 Oh my goodness. Wow. Let's take a moment here. Thank you. Do you need to change anything else? Okay. Oh, wait a second. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Sorry. My goodness. Thank you all for being here. Oh, good. All right. So good afternoon. It's a joy to be here with three generations of my family and with so many of you who have served for the city and who I've been able to partnership and partner with and other ways over the last decade to move this community forward. In this room, 12 years ago, right here, I announced my intent to run for mayor of Burlington. I said we would fix the city's finances, hold city officials accountable and get stuck in stalled projects moving again. I promised the people of Burlington a fresh start, hard work, and a steady hand during the crises of our times. I didn't know then, of course, that those crises would include a global pandemic, an insurrection, an economic shutdown, and then sustained high inflation. I didn't imagine standing here that day that we would see a multi-year shutdown of the largest construction building, largest construction project in the state's history, the city's history, an unprecedented drug epidemic, and the closure of only high school. But if I had known then what I know now, it wouldn't have mattered. I would have stepped up for this job without hesitation, serving the people of Burlington with an amazingly talented and committed team and in partnership with so many people who cared deeply about this city has truly been the opportunity of a lifetime. With the City Council, with everyone here in this room, and most importantly with the people of Burlington who steadfastly supported dozens and dozens of our initiatives at the ballot box, we made good in that opportunity. We delivered on those campaign promises and then we delivered on much, much more. With a focus on equity and data and with dogged persistence, we got the big questions right and we forged great progress. It took seven years, but we lifted the city from the edge of insolvency to a double A rating, saving taxpayers nearly $45 million in counting. This financial strength hasn't just saved money, though. It's been critical in the years since as unexpected disasters hit and we needed to move aggressively first to fight COVID and then to construct a new 21st century high school. We took on and we beat one of the biggest banks in the world in order to resolve the Burlington Telecom debacle. And then with our credit and our credibility restored, we went out and proved that city government could still get big things done. We realized generational projects this community had been waiting on for many decades. Let me talk about a few. We completed the largest parks project in the city's history by rebuilding and upgrading the entire eight-mile-long lakefront bike path. The northern waterfront, which was abandoned in derelict as late as 2014, is now alive with skateboarders, kids learning to enjoy the lake and visitors arriving by boat. Today, hundreds of thousands of riders pass through our modern transit center every year and you can take a train from Union Station to New York City for the first time since the 1950s. And the Champlain Parkway, the mother of all stuck-installed Burlington projects, is now under construction and ironically, it's ahead of schedule. I guess it depends when you start counting on that one. Don't start 12 years ago. As a result of what we put in motion, this investment in renewal will continue and expand for years to come. This fall, we will break ground on a $30 million effort to transform Main Street and we have secured nearly $50 million of TIF funding and federal dollars to rebuild another 10 blocks of Cherry Street, Bank Street, and the new streets through City Place and rebuild them to the great street standards we created in 2018. What that means is the downtown of the near future will have healthy and tall street trees, outdoor public art and dining, protected bike lanes on Main Street, and beautiful planted gardens that also help keep Lake Champlain clean. In 2011, our housing market was totally broken and had built just 550 homes in this great city in a decade that had seen unprecedented national housing boom and particularly a downtown housing boom. With innovative partnerships at Cambrian Rise and City Place and Wichamplain College, a complete rewrite of our downtown zoning, the elimination of wasteful parking policies, and more, we have turned this around. Since 2011, more than 2,000 new homes have been built or are in construction and our pace of new home production is still accelerating. We are on track to meet the goal I set at the end of 2011 to increase the 2001 to 2011 housing production rate 400% by 2026. I came to the mayor's office with far more experienced building homes than I had in politics and there was, to put it lightly, some initial skepticism, should we say, around the developer mayors focus on making housing plentiful. But we made the case year in and year out that to make good on the promise of housing as a human right, we need to build a lot more homes and we have won that debate. We are a community that does what it takes to make that possible. We had a moment that dramatically represented this shift in attitudes and land use policy just a couple months ago when the city council considered an effort to rezone 84 acres of the south end in order to legalize housing in that zone for the first time and make it legal at substantial scale. I had to abandon an earlier effort to do something like this because it was too controversial just a few years ago, but this time it passed, it passed unanimously and even more amazingly, every person who came out to give public comment was in favor of the change. We've led the conversation on the other great issues of our day. We are leading the nation with our muscular and innovative local climate policies. We were the first community in the country to create net zero energy revenue bonds so that we can invest $20 million into improving our grid and electrifying everything. We now require all older rental buildings to be weatherized, to meet modern insulation and air sealing standards, changes that make a huge impact. And while many have given up on the critical climate policy of properly pricing carbon, because they don't think it's politically possible, before the end of the year here in Burlington with the approval of the voters, with the approval of the legislature, with the signature of the governor, we will implement one of the country's first carbon pollution impact fees. When 26 first graders and teachers were murdered just a few miles south of the Vermont border, here in Burlington we ended years of silence in this state over common sense gun violence policy. We passed gun violence charter changes and we demanded that the state act. Eleven years later, some of what we called for is still pinned to the wall in a state house conference room, but Vermont is now a place where life-saving gun violence initiatives can become law. For my first months in office until now, we've pursued the essential and difficult work of eradicating racism. In 2019, before the horror of George Floyd's murder, we created one of the state's first racial equity, inclusion and belonging departments, and it is now far better resourced than even the state's own diversity and equity initiative. And in 2021, we started the already beloved tradition of the city hosting a major Juneteenth celebration every year. We've also worked tirelessly to get policing and public safety right. I've challenged our officers to live up to President Obama's 21st century policing ideals by becoming one of the first cities in New England to comprehensively deploy body cameras, overhauling the way in which we respond to mental health crises and becoming the most transparent and data-oriented department in Vermont. However, I also have long understood that our public safety depends on having police officers willing to put themselves at risk for our safety and fought those who sought to decimate our officer ranks. Well, I regret, I don't have many regrets, but I do regret that it took 18 months to reverse the city council decision to eliminate 30% of our officers. We are now on track with our rebuilding plan. We have a confirmed and committed chief, and we are in a trajectory to become a stronger, better resourced, and more skilled police department than ever. As we've gone directly at these big issues, that's always the way I thought we needed to do it. As we've gone directly at them, my perspective was always informed by what was on the minds of Brawntonians. One of the things I'm going to miss most when this job is over is my weekly coffees. My weekly coffee and a bagel, sesame seed with a slice of tomato, they know that out there, with dozens of neighbors in the New North End. We have had now more than 500 of these weekly talks, but just about every week, still, there's a constituent who comes for the first time, and I never leave without learning something new. I also love the conversations I had with Brawntonians about the issues of the day at our Mayor's Book Group meetings. We haven't had one of them for a while, but they were great when we did them. We hosted them in partnership with UVM Humanities Center that bought hundreds and hundreds of books for this community so we could do these events. One summer, amidst the huge community debate we had over City Place, we read a book called The Triumph of the City, in which writer Ed Glazer makes the case that cities are human kinds greatest invention, and that they make us richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier. The noble work of making these complex inventions function is, of course, never really done. It's never really finished. And because of that, because there is so much important work still to do, and because so many constituents have urged me to run again, deciding whether or not to seek another term has been one of the most difficult decisions I've faced in this job or in my life really. After 12 years, the longest unbroken stretch of any Mayor, with the pandemic behind us, the economy largely recovered, and investment and progress on track to continue, I have decided that now is the right time to conclude my service as Mayor. I will not be seeking re-election for a fifth term as a Mayor at Brawnton. However, I want to be clear, while I am not certain what I will do next, I have every intention of staying involved. We still have an enormous housing shortage and the second worst homelessness problem per capita of any state in the nation. We have a deepening drug crisis that is taking an enormous toll on this community and on the rest of Vermont, and a wide range of serious public safety problems. And we are not doing nearly enough as a state to take on the climate emergency. These issues are bigger than what any one community, even Brawnton, can solve on its own, and they are not going to fix themselves. Addressing these challenges will require committed, tireless leadership, and I am going to take some time to explore how I can best continue to work on these challenges. I also want to be very clear that while I will not be on the ballot in March, this administration intends to run through the tape from now until April. I shared that with our department heads yesterday, and I don't think they were surprised, but I'm committed to handing off a strong, effective, and resilient local government for our next city's leader to Steward, and that will mean a lot of work and big decisions on public safety, the budget, infrastructure, and more over the next six months. As you can see, I take great joy and have incredible pride in the work of this administration. I want to say thank you to the many department heads, current department heads, and past department heads who have, some of whom have traveled from some distance to be here, as well as our colleagues who just couldn't be here but wanted to. I've been so grateful and proud that you all joined and committed yourselves to this team and to Burlington. I also see in the crowd today other city workers, union leaders, business and nonprofit leaders, the builders of this city, and I want to say to you thanks as well. I am so proud of our collaborations as well. And most importantly, I want to say thank you to the people of Burlington. I am so grateful to have had your faith and confidence for 12 years, and I want you to know, I want the people of Burlington to know that that is not a confidence I've ever taken for granted. I actually brought a prop here. I keep on my desk at home this frame copy of the 2011 Democratic Caucus ballot. And there's some great details here. There's a sticker, there's a plastic sheath that made sure people held on to it. I left my ballot in my jacket pocket, almost didn't get the ballot in, but I leave there on my desk to remind me that if a single one of the 540 people who supported me that in November had voted differently, or even simply if they had decided to go home instead of sticking around for six hours in the third ballot, the last 12 years would have been very different. Certainly would have been different for me. I think they would have been different for this community. Every time I walk up the stairs to the third floor of City Hall, I am grateful for this role. I'm full of respect for the Office of Mayor, and full of respect for what city government can do to improve the lives of our neighbors. Almost done. There's a little, not everyone knows this, a little kitchen down the hall here. I remember kind of hiding in there 12 years ago, waiting, hoping for a crowd to build before I walked out to launch what seemed at that point like a fairly improbable campaign. We had done the work. We had made the calls. But as a first-time candidate for office at my first-ever press conference, I had no idea what to expect. I had no idea if anyone would show up. But you did. And you did time and time again for the city, for the tough times and the celebrations. We've had lots of both. We have been tested. And together, we have made this wondrous invention of Burlington an even more special place to call. Thank you.