a raised intersection plan for the North Ave, Washington Berry intersection. Reason for the project, as you can see here, we've received numerous complaints about the safety of this crossing. This was studied as part of the 2015 North Ave corridor study. Plans, funding have finally come into place and come into view, where we are now, I think we're done with being out to bid. I believe we've got our contractor and we are meeting to discuss traffic control next week. But essentially this project is gonna consist of a five inch speed table at that intersection. A whole host of other improvements like stormwater capture, pavement marking, signage, sidewalk ramps. The crosswalk, the cross North Ave, the existing one will be relocated. And I know folks have advocated for RRFBs, which are those flashing blinking crossing lights that predominantly you'll see on North Ave and Pine Street and the end on Willard Street now, Colchester Ave. We aren't putting those in just yet, but we are gonna continue to collect data and monitor counts and observations of how traffic and pedestrians respond in that area. And this doesn't close the door on the future ability to do that. The timing is late May, lasting about six weeks. Sometimes those projects go a little longer if the weather's not cooperative. Expect travel delays. And I have a screen slide at the end that shows you how to sign up for some updates if you wanna stay really up to date with that. I'm not gonna go into detail on the Shelburne Street roundabout project. Just like to bring this up if folks commute through the area. It's a big project funded by the feds by the state. We're partnering with the state who's the primary manager here. We are constructing a single lane roundabout. This is likely to start sometime over summer, likely to last about two years. This will be another disruptive project with traffic flow. But I think we truly believe and many folks we've heard from really believe this is hopefully a game changer with respect to being an existing high crash location. I'm excited about finally getting this project off. I'm gonna end my presentation there. You can see a couple of different URLs or ways to contact us or sign up for alerts. This is a really great slide. It's available on our website. I encourage you to sign up for as much as you can. I'll turn this over to Lee Perry who will use the remaining time we have if you have any and go through consolidated collection. Hello everyone, as Rob pointed out, my name's Lee Perry. I'm the division director of maintenance for public works and the top consolidated collection. As the heading says, it's using one hauler to provide trash recycling compost pickup to addresses with one of four residential units. Next slide please. In 2018, city council passed a resolution directing DPW to study consolidated collection for trash recycling compost out of a nationwide study. It showed that 83% of municipalities consolidate their services. So here in Burlington, we're really in the minority in our situation. The consultants report found the following benefits and environmental economic benefits, quality of life with the reduction of traffic in dense neighborhoods, reduce vehicle miles traveled. Next slide please. And the possible scenarios going forward as a city, we need to decide if we should consolidate services or not. And if yes, which options? And the options being consolidated services in a franchise model where we would put out to bid private haulers for contracts to service zones throughout the city districts or a municipal model where the city would provide consolidated collection services and, you know. Oh. Whoa. Hey, can you hear me? Can you hear me? Yes. Hi. Hi. Go ahead, I'm listening. Okay. Sorry, I lost my train of thought. Okay, they've been reviewed. Sorry for the interruption. No worries. Municipally operated consolidated services where the municipality would provide all the collection services for trash recycling and compost. Next slide please. So here's a cost comparison of the two models being franchised and municipal. Just to give us some context right now, residents in the city pay anywhere from $28 to $49 a month to have just their trash and recycling picked up through the various haulers with a municipal model. We originally identified two options but expanded it to three as a 0% opt out, a 15% opt out and a 25% opt out. So opting out would mean residents would have the choice to opt out of the program and self haul to a drop off center, you know, either locally or nearby community. So in the 0% opt out, you can see our prices are pretty competitive with the franchise model. And as you lessen the participants, obviously the price is gonna go up where we are a little bit higher on the 25% opt out in and a little bit on the 15% opt out in. That being because, you know, starting a municipal operation, we're gonna have a heavy capital investment in the trucks, buildings, salaries. It's gonna be an endeavor. Next slide, please. So next steps, we're evaluating all scenarios. We're gonna present our recommendations coming up at the following date. So the next one will be at the Transportation Energy and Utilities Committee on the 25th, then Public Works Commission on the 16th of June. And, you know, if the council decides to advance consolidated collection, it's gonna take some time to implement this program. You know, we wanna do it, you know, methodically well thought out because it's gonna be right. And that could take anywhere from two to three, maybe even four years. Next slide, please. And as Rob indicated, your feedback is welcome. Here are some links that you can go to to get the consultant study for the original franchise model. There are other documents available at links to the Transportation Energy and Utilities Committee as well as Public Works Commission with memo submitted and information there as well. And if you would like to talk about this, you can give me a call or email me. I don't know if my email is listed there, Rob. We can provide that for you as well. Thank you so much, Lee and Rob. We do have a couple minutes for, we've got four minutes for questions. So I would invite anyone who would like to hear more or ask a question or has a comment. Feel free to unmute yourself or use the raise hand function. Charlie. Okay, so everything sounds good, but I remember that for 20 years, the Department of Public Works, even 20 years ago or more, we're saying how worried they were about the water and sewer lines in Burlington and how it was becoming more and more of a crisis. So I've been hearing that for over 20 years. So I'm disappointed to hear how little has been done with that. And I was especially hoping this year because of money coming in from the American Rescue Plan or whatever it is from the pandemic, I was hoping there would be a ton of money that we could put into that infrastructure. I mean, it's nice to hear about paving projects. Charlie, first off. The streets and the sidewalks and things. I think Charlie froze, but Rob, can you respond to that? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, in a city with 40,000 people and 95 miles of roads, 130 miles of sidewalks, 100 miles of water mains, 100 and some odd miles of sewer and storm pipe, there will always be a need to reinvest in that infrastructure in a dense urban area. I would say the productivity of the last four years, five years does stand kind of on its own as a really significant milestone. We've paved 20% of the roads. We've tripled our sidewalk reinvestment. We also, we are strong advocates for our own work. So if there is more resources available this year, we can put those to work. Now, the budget conversation is happening with the mayor and the city council right now. The mayor has advocated as has the city council for more resource investment in infrastructure. All of those American recovery funds need to be devoted a myriad variety of city priorities. So we do hope and expect if there is availability, we'll do even more than we've presented this year. But I do think the work of the last four or five years has truly represented a five year era of just massive investment resources where we're made available, we've made use of them. And if there are more resources this year through that federal funding, which right now it's not allocated to us, we will have plans in place to use those. Thank you, Rob. Do we have other questions? I don't see any other questions. I'll just make a quick comment. You know, as someone who lives right on North Champlain Street, I'm really looking forward to the improvements on our street and the two-way bike lane, which I know will not only increase the safety for bicyclists, but will also slow down traffic. So I think between that and the North Avenue pedestrian crossing that you're talking about in Manhattan, both of those things will really increase the safety in our area. And I would also advocate for that flashing pedestrian light on North Ave. I think that would go a long way. Let's see, we have time for one more question or comment. And I see, Tony, you have your hand up. Hi, I think Rob, I have two questions. One, we have 20 high crash intersections in the city. And I really don't hear anything this year being done about any of those. The roundabout one is the 21st. That's been taken care of. I just find it strange that we don't prioritize where we're having one and a half entries a year to deal with that. The second question is, we hear about lead in pipes. How many pipes do we have in the city and what are the lengths of lead line pipes, water pipes? None. None, I mean. Okay, good. So there's no lead in Burlington water, that's good. Okay. Very, very, thank you. The outliers that are like almost impossible to find, but mains are not lead and most of the services that were lead have been replaced. There's probably a few somewhere, but it's not, it's almost non-existent. That's our property. Okay, thank you for former DPW director, Steve Goodkind, who knows the system as good as anybody. Thank you. Yeah, we have, you know, I know division director Moyer has taken that seriously, has looked and re-looked to make sure we know our system in and out, especially in light of what happened in Michigan a few years ago. Lead in drinking water, as Mr. Goodkind said, is not a concern here. Megan has been very focused on making sure we know what the health of our system is. Tony, your feedback on the high crash locations is noted. They are important. I mean, we have, you know, there've been a number of projects we've focused on. Sheldon roundabout, as you know, you've said it's the 21st location. Some of the work on Winooski Ave was meant to kind of focus on some of these high crash, you know, unsafe locations. So it's noted I'm gonna share that directly with our transportation team and our management. Thank you. Great. Well, thank you very much, Rob and Lee. I really appreciate your presentation and we will, and we appreciate you coming to see us tonight. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So we're gonna move on to our next item. Thank you. Thank you. Which is, we have Steve Goodkind and Tony Reddington of the Pine Street Coalition and they'll be talking about the Champlain Rightway Initiative. And we're on, Tony, if you've got slides, you wanna try and coordinate with us. Most of what I'm gonna see is slides, but you might want them. I'm trying to get them to Zoom so I can see everybody. If I can't, to Liam, I wanna share the PDF I have. You should have the capability to, as a co-host. I can't get the, and going back and forth here, I cannot get to the Zoom screen for some reason. Well, let me try that. Okay, I'm there. And I'm looking for the share. And now I will go to the slide show. And Steve, you're on. Steve Goodkind will be leading us off. And Tony, as we talked about, there's that one slide that I'm interested in. You may need other slides for your part of it, but I only need that one slide to go after the traffic. Okay, start off. I'll go to it after we do the introduction. We've got it. That's fine. Anyway, as Tony said, Tony and I are from a group called the Pintreak Coalition. And we've been advocating for a better Southern connector now for about six years or so. I was formerly, for about 30 years, city engineer and public works director. And at one time I was the manager of the Southern connector project. So I probably know as much about its history as anybody. And I want to focus on one part of its history. And that is the environmental justice part of this project. It's environmental justice is something most people are hearing about lately. It's been in the news along with Black Lives Matter in the last year or so, but it's been around for longer than that. And I'm going to tell a little bit of a story of how the city has gone from what I would consider an advocate for environmental justice, more or less an apologist for a project that does not credit as far as environmental justice is concerned. That project is the Southern connector in its present configuration. Get rid of this full ball. There we go. Okay. Anyway, Southern connector product has been around for a long time. It's changed over time. Its concept hasn't changed, but its route has changed. And it goes back to the 60s. It was part of a ring road system. It was going to connect the interstate, wrap around the various towns of Chittinette County, almost forming a circle around the county. The Northern connector is part of it. The Essex bypass is part of it. Route 189 off the interstate is part of that ring road concept. The Circle of Venture Highway, which I think is pretty much an abandoned concept now was part of it. And the last remaining part that is still alive in some form is the Southern connector. The road itself, contrary to popular belief, was not meant to be a new, better way into downtown Burlington. That's not its purpose. Purpose was to provide an alternate North-South route across Burlington, an alternate to Pine Street. And in doing, and this alternate was supposed to take traffic out of neighborhoods like Flynn and Home and Maple and Pine and King Street. That's what it's about. It wasn't about bringing more traffic into downtown. Maybe that could be an... That could happen because of it in some ways, possibly. But that's not what its purpose was. And those that say that that's what we're trying to do, that's not what we're trying to do. That's not what the city tried to do for 40 years. The project itself had to go through various environmental reviews over its time. I was involved with the two most recent ones. One was in the 90s, one was in the middle 2000s. During both of those reviews, the city had to justify or look at various alternates for this project, select the one that they thought was the best and then see if that one met all the criteria that environmental impact statements have to meet. In 1996 or seven, when I was managing the project, the state wanted us, so the feds wanted us, the federal government was providing most of the money for the project, they wanted us to look at a route that did go right up Pine Street to Main Street. At the time we said, no, that just contrary to everything this project has been trying to do for 30 years, not interested. They said, okay, the matter was dropped. And a version of the project was eventually approved in that environmental document, which city was happier with. And I think the feds in the state of the time were happier with. About 10 years later, we had to do another update of that environmental impact statement. Federal government said, what about this route? It could go up Pine Street all the way to Main. And we said, once again, not interested. They said, well, tell you what, we're interested in it. We want you to look at it. In fact, we want you to make that the preferred alternative for the project. We're pretty taken aback by that. Make a long story short, the city fought for three years trying to show how that route did not meet the criteria that we had established for the project. And it did not meet the criteria of the environmental impact statement that it had to meet. One of those things we challenged it on was environmental justice. We said that particularly in the case of the main of the Maple King Pine Street neighborhood, that neighborhood is low income and minority. In this case, minority black and African-American as the minority. It's clear that it meets that criteria. We argued it, but the federal government said, well, we understand what you're saying. And maybe the criteria isn't being met, but that criteria is not that important at this important time. It didn't have the weight of other criteria in the environmental impact statement. Some of those criteria, like historic preservation, we're gonna win the day when we had to choose our route. And environmental justice really wasn't a strong criteria in those days. So eventually, after threats by the federal government to withdraw all the money from the project, and actually they did withhold money for many years, Mayor Kiss finally folded and said, okay, we'll take what we can get. That's what you're gonna give us. We'll try and do that project. The project, I'll say, stumbled along. Fast forward to the mid-15s, 2015 or so. The Pine Street Coalition formed. And we thought maybe there's some way, even though it seemed hopeless, that we can maybe get this project back on track and make it a better project, a modern project, and not be stuck with this old project and a project which really was imposed on us by the federal government. We hired an attorney, a document was filed in federal court, and it listed five or six things that we thought were wrong with the project. One of them was that it failed to meet environmental justice criteria. The thing that was different this time about that criteria was with the Obama administration, criteria had been greatly strengthened. And now it was more of a mandate for the project. It wasn't something which had to be looked at in addition to some other things which could override it. It was a top priority, projects have to meet that. And to our surprise, when the documents were filed and the Department of Justice looked at them, and they're the ones that represent the federal government in matters like this, the Justice Department said, well, we think we're in pretty good shape on this, except we agree with you that environmental justice criteria has not received an adequate review in this project. And what they did was, make a long story short, they withdrew the decision that was made back in 2009 or so that established the root of the project up Pine Street to Main Street. They withdrew that. I'd never heard of anything even happening like that before, but they did. And they gave us an opening now to go back and have the project looked at from an environmental justice standpoint and our belief is if you do look at it from that and do a good review, the current project cannot pass muster. In fact, if somehow the state, the city and the federal government try and push it through, they'll probably face a lawsuit from us and they'll try and challenge that and see if we can't prevail. And I think the federal government, especially with Pete Buttigieg in charge, I think the transportation or the Department of Transportation is very much looking at environmental justice and making sure criteria is being met and not allowing it to be swept under the rug. So we'll see what happens with that, but I think the good news is, it isn't like there's no project. There are ways to do this project. Even what was approved in the first environmental impact statement back in the 90s is a much better way to do this project that meets environmental justice criteria. Tony, you'll talk a little bit about what could be done here. And I just want to know one last point though, because it's a slide that up and then I'm going to turn it over to Tony. This slide shows exactly what is wrong with the environmental justice criteria as far as public concern. Environmental justice says that the federal government is not going to build projects that disproportionately impact minority and low income neighborhoods. And the disproportionate impact is very clearly represented on this chart. What it shows is in the neighborhoods of home and Flynn Avenue and more to the left of this chart, traffic will see large reductions, 72% in one case. On the right side of the chart is what happens to the Maple King Pine Street neighborhoods. They see an increase in traffic of 32%. That is what we say is in black and white or in this case, red and blue and purple. That is definition of environmental justice not being met. They are seeing a disproportionate impact of this. And I'll say my last closing statement. The city fought against this current design when I was the manager of the project. We fought strongly against it. It's actually the city has now gone to being an apologist for the project. But I think the city was on the right track. I think the comments and the stand the city took 10 years ago is still valid. And I think we're going to try and do our best to see if the city can move forward but by moving toward a better alternative. So I said a mouthful. Tony will talk a little bit more about what might be done with this project. Thank you, Steve and Tony, just a heads up. We have a little less than 10 minutes left for this agenda item. And we want to make sure there are time for questions within that time. Okay. Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Jess. So again, to summarize what we're watching in this project. And I think that the picture of the students getting on the bus at the corner of this photo is taken at the corner of Pine Street and Maple Street sort of says it all. This King Maple neighborhood perhaps has the highest concentration of residents with black and brown skins in the state. And of course, as we all know, we're in the old North End. The old North End King Maple and onto to, onto Wynuski has 26 to 9 to 29% poverty level incomes and one up to a third, 30% according to representative McCormack, 30% of the people who live in King Maple and the old North End that Kurt represents, they have no access to our car. So they're totally dependent upon walking and transit. We feel that we can make a change and promote car alternatives and more effective traffic routes rather than disrupt our communities with more car traffic. To put these numbers again, that Steve stressed, again, traffic in King Maple up 37%, Flynn Avenue down below is down 72%. And then if you look at the census tracks of King Maple, 77% of the residents of King Maple are low and moderate income and that area relatively well-to-do folks who live below Flynn Avenue, only 34% low and moderate income. So both by income and in terms of racial makeup, this project cannot fly. So as a result, and this is news, brand new slide, we say first things first, rear yard then a redesigned Parkway elements, put King Maple first. So we're suggesting actually was a city council president, Max Tracy who first said this, suggested that we do the so-called rear yard project first, which will bypass King Maple and immediately provide or immediately stop any cutting of the King Maple and two will actually improve the, reduce the traffic, reduce the congestion, reduce the pollution and make it safer by doing that section first. And how did that happen? Well, your Pine Street coalition did drop a court case in a year or two years ago. We've been through the environmental justice process, which we expect to be completed this summer, but the federal highway administration suddenly saw the light and they changed their position and say, Oh, Burlington, you please take $20 million and build a rail yard project, hoping that somehow they could finesse the rest of the Parkway through. So your Pine Street coalition in a meeting has decided and you're the first to hear it that we want to see as Max, Councilor Max Tracy has suggested the rear yard project first that relieves and improves King Maple and then the revision revised elements of the Parkway as we've been pushing now for years comes second. I want to give a shout out to the Walkbite Council who first found completely found no walk and bike facilities in the entire project that were satisfactory in letters to the city and to the public works. By the way, they never got a response to those letters. And this is really what the Walkbite Council and Pine Street and now joined by the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance really would like to see on the entire route from down at Queen City Park Road, right up to and going over to the Battery Street where it'll meet the Burlington bike path and actually sort of make a loop. And that is on the right, you see a bike, a sidewalk, there is no sidewalk we're spending $100 million on this Parkway project and there isn't one inch of sidewalk. And beside that, we will have a two-way bikeway, not a single inch of accommodation of safely of bicycles in this $100 million project as the city has been pushing it, it's a scandal. And we think this would make a world-class walk and bike facility through the entire two-mile route. You can do a circuit then over to the bike path, along the shoreline down to Oakledge Park and back over to this facility or reverse. And you can stop and have lunch of course or a bite to eat at the South, at the cafe there at the co-op South End. So the Champlain Rightway is a multimodal transportation improvements alternative to the obsolete, environmentally harmful and racially unjust Southern connector Champlain Parkway proposal will take some questions. I think we've gotten the message across and of course we'll do best practices roundabouts too at the new intersections. And by the way, the city does, Rob note this Rob Golding that the city has and Chapin Spencer advocates a roundabout at that junction at Curtis Lumber and Pine Street and Kilburn Street that would take you over to the Battery Street. So we are pleased that they included a roundabout even in their plan. Thank you very much, Tony and Steve. So who has questions? And feel free to unmute yourself or raise your hand. And while folks are gathering their questions, I do have one question for you. So how can folks get involved or if they want more information, how do they? Well, they can first, they can go to safestreetsberlington.com and we're trying to keep our information updated. Pine Street also has a Facebook page where we try to keep things located. Obviously you can contact, my name is on the steering committee and email address is on online. And Steve, any other suggestions how they can contact us? Well, there's us, but also I think if you feel strongly, how about we're saying that your city counselors know that. They're gonna be making some decisions in the future. We hope we're gonna make a decision that we agree with, but that soon needs to hear you want a better project, you want environmental justice. And it can be done. This project, as Tony has described it, the root of it is the same route that the Feds approved us to use in the 1990s in that first environmental impact state. The route included rail, what we think of as rail enterprise North was part of the project. And in fact, our alternative, we tried to persuade the Feds to accept in the second most, in the most recent environmental impact statement, again, used a route through the rail yard. So this isn't something we've just pie in the sky. This is what the city had wanted. This is what we, the 30 years thought we were gonna be doing. And I think people need to let their counselors know you'll want to see this done and have it done right. And we can have a good project if we do it. Thank you, Steve. Do we have any questions? By the way, just to add that the rail yard project will be coming to city council this summer in a contract for the city design to manage the planning phase, which a lot of what work has already been done as you know, that anyone who's been around it, I think the rail yard planning, base planning was done about four or five years ago. And we also have the work that was done during Steve's era when they were looking at this alternative route. Great, well, thanks again for being here and thank you for your advocacy for the neighborhood. Thank you, thank you, guys. So now our next item up on the agenda, we have Jessica Lafel and Eric Farrell of Farrell Properties to give us an update on the Cambrian Rise Development. So welcome, Eric and Jessica. And do you have slides to show? Yes, I have slides. Okay, great. So Toni, you'll need to stop sharing and then Jessica can bring up her slide. Super, thank you. Thanks, I think it's done. Well, oh, that's a nice view. So, oops, disappeared. Oh, did it? I'm sorry. Well, while Jess is doing that, I'll give you a thumbnail of where we've been and where we are today, does that make sense? Are you able to see it now? Yes, I can see it. Anybody else there? Yep, we can see it now, thank you. Okay, all right, cool. Jess, you disappear. Okay, so Cambrian Rise, we were approved by the city and the state at 250 back in 2016, 17, and their first building to open was the Liberty House. The former orphanage opened up in 2017, 65 units, one condo with 64 apartments. Then fast forward to October of 2019. Actually, Jess, can you show the site plan? And I don't know if the building letters, oh, there's no building letters on there, are there? Oh yeah, you can sort of read that. So Liberty House, which is in the middle facing North Avenue, if you can read the plan. Yep, and then the next building to open was Laurentide. Champlain Housing Trust opened that building in October of 1976 units, subsidized family housing. Then we opened the Rise, which was a new addition attached to the old classroom, Burlington College's classroom building, 94 units. That opened in July, these are all apartments now. I'm sorry, opened up in July of 2020. We were supposed to open up in May, but we got delayed a little bit by the COVID stuff. And then Cathedral Square just opened Juniper House, 70 units of subsidized senior housing in February, March of this year. Our next building we're gonna start is another apartment building, Sunset House. We were supposed to start that in March of last year, 2020. We're probably not gonna start it until the fall of this year. So we're a year and a half behind, all thanks to what's been going on in the world. And then our next adventure would be our first foray into the condominium market for sale, 202 units. We hope to start that building in January, end of the year, or the first quarter of 2000 and 2022. So a little bit of background, we were originally approved for 770 units. There's actually no density cap in this district, but there was a density cap in my development agreement with the city. The city council last year increased that cap from 770 to 950 because there's so much demand for housing. And remember that 25% of everything, 25% of the rentals and 25% of the for sales units all have to meet the inclusionary requirements. In the breakdown will be roughly out of 950 units when we're done, will be 513 apartments, rental units and including the two buildings that the nonprofits built and 437 condos, condominiums, home ownership units. A lot of people ask us when will we be done and that's anybody's guess depends on market conditions. I think we'll be done probably in five years if all goes well. Now we'll show you a couple of more views. The next slide is a view of the overall project as though it were complete, you can obviously pick out Liberty House, kind of our iconic building at Cambrian and to the right of that, facing North Avenue, the other way Jess, the facing North Avenue and then runs down parallel to the cemetery is the condominium building I just mentioned, 202 units, we'll build it in two phases. It'll probably take three years start to finish to build it in two phases and sell units in two phases and then go back to Liberty House Jess, if we to the left of Liberty House, south side is the rise 94 apartment units and in the brick classroom building in the addition and then south of that is Cathedral Square that opened just this spring and then west of Cathedral Square is Laurentide, which has Shemplin Housing Trust opened and then our next apartment building is what we call Sunset House, 125 units. Again, we'll start that later this year and it'll take 14 to 18 months to build. And then so after those are done and the condo building I mentioned will have, there's four other buildings. There's in the southwest corner is building southwest corner, the other corner Jess that is on lot four, that was originally gonna be condos, it's gonna be apartments. And we are probably gonna sell that to another local investor developer type who's gonna build that building until we start later this year. And then going north on the site next to that is building what we call building, well, building, yes, I'm sorry, Jess, so building H that'll be for sale, probably all inclusionary 72 units. West of that will be building P, market rate, might have some inclusionary units in it, all for sale, condominiums. And then the last building on the northwest corner would also be condominiums, probably contain some inclusionary as well. So when we're done, we'll have 950 units, 128 inclusionary apartments, 109 inclusionary for sale units in a total of 950. And I'd like to be done before I'm 80 years old so I gotta get crack it. Next picture would be, so that's a close-up of the condo building that we're gonna start on the first quarter, facing North Avenue, five stories on North Avenue, six stories in the middle. The next slide is what's the next? So the next slide is if you're hovering over the end of the site where the bike path is, the land we sold to the city, looking back up at Liberty House, we had said at the outset that we wouldn't build anything in the corridor that would interrupt the view from Liberty House to the lake because we wanted to honor the Liberty House building. So in the foreground, you see a large green, which is a common amenity of Cambrian rise for the use of all the residents there, kind of an unscheduled space. It won't be structured in any way for Frisbee or outdoor events or whatever the association decides to allow. And then I think the last slide is a view of Cambrian with Texaco Beach in the foreground and a completed Cambrian rise project in the background and an awful lot of steam billowing out of the McNeil plant in the far ground in Mansfield way back. So that's a pretty short version of the story, hasn't changed a whole lot other than the total number of units, a little more housing, a little less commercial space. And probably, I think our timeline is stretched to probably a couple of years because of what's been going on in the world. So, but we're pretty excited about it. And with that, I would answer any and all questions that anybody may have. Thank you very much, Eric. It's nice to see the updated plans and we all know that we need more housing. It's also good to see that the inclusionary units seem to be spread a little bit. They're not just segregated into one area. So I think that that type of mixed use, mixed income development is really important. So that's good to see as well. Thank you. So do we have questions? I'm sorry. Oh, you're asking people if they have questions. Yep, yep, sorry. So Molly, Molly has her hand up. Yeah. Hey, this is Jacob talking to Molly's speaker. Hey, one thing I would like to comment on is I see some colors in here, which are muted colors. So keep it up, even go bolder if you want. I would love to see more colors in the building. Question I have is, I know in one of the buildings that you've built, there is I think some maybe worker space on the bottom floor. It sounds like there's not too much of a market for a retailer or commercial space, but wondering if your buildings have flexibility on the ground level to adapt to that as this community is over time. Sure, Jess, go back to the other aerial showing the street side. Yeah, so that one. So in building B, the rise, there's about 10,000, well, there's actually 11,000 square feet of commercial space and the kind of commercial space we're looking for is we have a commitment from a group that's gonna do a cafe and a food to go shop, which we think is pretty important. We'd like to attract uses that would serve the residents, certainly people off the street and people living in the neighborhood across the street, but primarily the people that live at Cambrian Rise. So we're gonna try and be as economics will allow, we're gonna try and be as fussy as we can with who we attract for commercial. We've got about 100,000 square feet of commercials earmarked in various buildings, more of it along North Avenue, but it could be sprinkled anywhere as time goes on. It'll be primarily a residential development, but it will have services. And another important aspect that I should mention is that we're gonna widen North Avenue on the West side of our road at about 35 on-street parking places and a separated bike path and a bus and a pull-off for the bus. We also built, we think the second nicest, maybe the first, second nicest bus stop in the city of Burlington. It's a climate controlled facility at the Southeast corner of the Rise building. Probably won't open until next year, but it serves, it's a huge statement on our part, we think towards encouraging people to use public transportation. That's in addition to us connecting to the bike path and we put bike facilities, a lot of bike facilities and bike wash, bike storage, bike, everything in all of the buildings. So we think that this will be a great place to live. And we'll have some commercial. Thank you. Do we have other questions or comments? Hi, I'm just wondering if there's gonna be, maybe I missed it in a slide, but is there beach access? And I'm also wondering about the land behind or in between Cambrian Rise and Texco Beach. Being like kind of publicly accessible, I'm definitely one of those people that has enjoyed that space for many years. The public, I grew up in Berlick and so the public has enjoyed crossing this property, even though it's privately owned for like several decades to get from North Avenue to the beach. And so one of the first things that we agreed upon when we went through a year long process negotiating with the city, a development agreement. And one of the primary tenants of that agreement is that we sold the city all of the land on the South, southerly end of the property, including the Stone House and along the westerly edge of the property and Texco Beach. So we sold them 12 acres of land, including Texco Beach. So that's publicly owned property. It's a public park. It's in their urban wilds program, meaning it's not intended for like structures like soccer fields. So they'll have an informal path that they're gonna upgrade that will take you from North Avenue to the beach. We're also gonna do a hardscape, a paved connection from the bottom of the public street at the westerly edge of our developed area all the way to the bike path. It's just, it's gonna be an extension of the bike path because we want people to be able to get to North Beach. We want them to be able to get to the bike path. We want them to be able to get to the waterfront without getting in their car. I appreciate that. So when can we actually see the specs for that for those walkways, bikeways, whatever places in which people access the beach? Well, everything that's part of, I mean, we sold that land to the city four years ago. So we've been working with the parks department on, because we're gonna build the path at our expense. But in terms of management of that park area that's under the purview of parks and rec department. So if you want to know what their rules and regs are gonna be, if they have any, I don't think they're gonna prohibit free access to it. So, but I can't speak to what any other, operational rules or regs that they're gonna have. But the public will certainly be able to go through our, see we're doing a public street too. We'll do on a horseshoe street. It's called Cambrian Way and it goes west and then it turns north and then it comes back up east and connects to North Avenue. So when that street is done, it'll be that, it'll be deeded to the city, it'll be a public street. And then at the foot of that public street, the first section, we're gonna build a bike path connection that'll connect to the Burlington Bikeway. So the public's gonna enjoy easier and better access to the beach than they ever have prior to now. What's the timeline around that public access, the bike path? The bike path is scheduled to be built in the summer of 22. Okay. And parks and rec or any infrastructure that goes along with access in the beach, what's their timeline? Do you know, I can bug them. Yeah, well, we're just building the bike path. They did some improvements for access to the Texaco Beach on the south end so that I believe it's handicap accessible or ADA accessible now off the existing bike path. I can't speak to whether they have, what other things they're intending to do down there along the bike path. You have to speak to Parks and Rec about that. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. So we have time for one more question or comment if anyone has one. Okay, Gabriel, you're still muted though. I'm not hearing that if you are. Yeah, I'm sorry, we're not hearing you. You wanna try again? What about now? Oh, perfect. Okay, go ahead. Okay, well, I got lucky there I think. So I was going to DRB meetings way back when this project first got approved. And in terms of inclusionary housing, I was just wondering if my interpretation here is correct. So the project had to have a certain number of inclusionary units to meet the city's requirements. And initially to meet those requirements, the DRB approved that they didn't have to be necessarily spread out within each individual building. And so the inclusionary units were met with what would be the warrantied apartments. So those are concentrated, but they met the requirements project-wide. Do I have the right interpretation there, Eric? Well, you're close. So there's two components of inclusionary. There's the inclusionary requirement for rental housing and there's also an inclusionary, the same inclusionary requirement, 25% for sale, home ownership housing. So the two nonprofits, Cathedral Square and Champlain Housing Trust built 128 inclusionary rental units. And so they satisfied the inclusionary requirement up to a total of 512 rental units. So if we don't build more than, excuse, yeah, 513. If we don't build more than 513 rental units in all of Cambrian, then the full inclusionary requirement is satisfied in those two buildings. Now separate from that, if we stick with 513 and I think we will, the 437 for sale units also have an inclusionary requirement, which 25% of those is 109 units and those 109 units will be spread over at least a couple of buildings, two or three buildings. Okay, but the vast majority of the inclusionary units have already been met with the Laurentide apartments. Just on the rental side. Okay. Not on the sale side. Okay, thanks. Yes. Great, thank you. Well, thank you very much, Eric and Jessica. We really appreciate you coming tonight and sharing this information with us. And we would, as construction moves ahead or plans change, we would invite you to come back. Well, we'll probably invite ourselves. Okay. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, thanks, bye. Bye-bye. Let's see. So next up we have Mayor Weinberger to talk about the police chief search. Welcome, Mayor. Yes, thank you. It's great, great to be with you. And yes, I'm here to talk about the police chief search. I also would like to briefly share with you a little bit information about the FY22 budget process that we're in the middle of. I'll start with the police chief search, which is I'm really here with some news. Well, formally announced this tomorrow is the plan. A year ago, I, as it was clear that the COVID emergency was really deeply disrupting everything, I made the decision that we were not in position to conduct a successful search for a new permanent police chief. And we suspended the search and said that we would resume it after the mayoral election. And I've spent the recent weeks since the election confirming that it made sense to go forward. I'm quite mindful of the fact that we are in the middle of a lot of police transformation efforts. And in some ways this is, in some ways a challenging time, a unsettled time to be searching for a new chief. I kind of considered the possibility that maybe we should get further along with those transformation efforts before starting a search process. But after really talking with a whole range of people, the general consensus is no, we are gonna be doing this police transformation work for some time. It's not good for the community. It's not good for the department to have this sustained period of uncertainty about who the long-term leader is gonna be. And so tomorrow we will be formally reopening the search and but here's how we're gonna do it. We're gonna add a component given that we are in this time where clearly we're trying to figure out a new way of doing public safety, really forge a new consensus about what that looks like in this community. Before starting the search and even kind of posting the position, I am gonna spend the rest of this month doing what we're doing here and going to all the MPAs, having a number of stakeholder meetings and really, and we will be putting out a survey to really try to understand from Berlin-Tonians, what are you looking for in the next place? What's the kind of characteristics, experiences, what priorities do you think the chief should have in the first year on the job? I am happy to take a moment also to introduce Stephanie Seguino, who is, I think you can all see on the screen here. I'm sure Stephanie doesn't need an introduction to most of you. Stephanie is a long-time Berlin-Tonian and she is, she just disappeared, sorry, a moment ago. There she is. Stephanie is on the police commission currently and she and Milo Grant will be the two police commissioners who will be on the search committee that I am putting together to both be part of this listening effort and then to be part of a larger 11-person search committee that will review the, what I hope and expect will be a large number of resumes and interview many candidates, but I have good candidates and narrow down for, now we're down, I'm hoping three to five strong candidates for me to further vet and have a further stakeholder vetting process like we did last time before coming forward and making an appointment for the city council to confirm. I expect, my goal is to do that by September. There will also be two city councilors on this committee. I've been talking with President Tracy about this, our goal is to have one progressive city council and one non-progressive on this committee. And at the end of this listening effort, we will publish a report about what we've heard and how we're updating the job description and sort of position profile and really try to be as kind of transparent and direct as possible about how we're moving forward in a search process that certainly my hope is a step in and itself towards forging this new consensus that I think is so important if we're gonna kind of end some of the turmoil and the real disagreement that we've had about policing and public safety really as long as I've been in office I have sense that we needed a new consensus. And I think there's a lot of active work going on towards it and I'm hopeful that the chief search process can be a step in that direction. I'm just gonna quickly, I think it looks like I have the ability to share my screen. Let me just show you a couple of documents so people can follow up from this presentation and give us this input. There will be a police chief search webpage that's actually up on the city's webpage right now. It has these dates, it has a link for the survey, has this additional information and here's another thing I wanted to make sure I pointed out to you all. They, in addition, I'm gonna try something this time that I've never done on a mayoral appointment search committee before and that we're gonna invite the public. If you're interested as a member of the public in being part of this search committee, there's an application process that we are launching that, and this is the way you get to the application where you can apply to be selected and serve on the committee. That is, yeah, so that's where we are. This page will be updated further over the course of this process. It'll be kind of a landing page for additional documents. The survey is also, as you can see here, a web-based survey and you can go proactively find this for yourself. We'll also be emailing this out and sending this out through front porch forum. Something I will just point out for people wanting to stay engaged in city issues, we've gotten much better over the last couple of years about using a large and growing email list for kind of newsletters from the mayor's office. We put a lot of effort into those newsletters and we'll be sending, that'll be another way we're pushing it out and I invite you to, if you're looking for updates from my office to sign up for that. I'm gonna shift gears and just make sure that, so here somehow I've already clicked over to the budget page here. We also have a landing page on the web page about the fiscal year 22 budget. This also has a survey associated with it, which you may already have gotten in your inboxes or through front porch forum. Let me just say really quickly, this is a really unique budget year and we're doing this year, what is happening is unlike any other of the nine other budgets I've been responsible for, this one is unique. Last year's was unique too. Last year's was unique in a bad way. We had to make all sorts of seven figure cuts to make it through last year and we had to spend down these reserves that we together had built up and over the last decade. This is a very different budget in that because of the federal action, the Biden administration's action, we will have a full service budget and we will be able to make investments in strategic areas that make us a better community that we've never had the opportunity to make before with the federal government's assistance. We're doing this essentially in three steps. The first step you may have noticed took place on Monday when the council approved essentially an extension of the emergency funding that we've been using to fund the city's public health response over the last year. That, that was a really, really significant thing that the city council did in the first weeks of the pandemic last year is they set aside a million dollars out of our reserves and gave the administration the authority to act quickly in any way that we needed to, to try to help keep the public safe. And that's one of the reasons why we were able to have a masking program and a wastewater testing program and supportive quarantine program. All of that was possible because of that, million dollars of funding and the three and a half million dollars of additional funds that we were able to leverage working with our state legislators. Let's see, we have at least a representative Stanek, well, may Stanek here with us, good to see you and working with using federal dollars. This gives us, we have about $900,000 to continue that kind of emergency response and to really put city dollars into reopening the economy this summer as we're bouncing out of this as the pandemic is coming to an end. The next stage is the FY22 budget stage which is underway. We had the first of four budget meetings this last night and we have three more next week. These are detailed presentations from all of the departments. It's a really good way if you're really interested in understanding the nuts and bolts of the budget. Those are Zoom meetings and they also are logged and archived on Channel 17 and you can watch them afterwards. We also have this landing page to try to communicate to people. If you don't have the time to show up for these, I think it's gonna end up being nine or 10 hours of budget meetings over the next couple of weeks. You can also, this is a place for written materials here and this is a memo that is a good summary of the budget that really articulates the principles that we have as we're trying to craft this budget. And I will just touch on them quickly. We are basically our goal is to restore all city services to pre-pandemic levels. We are gonna continue the historic levels of investment in our sidewalk, road, bike path, water resources infrastructure that we've had since the 2016 sustainable infrastructure bond was passed. We're gonna continue that this year. We're proposing this in our preliminary proposal of the council that we continue that. We are going to put the emergency reserves that we have spent down significantly over the last years. We're gonna put them up to a prudent back, not all the way back up, but refill them to a prudent level consistent with the policy we have about reserves. We are trying to minimize tax increases. We know that this is important for multiple reasons right now. Many people still being financially impacted by the pandemic. Many others having seen significant re-appraisals of your property that's gonna result in a tax increase. We don't wanna do everything we can to minimize exacerbating that by minimizing discretionary tax increases. We are proposing to make really overdue investments in racial equity and justice. We're proposing a substantial expansion of the new racial equity inclusion in the belonging department, new investments in language access and going beyond what the level wage ordinance requires and paying all city workers, even seasonal and temporary workers that have only been with us a short time paying them all livable wages. We are also for the first time proposing that we pay a per meeting kind of stipend to people serving on city boards and commissions the way the state does to expand, really expand who can participate in those critical civic bodies. We are, as you can, if you think about it, it's probably not a surprise. Our electric company, our water company and our parking, especially our parking utility, our parking fund have all been dramatically impacted by the COVID emergency. And if we're gonna really keep those parts of city government solvent and strong, we are considering some assistance using some of the emergency dollars to assist them. And finally, the final principle is if we're gonna make good on all those other principles, we're gonna have to use a significant percentage of these ARPA funds, American Rescue Plan Act, ARPA funds to balance that budget. However, even if we, there's no scenario that I see where we won't have at least 10 to $15 million still remaining after the FY22 budget has passed about a month from now. And that is gonna create a further opportunity that we will be back here at the MPAs and in other public settings requesting your input on. We're gonna give ourselves through the summer and into the fall to make decisions about what we do with that remaining 10 to $15 million that we have until the end of 2024 to invest in high impact ways. So more to come on that. I'll pause there. I think I've used my a lot of time. If the leaders, I'm certainly happy to stay for as long as you want, you know, can fit me in here if you wanna ask some questions. Great, thank you very much. So does anyone have a question or comment? And feel free to unmute yourself or use the raise hand function. No immediate question. I have a question for both the surveys, both for the police chief search and the budget survey. Will those be available in translated versions? And will there be outreach to the non-English speaking communities? Yeah, great question, Jess. We certainly are one thing that I think one positive change to come out of COVID is we are dramatically expanding the materials that we do translate and distribute. And with the first budget survey and the timeline that we are trying to turn that around in, I am because of just the kind of charter required deadlines and kind of a late, we've never done a budget survey like this before and it was in response to, and I see President Tracy's with us, there's a response to see counselor feedback over the last few weeks that we have pushed that out. I'm not sure if that one will be translated. I will commit the survey for the police chief does need to be translated and distributed broadly. And then beyond that, I will say, I can mention it glided over it in the budget, but we are proposing almost $100,000 in spending to really fully implement the language access plan that was approved by the city council after really years of work and discussions between the council and the administration, a plan was approved and that this will become a formalized mandatory required part of city communications going forward. We are both budgeting to kind of translate kind of foundational documents that people need to kind of success that are frequently used in city government as well as to be available for kind of ongoing translations. Another thing we're funding is the trustee community voices program, which also set up really created during the pandemic, but we're trying to make permanent, helps us get information about city initiatives out to our refugee and immigrant communities and to get feedback back. And we definitely will be working with these trustee community voices on both the budget and the police chief search to engage and get feedback from those communities. Thank you very much. And I think there's also a wonderful opportunity for both the language access and the trustee community voices program to support the NPAs too, because I know that we could all of our NPAs could use some help in increasing access to these meetings and this information. So thank you. Yeah, great point, Jess. I think that's right. And one additional kind of component of this, significantly expanded effort again, coming out of the pandemic that we wanna hold onto is we are setting out postcards on what's supposed to be basically a monthly basis that are translated into, I think, seven different languages, eight different languages. And I would, I think, and Pitt, who may be with us tonight and I know frequently works with the NPAs, she's also working with the trust on that program and with the trustee community voices and I think she can help get that. I think working with her would be a great way to make sure messages that the NPAs are trying to send out do get to our refugee and immigrant communities. Thank you. Any, we have time for final question or comment before we move on to our representatives. Let's see. Well, thank you very much, mayor, for joining us tonight. There's exciting things coming up in the city and a lot. And it's nice to see so many ways for people to get involved in these big decisions. Thank you. Well, thank you, Jess, for your leadership on the NPA and everything the executive committee does and thanks for the chance to be with you tonight. Good night, everyone. Thank you. Bye-bye. Okay, so next we have, well, almost on time. We have our representative updates and let's see, why don't we start with Emma? As the legislature's winding down, I know you've been working fast and furious in these last few weeks, for the last few weeks of the legislature. So we'll hear from you first and then our city councilors and then our school commissioners. Hello, and I appreciate, if I bumped the line, I appreciate it because my assistant needs to go to bed soon. So I don't mean to pull that card, but I'm pulling that card. So buckle up. I think I'm the only state rep on. So I'm gonna try to give a thorough update, as we all know, at the end of the session, which for us this year will end about a week or so. There's a lot of things moving and it moves fast and it moves a little furious and at a breakneck speed. So I just tried to look at last week's calendar and bills that have moved and passed to give you all an update or things that are about to pass, I should say. I'm gonna lead off with an unemployment bill that I personally have done a lot of work on because it's spent a lot of time in my committee, house commerce. It started as S10 and I wanna also just start by thanking anyone who was from wards two and three who took time out and either submitted testimony or participated in a public hearing about a week or so ago on unemployment. It is very hard to come and testify even in the best of conditions, but to testify on Zoom in two minutes or less and talk about unemployment, especially what's happened in the last year with so many Vermonters, 30,000 plus are still on unemployment and the experiences of our under-resourced Department of Labor, I just really wanna commend and send gratitude to anyone who did testify or submitted written testimony because it is, we have a lot of work to do to make the process easier and better for unemployed folks. But S10 is a bill that is now gonna be merged into a number called S62 if folks wanna follow along. And this is the only substantive unemployment bill that is moving forward. And it started as a somewhat balanced bill between providing employers a bit of tax relief given how our unemployment trust fund gets funded. It's a complicated formula. If you wanna geek out with me, I'm happy to get into the weeds, but not tonight. But folks just need to know that there's a formulaic system under current law that would have really jumped employer tax rates up significantly July 1st because it's based on how much it gets used in the fund, the unemployment fund. And obviously a record number of folks were on unemployment. So the system doesn't know that that's sort of like a robot. It just assumes, okay, we have to increase the tax rate in order to fill the fund back up basically. So we did not intervene. It would have been a big tax hike for employers. So that was part of the bill. And the other side was from the Senate of a modest dependent benefit for folks using unemployment who had children to help cover basic needs because that's the premise of unemployment is it's a bridge to keep people attached to the workforce and getting back to work. That got stripped out in my committee. And I was one of the only dissenting votes and I am forever committed to workers and bringing that voice strongly into the state house. And so it was, as a new legislator, a little unnerving. I'm gonna be honest, I'm with friends, but I stood my ground and I started to really work hard to make sure that other legislators outside of house commerce knew the importance of keeping something in there for workers. So just today, the House Ways and Means Committee put together a proposal which my committee took back and voted on and supported unanimously, which puts a $25 a week benefit for all UI claimants back into the bill. So workers will be able to access that and have an increase in claim benefits basically. Has to still go to the floor. I really wanted to report on that one in particular because so many folks are still on unemployment that will kick in after federal pandemic unemployment benefits and around Labor Day. So it's something that will continue on probably up to about at least 10 years or so based on how the language is written. So I'm pretty proud of that one. The other ones I'm gonna do a drive by on. So if you want more information on it, you could just let me know. But we passed this week S15, which is a voter related bill where we're gonna allow municipal, sorry, we're gonna allow the state to mail all registered voters in a general election of ballot. We learned how the importance of that and the increase of voter participation through the pandemic sort of add a necessity. And we're now enabling the state to do that permanently going forward. Also enabling local communities to do that by choice for town meetings. So Burlington can opt to do that for whatever reason going forward. And it also allows what's called ballot curing. So if anyone who had voted for the first time by mail or by dropping off your ballot before last time and made a mistake, we did not have the ability to allow town clerks to notify the voter and correct the ballot. So that is now something in the underlaw that voters can do. The town clerk is allowed to open the ballot early, check it if there's a mistake, be in touch with the voter and people can correct their ballots and have a chance to actually have their vote be counted. Which I think is a pretty good thing. The other just two things I'll mention are Burlington charter change items that are in a bill called H-448. There's a lot going on in this session. That and I've been working with counselor, carpenter and counselor Pine on this and I appreciate their work together on this as a coalition. So we're hoping that the airport question because it's a pretty minimal, not super controversial item will prevail on its own and still move in this last few days of the session. But the other three items are just taking more time. And we've heard from our speaker that that will be a priority bill early next year. It cuts a little close for timing of just cause eviction and these items are a ranked choice voting for city council races, just cause eviction to start the ordinance process here and thermal energy. So it's just taking more time to dig into the details but we have a commitment that that is not lost but will be a priority next time. And then the other just very brief one is S-13 is a weighted study, the weighted study issue related to education funding. And I'll just briefly say that is coming to the floor in the next few days and it basically would create a task force to dig into this. There's a study UVM did about a year plus ago and that one's around looking at how we calculate education spending and how students get weighted per pupil gets weighted, looking at categorical aid as well as the weighting factors. So that's in the works. I'm always available to answer questions. You can reach out to me. My email is on the legislative website. Thank you so much for letting me jump the line and I can hang on for a few questions if there are any. Thank you so much, Emma. Do we have questions for Emma before we move on to the city councilors? Jeanie. Hi, Emma. As you know, the idea of like where S-13 is right now it's really important for you to convey to anybody in the final decision-making process. I mean, this is my opinion. And actually I'm speaking for a coalition of school board members that have been formed all over Vermont. Like all of these school board members have formed this coalition to advocate in lobby for the student weights to be implemented. And when I say the student weights I mean the weights from the study. So as of now, S-13 looks like it still could be amended or I'm gonna say it in the nicest way, fudged and kicked down the road without actually becoming the task force actually implementing the weights. The idea of them going back to the drawing board seems just so ludicrous. I'm happy to have a conversation separately from this. I realize like not everybody on this line is invested in that, but I am very invested in that so. Well, we should be all invested. Yeah, I hear you Jeanie and I would say like everyone should be because Burlington has the potential to really benefit from a system that's more equitable within this weighted study. And it's an interesting element where Burlington and Winnieski in particular have solidarity, have a kind of a similar cause with very rural districts which it could also benefit from a restructuring of how we do education. And there's some parts that were just frankly not really well-defined when this was all put into place. I don't even know how many years ago now 20 plus years ago. The task force process does call for several public hearing pieces of it. So I would encourage anyone who's interested, this is the power of organizing to intervene in those, you're not intervening, that sounds weird, to engage in those meetings. And the report itself is due back in mid January. So there is time for us to act on that next session and to be in touch, especially with education committee members. I mean, I am sure that I hope the Burlington delegation is fully vetted and informed on this, but it's often the committee of jurisdiction who really needs to make sure they don't water down the elements of a task force report and actually take it up and move it. So I hear you loud and clear and I'm with you and happy to talk more offline. So thank you. Well, thank you, Emma and your assistant. We really appreciate you being here tonight. And we'll move on to our city councilors and Max and Brian, oh, and we have art too, oh, beautiful. This is her portrait of all of you on Zoom. I love it, that's wonderful. Right, thanks. That definitely needs to go on the CEDAW website. Hi, Ruby, we love your art. Yeah, great job, Ruby. Thank you, Ruby. See ya. Okay, so Brian and Max, who would like to go first? You can go ahead, Brian. All right, so I'll be very brief. There are two things I'd like to mention. One is the nearly 50 openings. They're not all really open, but on the boards and commissions coming up, the deadline is actually tomorrow. So if anybody's interested in applying for serving our community by being a member of one of the 20 plus boards and commissions, there's nearly 50 openings, meaning that the seats are up for renewal. It doesn't mean that the person who's incumbent is not seeking to be reappointed, but it has happened before that incumbents, for one reason or another, don't always get reappointed. So it should be an open process and it's meant to be an open process and the appointments don't take place until sometime in the middle or late June, but the applications are due tomorrow. I would encourage anyone to go on the city's website. It's a city council page on the website. You'll see the tab on the left, which is boards, commissions and committees. You click on that and then it goes into the vacancies that are open. So encourage folks to take a look at that. The other one is that the city council recently created a Burlington Aging Council and this concept is one that has been, it's not entirely new, but the focus on seniors was sort of put on the back of the burner in a way after a study in 2019, a group of seniors and service providers and just stakeholders who care about issues affecting older Burlingtonians came together and one of their recommendations was that we form a local council focused on issues affecting seniors and the charge of the group is to review and make recommendations regarding sort of long-term provision of senior services to bring the voice and the interest of seniors to the policy makers at the city level, but also perhaps even at a state level. So it really tends to give more focus and more voice for older Burlingtonians. And I think it's an idea whose time was overdue and I'm really glad and proud to have been part of the effort, but it is open for anyone to apply. The process for that commission or council is open till May 21st and then the mayor and the council president in consultation with the city council community development and neighborhood revitalization committee will review the applications. And just to give you an idea, it's a commission, it's a council which I think is intended to be very representative. I will mention quickly that it includes a one member representing a healthcare provider, one member representing long-term care organization in Burlington, a member representing an affordable housing organization, one representing an organization working to fight food insecurity, one member representing an organization providing advocacy and support for older adults, one member representing an organization supporting new Americans in Vermont, one from an organization advocating for racial equity, inclusion and belonging, one member representing a senior center, a member representing an organization providing mental health services, one member representing an organization providing transportation services and focus on transportation issues and one member representing the city's community and economic development office. And last three, three to five older adults living in Burlington who may or may not be affiliated with one of the above groups but intended to be sort of the citizen voice, if you will. And that is all I have for tonight. Thank you, Brian. Max. Thanks for that, Brian. And thanks for having us again. It's great to see everyone. So for, we had a pretty big council agenda covering a wide range of topics this last week. We had a resolution looking at councilor pay that in council compensation, counselors, if you don't know, receive about three, a little less than $400 a month for serving in this role. And councilor Stromberg and some others on the council have been looking at this as an issue of one that can be very limiting in terms of who is able to serve and how much they're able to do even once they get into those roles. And so in that resolution, which started really more being focused on councilor pay, I got brought in out to look at some additional other potential barriers that could be standing in the way of people running for elected office and serving elected office, things like dependent care as well as healthcare. So that resolution was referred to the charter change committee with the idea of them reviewing those issues and potentially coming back with a charter change proposal to be put forward to the voters next March. So we've got plenty of time to look into those issues. There was another resolution put forward primarily by councilor Jang that had to do with creation of a dog task force to look at some issues that I guess that have been persistent in the new North end, but that I think are issues that neighborhoods across the city experience, whether that's aggressive dogs off leash, dog poop, those kinds of things, trying to create a group to look at those different issues. So that passed and that'll start getting going. After many years of process and debate and discussion, a partial, and I say partial because there is still more work to be done, but a partial weatherization ordinance passed and this is an ordinance requiring landlords to weatherize leaky buildings. The reason that it was partial is that there was broad consensus around the need to address the leaky buildings. And so they were able to identify what threshold essentially those buildings would meet in terms of just them being absolutely terrible in terms of energy efficiency. And so for those buildings, there was a broad agreement that we just needed to get this passed and get them starting to work on those really terrible buildings. Where I think the rest of it comes down where the rest of the debate kind of was a little bit more disparate was around some of those less leaky buildings, but that still certainly need attention. And both from a climate perspective, but also from a quality of life and cost of living perspective for tenants. And so the agreement, the disagreement was more around for those ones that are still in need of attention, but less leaky what timeframe we would be addressing those or requiring those to come into compliance. And there were concerns around availability of weatherization contractors and those kinds of things. So I'm of the mind that we really should just be requiring it. And if they can't find someone, that's one thing, but at least require it and force them to really take a good look and really prove that they couldn't find anyone. So that will continue to kind of go forward. And then the last piece, and I'm not sure if the mayor touched on this, I think he gave you a broader budget overview, but I did wanna just highlight some pretty substantial spending that was greenlit at the council this week. I'm not sure if I can share my screen. So I have that up. I just wanna run through just some initial spending of the American Recovery Act dollars. Okay, great. I will just share that briefly. I know it can be a little difficult to read those kinds of things, but I just wanted to bring it up just to give folks a sense of how at least this initial chunk of what is a much broader amount of government spending that will be taking place. So you might have heard that we've received $27 million in federal funding through the American, through the ARPA or the American Recovery Act. And so we'll be seeing that money come in over time, but there were some initial pieces that we were wanting to roll out. There was significant discussion and back and forth. The first piece was around wastewater testing. If you don't know, Burlington has been doing significant wastewater testing at our wastewater plants throughout this pandemic, and that has really helped us to track surges. So wanting to see that continue so that we have that predictive ability looking at different surges that continue to take place. This is a great public health tool that's really helped us to be responsive to the different trends that we're seeing there. There's also vaccines, vaccination site support, $100,000 for that, and really trying to create inclusion around that and make sure that we're continuing to reach all Burlingtonians in those vaccination efforts. So we'll continue to see that. And then also what the mayor was talking about a little bit with those emergency, enhanced emergency communications. So really trying to make sure that, again, we're being inclusive about those conversations and how we're pushing those messages out and really continuing to learn and evolve around those communications. There's also quite a bit around, quite a bit of funding that was included around getting things back up and running on an economic and community level. So thinking about mobile placemaking, so really trying to create ways for us to get out and enjoy public spaces and try and make those spaces maybe a little bit more flexible than and be creative with those spaces so that we can really make different use of them and really enjoy them in safe ways. Also just trying to have different activations around the city, so making sure that there's all kinds of different ways for people to enjoy themselves as we kind of come out of this pandemic, whether it's through open streets or pop-up markets, decorative lighting, those kinds of things, significant mural project. There had been, one of the areas that got significant debate was around graffiti removal. We've heard quite a bit of concern around graffiti removal. An initial proposal had been to have, to buy a vehicle for graffiti removal. We felt like that might be a little bit overkill given that this may be a situation where we've seen a significant surge in it as a result of the pandemic that may go away. So we certainly want to address that, but don't feel necessarily that we need to be investing all of that money and that we need to be really careful about weighing that need against all these other needs that our community has that are, that may be sort of more basic in nature. So food assistance, for instance, those kinds of things as we think about how we spend this significant money and the opportunities there. And then also just some additional constituent services. One thing that I was curious about was this $97,000 for software. They're thinking of getting a different kind of software platform from what we currently have. So we currently have C-Click Fix, which they know is, which works pretty well for like addressing like a pothole for instance, because it's a location, you can take a picture of it, drop a pin where that is and they know where it is and they can really follow that through. For some of these other things, like how you navigate like a rental relief program or something like that, it doesn't work quite as well. And so they're wanting to make an investment in that so that they can really track who all has, who all from the city and what different departments have interacted with different aspects of that tenant's question or that community members issue and really track it so that they're providing good responses and timely responses. So those are just a couple of different pieces of that funding that I wanted to touch on. And then there's still some leftover in that, even just this initial chunk, but again, there's still substantial money leftover that will go through additional community process. That's why that survey that the mayor mentioned is happening. We have budget sessions that are ongoing for that broader budget that the mayor mentioned. We have several next week, public certainly encouraged to come. There's a public forum at the beginning of those. We're also pushing several of us in the board of finance, council pine myself have been pushing for an additional town halls component trying to get just more constituent feedback both on this big chunk of money and the opportunity that it presents but then also just making our budget more inclusive and receptive to public feedback than it's been in the past. So I'll pause there because it was quite a bit of information and see if there are any questions that I'll stop sharing too. Thank you. Els, you had your hand up before. Did you have a question for councillor Tracy or councillor Pine? I was just, sorry, I was just gonna just mention sidewalks and any extra money to fix any sidewalks. I know it's a constant losing battle, but Yeah, for sure. So we've been in the last several years doing about three miles of sidewalk replacement per year in the past and in prior budgets. Well, for several years we've had enhanced sidewalk that was a result of the investment that you all made in the sustainable infrastructure bond that's allowed us to address the real backlog in sidewalks work. So we'll continue to do that. There's been a couple of initial sidewalk projects that'll happen, though there's still certainly more to come. And if, and so that will continue to roll out over the course of the summer as we kind of get into it. But again, there'll be about three miles of sidewalk work that should happen from now well into the fall. Thank you. Any other questions? Gabriel. Can you hear me? Okay, good. I really like the idea of city council is getting paid more and I was really happy to see that. I was wondering with the broader discussion that happened, if anybody was talking about barriers, kind of like on the other side, like not so much what is stopping people in terms of what's waiting for them, but what might be challenging when people are actually running. So, you know, cost of a campaign and things like that. And one thing I wanted to say was, I had a friend who ran for the state legislature and she won her seat. And I noticed that she was waived from collecting signatures in person because of the pandemic. So she was able to, she had the option to collect those signatures online. And I thought that was really nice in terms of like, a nice option for somebody who might be concerned with safety, disability access. And I would like to see that be a permanent option for all local and state campaigns is that people can collect those signatures to get on the ballot online. So like, for example, I don't see myself ever running for anything. But if I did, I wouldn't be able to go door to door very easily. So it would be really nice to have that option. So what are your thoughts on that? Gabe, I think there's some really interesting ideas there that I think deserve a lot more discussion as far as the community around how we can make it possible for people who may face mobility challenges or other challenges that make it hard to run a traditional campaign. I would say that COVID has certainly shown us that there's ways to engage with people that doesn't involve trudging through the snow in January and February to be able to reach people. So I think there's probably a lot of creative ideas out there. And I think it's a broader community conversation about how we can make it more accessible for folks to be engaged. And I do think that mailing ballots to everybody, for instance, is one way to ensure people have greater access. And we don't require people to go out and get signatures out of petition for any office during COVID. So that was the case that that practice was instituted. So I have to say, as somebody who's done it many times now, it's actually, it's a privilege and it's an incredible honor to be able to interact with people at their homes, but I recognize that it's not something everybody can do. And so I think you're bringing it up as really, is a helpful reminder that it's just not available to everybody. Thank you. Jeannie. I really appreciate that, Gabriel. And I am looking forward to hearing more ways in which people can be stewards of our city in accessible ways. And I do believe that it should be like challenged by choice kind of thing. The way that we have these mailing ballots doesn't necessarily mean that you can't go to the polls, right? So the way that you can run for office doesn't necessarily, I am hoping to extrapolate from what you just said, as it's a challenge by choice situation which you either get signatures or can submit your, you know, vie for office via something online. And there's other ways for people to get signatures, you know, I know at one point when I was, I'm just saying, trying to get permits for things that went on with the ramble, I was given the privilege and this was not during the pandemic to get people to weigh in via emails and sign off on permitting in support of, whatever we were doing. So I think that we are not abusing a system, we are using a system to help us all more be involved. So that's a great, great, yeah, I really appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you, Jeanne and thank you, Gabe. So let's see, I think it's time to move on to our school board members and our last item of the evening, we have all three of our members here tonight. And I would love, just because this is my first time facilitating as a steering committee member and I just feel like this rush of power. And I would love to ask Polly to speak first and then Jeanne and then Stephen, if that's okay with you all. Thanks Jess. So my plan was not so much to speak and give an update as it was to respond to questions, but I will say that we need a high school. And I think many of you have read the news and I felt for me like it was an easy step to take, to vote to say we need a new high school last week. And now the challenge is going to be, how do we build community support and find the right place? So that's my primary focus right now, coming out of the pandemic, but also how do we get a high school going sooner rather than later? So that's my preoccupation and my update for the moment. And I passed the baton to one of the other school commissioners. Jess, I know you said I would go next. I've been very much focused on S13, the waiting people study being implemented as a part of our educational tax funding. How do I put it? Scheme, it's just such a controversial issue. And I'm also hoping to answer questions about it. In addition to that personally, as co-chair of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee, we've been trying to schedule a educational opportunity for the board to engage in anti-racism training and also Abinaki. Unfortunately, many people say Abinaki, but it is Abinaki. Once again, a workshop or an educational opportunity for the board to just learn more about our history. All of this is part of work that I hope the board will engage in and eventually crafting or I don't want to say crafting. I want to say sincerely having buy-in with an anti-racist statement on behalf of the board. And when I say that, I mean a very layered point-by-point directives and objectives for the board, not just for how the board will direct the district, but also the work that I foresee the board doing in educating ourselves and moving forward with, oh my God, my neighborhood is so loud, I'm sorry. In actually forging a statement, not a statement, but a commitment. And also not initiated by myself, but another commissioner, Martin, feel like land acknowledgement, talking about, you know, we most meetings start with the pledge to allegiance, which is not necessarily it's just not enough. We need to pledge allegiance to the people who's the history of the grounds on which we are operating, right? And oh, I'm also helping along with Polly plan the retreat for the board. That's my main things I'm doing right now, but I'm looking forward to questions. I'm Stephen Horto, and I just want to reiterate what Jeannie said about the importance of the weighted study. It's a little disappointing to me to see that there's going to be a task force and there's going to be a report out in January because we've done a lot of PR with the elected representatives in Montpelier. And it seems to me that it would be nicer if it could move a little faster, but I guess we'll just have to wait for that one. But it is extremely important for Burlington and Wendyski and other as Emma said, smaller towns in Vermont too, who would benefit from a more legitimate analysis of the students and what their needs are. But you know, there's just so many things going on and you know that Lauren McBride has been hired as principal of VHS and that there's an assistant principal ship open and that we have another principal ship of admins because Mr. Kiefer has decided he's moving out west with his family. So there are lots of moving parts as usual. In terms of the high school, the discussion right now is site appropriateness and there are numerous sites around the city that could be considered. So that's really the first step is seeing where the site could and maybe and then to get a plan drawn. And in the meantime, we're downtown and we have that three and a half year lease. The biggest issue that I've heard about the downtown site is the noise inside the building. The light seems to be okay, the kids seem to be okay, the teaching is happening, but the noise needs to be mitigated and there are plans in the works to make that more appropriate for the opening of school in September. So that's where we are in terms of that. I'll stop at that and help answer any questions that you might have. Thank you, Stephen and Jeanne and Polly. And I realized I jumped right into the school board without officially thanking Brian and Max. So thank you so much for your time and we'll open this up to questions and you can feel free to unmute yourselves or raise your hand. I'm gonna put a question out that I've heard from constituents and I don't know that it can be answered tonight, but it has been this question around funding of a new high school and funds coming into the school district with some very clear designations for how the money is to be spent and simultaneously money coming into the city. And there are a number of people who are saying without viable high school, we don't have a viable city and we really need support from the city to make this happen and could some of this one-time miracle money, that's kind of what it feels like both from the district perspective and the city perspective go toward funding a new high school. I think one of the frustrations and possible misunderstandings I've heard is what the money is earmarked for, that it might not necessarily be earmarked for construction, that it might be earmarked for social and emotional engagement or academic recovery. Those are examples from the district level, but I do think it's valid to say without a high school, without a place for kids to be that really is a place that has been clearly designed for them, we don't have any of those things happening. So I just wanna put that out there because city counselors are here tonight to say I've had a lot of people asking me questions about money coming in through COVID recovery funds to Burlington with this unique situation of needing a high school and how and where that money is earmarked and how it's going to be spent in a really strong desire for it not to not go towards this project. So that's possibly a not an answerable question but one I think should be brought up now. I would just be able to respond briefly and not with a great bond detail, fortunately, but to say that there is still almost, there's very little guidance for the federal government at the present. So ARPA is this huge thing and we know so little about it. So the list of questions is much longer than the list of answers. And that is true for the governor and the legislature and that's why the governor's allocation of ARPA funds was greeted by the legislature with a pause button of wait, wait, wait, we can't really plan to spend the dollars that you're planning to without knowing what we're going to be allowed to do. That guidance is starting to come out of treasury but it's gonna be a while, it's gonna take some time. So I guess the answer is, I think we all share the desire and the goal to get our high school rebuilt, a new high school built but I don't think we have any answers right now. So I don't wanna give folks a false sense of optimism except to say that I think the community will come together and find a way to make it happen if it's possible. And on that same thing, I think that I view this as an issue that's gonna require significant collaboration between the council and the school board. And so I reached out to a superintendent plan again and chair will this week to just see if we could just at least start that process. I'm not envisioning like that conversation that we had earlier where it was a lengthier one. I know that you all are sort of also at the beginning of your process but just to get that conversation going. So I'm hoping that we'll be able to have this as an item on the agenda for our next council meeting if only to at least just get a sense, get counselors up to speed fully on what you all are dealing with in the fuller picture of the situation. Because I know that counselors pretty much across the board are concerned about this. And so I just wanna create that open dialogue between the district and the council and the administration kind of starting now continue that over the course of the next several years. That feels so good to hear. We obviously need to bond together. We need to, obviously the school board cannot do this alone and they shouldn't because this is about our entire city. So however many fractions of our city municipalities we can engage that feels right to me. Also Polly, I believe these funds are time sensitive. It's not like at some point what they are used for will have an expiration date. It's not a, they just get put in the bank account and we get to use them forever and ever. Or maybe I'm wrong and if I'm wrong, that's great. But obviously, I mean, it is probably a thing where they're gonna be marked for certain objectives. Hopefully more about student experience than infrastructure. But that's just my personal opinion. But I'm saying that because anything that goes into and at this point, can we call it the re-envisioning program or project, it's gonna take years. We are already five years deep into what we thought would be something that would be somehow in place. I mean, when I say in place, I mean, starting to happen right around now, physically, actually. So if we are going back to the drawing board, which we are and we're going back to the drawing board, not necessarily knowing where our physical space is going to be. So we have to factor in that if we're gonna get input from the community, figure out finances. And when I say community, I really want to stress to everybody on the line right here, especially to my city counselors, BTC, anything about the Burlington Technical Center needs to be as large as a voice as any representative from Burlington High School. What is going on at the Tech Center is completely genius. And our general public has no idea what a gem we have in our community. And I am saying that so lightly. They're winning awards, of course. Okay, I'm not gonna go on, but mark my words. Burlington Technical Center is an innovative program that is going to make their mark in our nation very soon. With that said, they need to be a part of anything that has to do with this new school building. And that's gonna take time. Yeah, that's a really great point, Jeannie, and the Tech Center is such a resource. And we should have a presentation at one of our coming up NPA meetings about what they're doing there and how they can help shape the future of the school too. So I got a little scribble on my paper here. So we'll definitely do that. And we've gone over time, I'm so sorry. We do, Tony has one question. We can maybe finish with that question. Yes, thank you, thank you, Jess. And thank you, school board members for going back to the drawing board and saying we've got to start again fresh and look what it is it's gonna provide a facility for our high school students. It's gonna be quality. It's gonna meet the needs and look forward 20 years. I think that that was a part of the issue to begin with. You're really given a second life on this. I heard yesterday from one of your compatriots, Allwell from Ward, I believe she's Ward 1-2, excuse me, Ward 1-8, that the reason that you're abandoning the school is, and this is a question a lot of people had, was this $12 million guess, a guesstimate on what it would take to remove the existing contamination. And you first got to have money for a building. That comes first, and that's why you had to abandon that site. You may not get to spend $12 million, but the last dollar you spend would be trying to deal with that hulk, which may be the new brand plant of the city that sits there for decades before something's done. I'm sure that won't happen, but I liken it to that. So I guess my comment is one, thank you for making the decision you did was not easy and establishing the priority of getting a good facility built and that wasn't gonna be possible realistically to afford the cleanup and a new building at one time. I think that was part of it. And also you didn't really know what you're gonna run into and trying to remove that building or even if you chose to go that route. It's not easy. I think you will have the community behind you. I think that we're now forward looking in the city that and the work with our legislators has already gotten dividends at the state level and that cooperation is gonna have to continue. A sizable portion of any new construction should be sought for this and other new buildings, school buildings across the state from the legislature. Thank you. I'm just gonna jump in and say, Tony, of course we care about the money, but I believe the decision was more about protecting people from risk. It had more to do with the idea of working with a space and with a building that is toxic. I mean, no matter what we do in the future, we still have to spend a ton of money to clean up that site. The idea of moving forward with the re-envisioning project had more to do with safety than money. That's my personal opinion. And I'm a really frugal person, so... I don't think I can spend it on myself. Well, with tax money. Well, I think we'll wrap up for tonight. This has been a great conversation and excellent information. There's just so much going on in the city. And Polly, Steven, and Jeannie, thank you so much for your intrepid service and for keeping these things moving along. And Brian and Max, thank you for helping lead the city through pandemic and then some. And we're so grateful tonight for a Channel 17 town meeting TV for making these recordings possible. So folks who can't be here in person can watch it. Thank you so much to Liam at CEDO for supporting the steering committees and this work. And thank you all for listening and watching tonight and in the future days. We really appreciate your participation. We look forward to seeing you next month on June 10th. Thanks so much, everyone. Thanks, Jess. Thank you. Thanks, everyone.