 While we're talking about the food I want to say a big thank you to Matt Grady for roasting a turkey for us in his new oven and to Mary Riley for making lots and lots of cookies and for the Burlington Food Project for, is that what it's called? Do I have that name right? The project out of the high school that prepares food and we, they cater the sides this evening and then we're really happy to have Charlie McFadgen here on keyboard. Yes, thank you Charlie, thank you. And he'll be offering some interlude music between our presenters and he'll, yes, we talked about him accompanying people as they commented but decided not to. So what we'd like to do now is offer a 10-minute public comment period. Is there anyone here who would like to make a comment? Joel and Rob? You're creating, we've known each other for a long time. So I'm Rob Bacchus, I'm a Ward 6 resident and I'm closely related to Michelle Moraz although not biologically. So I just wanted to say that you're creating a wonderful community adventure, it's really cool. So thank you. So folks, could you just identify themselves before they comment? That'd be great. So my name is Joel Fitzgerald and I'm on the steering committee so it's kind of odd that I'm going to talk. But last meeting we had Megan Moore here talk about water projects in the city and all that stuff. And then after the meeting, very shortly after, I got home and I had this sign on my yard and it's talking about storm water runoff and what the city has plans of doing and all that stuff and it says to call the city with what's going on. So I called them two or three times and I got nothing back and then I knew that this meeting was tonight so I talked to James Charart who was, I think he's going to speak the next meeting but I told him how disappointed I was when we had Megan Moore here last meeting and Megan said nothing about you know plans of doing core samples on yards on what we're doing you know for treatment of water in words five and six and I said I was really disappointed and you know I think it was a perfect opportunity for her to you know to create a partnership with you know with this project with words five and six so one of the reasons I'm up here for is I don't want to be a complainer I want to be part of the solution. So I did talk to some of my neighbors and our fears this is they're gonna put bump outs in the road and in some of the places that are marked are behind driveways and they're at odd places so what I want to do is I want to be part of the solution and then I want to talk to my council person and the city to see if we can all in our little cove down there find a place to put these bump outs because we do support the bump outs and we do support the city but we think it's a great time to start a partnership with full transparency and have all the neighbors down there come up with a reasonable solution that everybody can like and instead of just coming home with these on our front yards and not knowing anything about it I mean when it says treat water when you use the word treat and the sign on your front yard you really get a little bit nervous so I just wanted to say I want to be part of the solution but I'm hoping that the city does as well so what the bump outs are is when the water is coming down the hill it's hitting the down which we support and what I did also talk about is a city maintenance of the current drains that the maintenance was better and the leaves didn't plug them you know some of the water would go down and instead of going by them so there was a couple things we talked about on the phone but he is going to be here the next meeting or one of the representatives is so I thought it was a good opening piece and hopefully it's beginning of a good relationship on Glen road so that's all I have thank you well I read something in the email something about a July 10th meeting and he said it was something to do with a 30 million dollar project and it was going to be in the city's green space anyway and I said well you know you know you expect us to maintain it but yet you don't want us any input on what's going on with it so I think we had a really good conversation and I he was surprised that Megan did not bring it up and and so he was very proactive he said I will let Megan know and then he emailed me the next day and said hey we really want to get in front of this thing so I was very impressed that he did you know he was going to come tonight he said I really apologize and then so he he's we're gonna put him on the agenda for the next meeting but he was a little surprised and and what surprised me is I went around the neighborhood and I didn't see anything else and now I hear that you have them but I mean you come home and you got three stakes in the front yard behind driveways and it was it was kind of startling for us so anyway I think it can work out if every villain if everybody's willing to let it work out so thanks Joel the things I forgot to do was to introduce the steering committee so the ward six NPA steering committee is comprised of myself Michelle Maraz, Mary Riley, Gail Rafferty, and Joel Fitzgerald, Matt Grady's behind the camera, I feel like Oprah Winfrey, you're all going home with a new car, does anyone else have a public comment and what we're gonna do is we're gonna pass the mic so everyone can hear the thing with this mic is you have to put it super close to your mouth to be heard super super close okay I just want to let our neighbors know that we are at the end of the academic semester for our Champlain College residential students I'm Sandy Euston from Champlain College this is exam week next week is I'm sorry this is the last week of classes next week is exam week and so you will see students moving out tends to be on a staggered schedule so I don't expect it to be as as crazy as move-in can be but just wanted to give you the heads up and then I also just wanted to call out that we do have new rapid rectangular flashing beacons on South Willard Street south of the Maple Street intersection so that's just a great development that we hope will enhance safety for both pedestrians and drivers so thanks thanks to the city for that thank you I was going to say Bob Lidy I lived near those blinking lights and it's just amazing that they're in there now having personally witnessed a Champlain College student break the windshield of a car which was really a horrible thing to see having the city proactively put on these lights and a bump out makes me feel so good thank you Bob anyone else okay so we'll start our agenda and we are very pleased to have our city counselors here we have Joan Shannon who is the South District Counselor and Karen Paul our very own words counselor and if you don't mind just coming up here and what we're looking for is an update on council activities and then we will have time for folks to ask questions and make comments and if you could speak into the mic that would be great so the we're picking up audio for the video through that one just curious like wicked close we should actually be used to this at the council meetings we tell people that when they're this close they're not close enough so goodness there's a lot going on I'll try to cover a couple of things we now have as most of you know a new design and a timeline for the first city place the construction is slated to start actually it's actually there's even a date it's August 10th of 2020 projected completion date in 30 months which would be February 2023 and there are phases and benchmark dates along the way so that was certainly great news and as many of you probably know the project is much reduced in scope and scale and size which I think makes most people happy I know it makes me happy and and there's more of a holistic approach to the entire project because of course now we have the they are able to incorporate the former Macy's property so that the schedule does include it does anticipate a fairly smooth ride for permitting but there is some wiggle room in terms of timing to be able to get construction to August of 2020 the other thing I just wanted to mention is that I had had a couple of people who had asked me over the last couple of days about the about our council meeting we had a vote to amend our our TIF request for tax increment financing and that's because of the timeline on city place it's not about the city place project it's about the TIF request voting no on that would have meant that we were out of compliance with TIF law which would also affect our audit that's done by the state so there really wasn't really wasn't a no this was really a yes because in fact on the project is amended and most of the people that were opposed to the project were opposed because of the project now the project is smaller it's going to take more time because of course it's got to go through public engagement and a permitting process but I think we're on a good track at least at least it appears I think cautious optimism is where what I would call my approach to this then I just wanted to also mention just because it happened two days ago two days ago was the deadline for RFP submissions for the memorial project that went out in October responses were due on the 2nd of December there were a couple of operators who responded to the RFP and the same consultant that's working on city place for us is what also working on memorial and there would be there is funding for that project through through TIF through a general bonding for the city which would obviously come to a ballot vote hopefully in November of 2020 and they've come a long way there was an eight million dollar funding gap and they have through a lot of looking at a lot of sources and as well as memorial auditorium yes sorry about that okay I thought I said memorial but okay okay all right so in any event that's come a long way over the past year or so in order to accommodate all of the amenities and modernizing the building it is fairly costly and part of our agreement with the schools in terms of the bonding for the new high school meant that we as the city side of this equation had to give up a little bit of our capacity our debt capacity so it was a matter of finding a happy medium in terms of moving this project forward and we'll see where we go from there and then just wanted to mention City Hall Park is on schedule despite the fact that we had a bit of an early winter on and the last thing that I saw on this which was about a couple of weeks ago was that it still is on schedule for an opening late summer of next year the roundabout is still on the timeline to begin 2021 for completion in 2022 the only thing that may get in the way of that is the Champlain Parkway because obviously we can't do both at the same time and then one other thing the budget the board of finances working with the mayor on the budget that will probably become a little more we will know where we where we stand with that in January for now we know that there are some funding challenges and we are working through those obviously if we had to ask for a tax increase it would come into on town meeting day so we need we're actively working on that and and then the other thing I just wanted to mention is thank you for bringing Joel the stake that was in your yard and I hope that if others have something like that that happens some that they will be in touch with us so that we can we can work on that and figure out what's going on so thank you I don't want to take up it all the time so I'm trying to mostly touch on things that Karen has not covered yet I just know done on city place even though there really wasn't a no vote all we were doing was updating just telling the state what the new plan is in order to preserve our ability to get the TIF funds for the public infrastructure which was broadly supported that was never controversial really there were still three no votes which I don't even know what that means really to vote no to on an on an update but there were I I just posted something I'm from porch form about that as well and there are a couple links on there that are pretty interesting just looking at the different floor plan so you can see what the program is and what goes where and if you have any comment on it feel free to let us know and also the timeline which get which Karen outlined quite nicely I also serve on the the committee on policing that was recently formed we haven't made a whole lot of progress but the city council has extended our deadline for a report on that and asked for us to come back asked for us to prioritize recommendations on use of force and citizen oversight and I think one of the things that that I'm learn it's always interesting when you serve on these committees you get to do a deep dive into an area of the city that you know for all these years I've really never taken a deep dive into policing policy but we've been learning about the training that the police get and the our hiring practices and a variety of things around policing and also hearing from at the last meeting we heard from some families that have family members suffering from mental illness who are calling the police regularly in their experience and they actually had quite a lot of praise for our police officers and the treatment they they get they say once in a while you know something doesn't go so well and we call back and say can you send somebody else but for the most part their experiences have been really good and our police work with the the street outreach program at Howard and have a very close relationship working with social workers and one of the things that has come out recently is that the social workers were cut back from from six social workers in the street outreach program to four and the city stepped up its funding to retain the four but they're still down those two and I think that they they do feel that another thing that has been brought forward and I don't know if it might have been covered at the last meeting but there's been a proposal to bring back non-citizen voting non-citizen voting was a proposal brought forward five years ago and rejected by the voters it's being brought forward again and I would love to have anybody's input on whether or not you want to see that on the ballot again if you know things have changed for you or you see a reason to bring that forward again I think that it's interesting that our one immigrant city counselor is not supportive of it and I think that there's some divide in the immigrant community as to summer for it and not everybody is so we approve the purchase of many new vehicles at our last meeting and the city has put out as you probably seen the roadmap to net zero one of the components of that is the city is going to lead the way in in trying to get our fleet and get the city as close to net zero as we can and part of that is converting our fleet to electric vehicles so in this round we were able to get three police vehicles converted to hybrids one large electric rider mower which is going to replace the gas mower and then there were 12 trucks that are neither electric nor hybrid I and we're told I don't know if you have more information but apparently they're not making electric bucket loaders yet and when they do I think we will be the first in line to purchase them but unfortunately there are a lot of vehicles out there that are not yet available in fossil fuel free models we are you will see on the ballot an extra penny for the housing trust fund the housing trust fund has through the last reassessment kind of got depleted in the process the way it's attached to to the tax bill when when the values increased there wasn't an an increase in the amount of the amount going to the housing trust fund and so the city has been making up for that through the general fund and we're trying to restore that that penny that full penny from the housing trust fund for the housing trust fund I think the way it was was it was a penny for the housing trust fund but then in reassessment it got because it was revenue neutral it got reduced to half a penny roughly speaking so there there will be a question on the ballot about increasing funding for the housing trust fund and I didn't think that it was I think it was unanimously supported no to two votes against it but it certainly has broad support and I've heard broad support word in the community there was a proposal to put two cents on the tax rolls for this but we also have other funds that were looking at other ways to fund the housing trust fund as well so one cent seemed to be the place to to start this and I think that people should be cognizant of a couple of things when we're voting on taxes one is that we've approved a seventy million dollar school bond that has not yet hit our taxes so the other is with reappraisal I would expect that we're going to see a shift in value from commercial to residential so that it's revenue neutral in that the city is not going to collect any more money but who they collect the money from is going to shift some people can pay less some people can pay more and if you look up the value if you look up the value of your house on the city tax assessor's site and you see that it's roughly half of what your neighbor's house just sold for that's just like yours your taxes are highly likely to increase and somewhat significantly so I've expressed some concern that when we go to the voters and we say this is what the increase is going to be for a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar house in Burlington that two hundred and fifty thousand dollar house isn't going to be a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar house two years from now so and we can't I don't think we have any way to accurately tell you how to figure out what these these taxes are going to mean at this point in time until we get through reassessment so I just want to caution people and and keep that on the on the radar thank you thank you Joan and Karen yeah we want to leave time for people to have questions and comments so it's just it's just market value and so some neighborhoods have gone up more in value than other neighborhoods I had asked you why it commercial is going to be less than residential now and you yeah commercial commercial property just has an increase in value can you kind of municipality your taxes of the commercial we already taxes and yes and we do that we've been doing that for a long time I believe commercial is taxed at 1.2 percent of their of their value so can that be raised that can be raised they're already paying quite a bit more than their value but yes except what you just implied is that residents are going to be hit with a substantial tax and yes one way to upset offset that might be to increase commercial yes two questions please I assume that Memorial Auditorium I haven't kept up with it that is a rehab and not a tear down and rebuild okay second question is with with the new plan for city place now are we now open for a total new round of legal obstructionism but has to go through permitting so there's a regulatory process and of course that could that could be challenged so so when you give it an August 20 start date that could be fluid depending upon the reaction of certain portions of our population that don't want this to happen it could be it could be one of the the the most those people that were opposing the project the primary there were a couple of primary reasons why they were opposed and those issues have been significantly addressed through the redesign whether it's by why because of the economics which some of it is the economics I mean we all know that you know office space is not as needed in this community perhaps even over the over in many communities is not as needed we know that retail the face of retail over the past even five years has changed significantly we know that housing is still a critical need and a lot of that has been taken into account in the new design plus it is smaller in scope and that was one of the biggest concerns of many opponents of the project real quick question could you comment on the library upgrade project from the article I read it sounded like the city wasn't going to provide any of the funds and it's important you know I'm you know Fay I don't know a lot about that I was contacted by the library I know that they are have been working through they hired a consultant and have been working through a feasibility study and I don't think that that has been completed but they are I think actively working to raise a lot of the funds outside the city it has not come before the board of finance and yet it is awfully early so I don't know enough about that to really answer it completely that's what I know so can you comment on the Amtrak train coming in 2021 and it's overnight storage issue so the Amtrak it's been the strong desire of this community to attract Amtrak to Burlington Amtrak is now coming to Burlington but we're being told that when Amtrak comes it's going to require a second rail that second rail is going to go between the existing rail and what's now Main Street landing Main Street landing you know many I don't know how many 20 25 years ago or something they've got a lot of money to create a train station there and there's there's a lease agreement where they have rights that go about eight feet from their doors so that was agreed to quite a long time ago and now the prospect of putting a rail and a train there is not looking very appealing so part of the question is where does the train overnight and get serviced and another part of the question is is the second rail needed the second rail goes right where the bike path is so the city is working more oh had come up with kind of a priority of what the how the city is going to evaluate the project and I think that it was really good I can't recite a verbatim but it included things like making sure looking looking at it from the perspective of public benefits and making sure that there was a place you know that the bike path was going to have a home and so we are working on developing the bike path on the other side of the railroad tracks and there there's still discussion going on to figure out if there are other options for storing the trains obviously nobody really wants trains stored in their front yard or their backyard so actually that and you're waiting white okay yeah I mean there has been there has been an update to that just today yeah gerrymanic Kingsland Terrace I think the latest I've heard is that the railroad would be putting in the second track no matter what so it's really a little bit separate from the overnighting of the the Amtrak and the latest proposal is potentially a McNeil plant overnighting location that's the latest I've heard as of about a week ago well it's actually as of today yesterday the Vermont Rail Council met and they didn't know they didn't allow for public public comment they met as a committee and they voted on the ideal location all of there was I don't know that it was unanimous but they were ranked according to you know preference and the number one vote getter was the intervail was around McNeil the one that came in last was actually Main Street landing so you know it appears as though it's possible that that issue may be resolved in what I think most people would say is a pretty good outcome the rail the rail Vermont rail systems has a 50-year lease on that property and it is within their ability to have that second rail line that is the next as you said that is separate they claim that they need that rail line not only for trains to be able to pass at night but also because they have a dinner a dinner car a dinner train that they were on a couple of days a week and having Amtrak as well as freight trains would impede their ability to have that train so that has yet to be resolved Charles Simpson the I was at one of the planning meetings for memorials redesigned and what the folks said there is while the redesign concepts there were several offered and they were very exciting but they all we all said well you've got to do the whole block because you've got to have is the facility won't work without adequate parking there's no adequate parking in that area and the plan BTV of course calls for this being the gateway block and the whole block being being taken into consideration so I'm wondering in your call for proposals did you ask people to redesign the whole block and did you add parking my recollection of the RFP is no it did not it didn't call for the redevelopment of the entire block and nor did it call for parking and I think that the view is that in a downtown area that it could be sustained as it always has been without parking so we're looking for an operator who can make it work with a little more modest more modest upgrades to the building so we have time for maybe one quick comment or question before we go on to our next agenda item okay great can I make one then yeah so I just wanted to say two things the first is kudos to the NPA Ward 6 NPA steering committee who has done an amazing job to get great speakers great conversation wonderful food just when I think that you've got a really great meal the next meal is better so and this is definitely an event not to be missed every month we will miss it in set in January because there is no Ward 6 NPA meeting in January but we'll be back in February and just wanted to just wanted to mention that well of course it's not everyone's responsibility to know the amount of hard work that the NPA steering committee does I want to acknowledge what they do because I know a lot of the work that has gone into making these events and and thank you thank you very much I'd also like to give a special shout out to Ward 6 own Charlie Charlie McFadgen for providing our lovely dinner music and creating a completely new ambiance at the NPA thank you and that's what we've got in mind so this is our gentle transition to the state representatives Joey Donovan and Mary Sullivan will be presenting next they'll be talking about what they've done over the summer and what they're gearing up to do in this session that starts next month so we'll ask them to provide an update and then we'd love to have your comments and questions for them and please be close to the mic sure I'll start I'm Mary Sullivan I live in Ward 5 on Caroline Street and I think most of you know that our district goes it's mostly Ward 5 and a fair bit of Ward 6 so the thing that I wanted to talk mostly about is I've been active in the climate solutions caucus since I went back to the legislature in 2015 I co-chaired it for the last three years I've just stepped aside is that as the co-chair this summer we really took out had a road show we had about summer and fall we had about I think close to 20 meetings of people around the state to present our climate agenda and we've had so far over a thousand people have attended these meetings to kind of let them know what we want to get done in this next session and to ask them to kind of help us move it forward we always remind people that we have a lot of pressure within the building from the fossil fuel lobbyists and people like that we need help from people outside the building so they've been we had a meeting Tuesday night at Burlington Electric Department I don't know if any of you were able to make it but I think there were probably close to 90 people there and it was really a great discussion with a lot of people expressing their frustration saying you are not doing enough you are not realizing it's an emergency I do realize that it's an emergency and we need to really get moving the few bills that were there's one bill the Global Warming Solutions Act and that would take our the reductions goals that we have in law now and make them instead of goals mandates and so that actually maybe we would start working toward them we have been increasing our emissions lately instead of reducing and when these goals were first put in place in 2007 they were heralded around you know especially around New England it's really out front and it's a little embarrassing now that we haven't even you know we have budgets that come from the governor's office that are not reflective at all of you know the governor has said that he wants to abide by the Paris Climate Accord and you've got to have budgets and you've got to have programs that allow you to start moving forward and we don't see that so with the Global Warming Solutions Act the other thing about it is that there's a citizen right of action in it so that if you say an organization sees that we're not meeting the goals they can see the state and that is the the element that that Massachusetts really going and they are now achieving they're actually better than achieving their goals so we think it will really help remind the other thing is the Transportation Climate Initiative and this is I don't know if you're familiar with Reggie the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that was started under Governor Douglas in I don't know 2008 or something I can quite remember but it has brought down the emissions in the electricity sector by working regionally in a cap and trade way so that we get money back and this money that comes back gets put into weatherization and other things that further reduces our emissions so Transportation Climate Initiative will be set up similarly and it's mostly the same state that's involved in Reggie and we are it's being worked on at the administration level and our goal is to make sure that it keeps moving forward and that we get it into place very quickly it's been talked about now for a few years so that's mostly our climate agenda we passed a wonderful plastics and this single use plastic ban last year it's one of the strong I think it is the strongest in the country actually and we're hoping there will be legislation that starts in the Senate but we'll come over to the House obviously that will add to that I was trying today to find out exactly what might be in this draft legislation I wasn't able to find out but I know what I'd like to see in it so I will really be keeping an eye on that and there's a lot of single use plastic that's out there that could be included and other states I think especially California has banned some of these products it's not unheard of and with that I think I'll turn it over you know one one bill that we passed last session but I don't think a lot of notice is that we codified in our statutes access to abortion and that was the first time we did that and I thought that was an important step and we also have set forth a plan forward that will have a plebiscite on that and have a constitutional have the have part of our constitution and that is a very very involved action it it'll have to go to a public vote two different times over a period of five or seven years and I just think I'm so proud that we did that and I never thought it got very much notice in the press or any discussions. Of course two of the things that I think are going to be on our agenda the first day we go back in January is going to be the minimum wage bill and the paid family leave bill those are two bills that we work very very hard on and the governor veto both of them the minimum wage was over five or six years back going up to $15 an hour and you know here in Chittenden County I don't think anybody can find anybody to work for almost $15 an hour but in fact throughout the state we've over 60,000 people largely women single heads of household that are working struggling to raise children on less than $15 an hour and I always think of them when I think about the importance of passing that and also the paid family leave would be such an enormous help to families I personally was able to take advantage of the federal family leave with outpay when my husband was sick and needed health care in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and it was a really wonderful relief to know that I had my job to go back to in three months and I didn't have to worry about it and I think how wonderful it is now if we pass this bill you know the governor buddied up with the governor Sununu of New Hampshire to have a voluntary system well I think it's a system very much like social security you're all in or it doesn't work so hopefully that we will be addressing that another issue that is in my committee Ways and Means is the marijuana bill and I just came from a very interesting forum at con toys on marijuana sponsored by this fabulous attorney general we have and he had a fellow from Massachusetts a fellow from Maine both who have a system up and running and he had somebody representing Vermont farmers he had somebody representing the credit unions and but he had David Mickenburg who is really knows this bill very well it was a very interesting discussion and we have a bill in Ways and Means that we left on the table because time was up it has already passed the Senate and it's gone to it was really a gov ops that did a lot of the work on this bill and it really has significant impact I think and it has lots of details and it's amazing that we have a product that we've legalized but you know we're looking forward now to be able to go and tax and regulate and that regulation that regulate part is so important that you can actually go and you know exactly what you're buying you know the product it's been tested and so I think it's going to be not only an economic boom for us but a very big step and also I've just put a bill in that Burlington and other communities would have an option a local option tax on that bill above and beyond the taxation that's already going to be on there another issue that I think we have to deal with is our pension system and I've also just put in a bill that would be a 2 percent surcharge on incomes over $500,000 and that income would be earmarked for the pension system that desperately needs help we have state employees that have done terrific work over the years and they are not sure what they're going to get for retirement which I don't think is very fair another thing that I'd like to say I don't know how many of you know about VEPC or veggie which are business tax credits and we just had a situation with the outfit that took over global foundries marvel I think is the name of it and they got a veggie tax credit and they laid off 90 people six weeks later and I think it to me it just I've always questioned the program it always was a but for you know we couldn't do this increase but for this credit and I would love to see some work done in this that that money that type of money goes into child care which I think truly is an economic development tool and I know how hard it is for families to find quality child care I think that would be a better use of that money so I could go on it on in my little pencil notes but I think it'd be more interesting to hear from you what you think is important and to have a discussion thank you thank you very much both Mary and Joey I don't know whether the political will exist I strongly believe we need a four-year term for governor because there's absolutely no planning horizon in the state of a month zero as long as you are going through the process of trying to amend the constitution for abortion rights is there any reason you can't piggyback new terms for legislature and governor onto that so that it does not become a repeat proposition maybe six or seven or eight years down the road you know that's been a discussion that's been so interesting I think Governor Cunin Governor Douglas I think with Governor Dean had two opposing views on that Governor Dean being very supportive of the two-year term because he felt it kept the governor going back to the people and being on top of it so um I don't really have an opinion on it I actually have a very strong opinion in the last time that I served through the 90s I had introduced legislation with um a Republican member and I can't remember who it was um to start that process because and I am very much in favor of four-year term um for governor um and definitely definitely the statewide offices I'm not sure for the state reps um I don't think our campaigning um I like getting out and doing door knocking every two years and it's just not as onerous um and you don't have to raise as much money as you do um so I'd have to have a conversation and see if you know maybe I'm not right on that um but I'm very much in favor of a four-year term for governor I don't hear anybody talking about it if that's what you're asking they sure they sure do talk about it in the business community here a lot so at least as the press reports it and I'm not sure how trustworthy that is anymore the House and Senate did not get along last year at least at the end of the session how are you going to make that better so that you can get legislation through you know I think that it might have been a little overblown Chris Pearson a state senator just walked in and Chris and I actually work very closely together on a lot of different issues um but I do think there was a lot of work over the summer and fall to patch up some things at the leadership level um that will um work better this coming year I liken it to just a family fight and it wasn't feeling very comfortable for any of us at that time and um I think as Mary said um we needed that break at that time because things were deteriorating and um I guess she said the Speaker of the House and President Pro Tem have worked very hard I think to open up lines of communication and that will avoid that type of thing happening and I in the years that I've been there I never saw anything that felt so not right yeah I just want to commend you both for bringing up paid parental leave and and um it just seems to me if we can flip some of these systemic economic equity issues especially for women raising young children in the state including child care but that's just more effective than offering someone $10,000 to move to Vermont um I'm not bashing that program although it did seem a little bit um so well a small program anyway um and I think that if we can start to do this people will move to Vermont and people's children and grandchildren will stay in Vermont if this can start to look like a place where you aren't driven into poverty by having children and you can never afford a home and we have to turn the curve on it and paid parental leave all the science is there um it's better for the kids it's better for the health outcomes it reduces the uh the incredible drag on the zero to one child care system which where we don't have adequate affordable quality child care for that range of kids let's let's help people stay home and do what those kids need during that first year so I just I don't know I don't know why we can't get there I don't know why as a country we can't get there it's embarrassing I think since the rest of the world's been there forever so I just commend you both for keeping it in the forefront and yeah it's going to cost some money I I hope that you um share that good view with the governor because I think the the senate and the house are with you totally on that and the only thing I wanted to say when you said it will cost us money it will and everything we do I think we need to look at the cost and the benefit um too often we look just at the cost um the benefit of this program is huge well if we're taxing marijuana what we're going to put that money a lot of it goes I think to healthcare and education this is related yeah absolutely so maybe I'm missing something but Democrats have a super majority now and can overwrite a veto theoretically you know people we are not a monolith we're not um there's some Democrats who really frustrate me there's not a whole lot I can do about it they've been elected from their own district you know I want to hand them our party platform and say could you please read this um but what do you do I never liked that term super majority because I knew some of the people who were getting reelected and I knew they wouldn't we wouldn't have their votes on a lot of things that were going to be really close for overriding a veto and I guess I recognize that but per the last sessions really frustrating that family leave other legislation was at your doorstep and spent in the house dissolved in arguments among themselves and I think this year that being the end of the session where you know things die if you don't do things that this might be the time we work hard to make sure that we can maybe override a veto and I think I think that we can build a coalition to do that I believe that the bill that will not be coming back to us because we cannot override the veto is a 24 hour waiting period and that absolutely breaks my heart because that is a real suicide prevention bill and I actually was really surprised that the governor vetoed that bill it's an important piece of legislation and the family of the young man who they thought that 24 hour waiting period would have saved his life they were dogged in being there every day and reaching out and it was a very difficult debate we had on that on the floor and they were sitting right behind in the gallery and I just thought some of the some of the debate must have been extremely painful for them to listen to, it was very hard. Hello Bob Lighty I live in the 46th and I strongly support everything that you brought up the one thing that Governor Scott says that embarrasses me is he brings up the police having the ability to test for marijuana and police have been using marijuana for years to attack blacks in our state it's really embarrassing to have him bring up that issue of empowering policemen to continue their horrible practices there was just a case from Bennington in the Supreme Court in Vermont how do we stop that argument because it's a horrible argument if you want to arrest a person for driving poorly arrest them for driving poorly you don't need to have a marijuana test the only time I mean that there was a long time we didn't have a breathalyzer test and you had to get out of your car and you know I don't know what you did back then recite the alphabet walk a line recite the alphabet backwards or something there are you know those types of things that you can do to determine whether the person is in control of the vehicle could I just if there's no more questions just I had a long served on natural resources committee but I went over to transportation committee this last year because I really felt like people who care deeply about climate needed to be on a committee that really envisioned transportation future that was much less carbon intensive and so we have a good number of people now on that committee and it's a little intimidating when you get the governor's budget that's like this thick two weeks after the session starts you know that so I think we're going to be a little less intimidated by that this year I've figured out how to kind of read through it whatever and you can't be signing on to the Paris climate accord and say that you really abide by the our emissions reduction schools and hand us a transportation budget that doesn't really reflect that so we are really going to be keeping our eye on that and really pushing for more public transit and you know there are going to be building a more park and rides there's a few of them that will be open including one in Williston and that's actually a very low-cost way of getting people to carpool and or you know drive someplace where the bus comes and hop on the bus quickly so I just wanted to mention that and take your time if there's any other thing you want to comment because you have plenty of time I just want to add that I did go to the hearing that Senator Pearson and Mary and representative Odie had the other night at BED and I think the most moving part for me was to listen to about three or four very young one was a middle school student I think two of them were and now there was high school student and the real fear that they have of their future and what climate change is going to bring to them it was it was very moving and very real and and I think we probably are getting on the train a little bit late to begin with and I hope that all of you will kind of help what sorry Pearson and Mary are trying to do in this endeavor and I mean I truly I read a lot on climate and I really hope that every time they go back to recheck the science it's a lot worse than they thought the time before and it just I hope that we really get to tackle this before it's too late and we don't know when exactly it's going to be too late so it is a climate emergency we've got to start looking at it like that I'm Matt Grady let me ask a question on those lines are we investigating a carbon tax something that's really going to get the ball rolling a little a lot of corporations are coming out in favor of just today IBM announced that they're in favor of we employ you know several hundred people here in Vermont we know we're really serious don't we have to start doing really drastic things like that despite the short-term economic problems that it'll cause to really move the ball um that the TCI comes the Transpiration Climate Initiative will come probably that's a cap and trade thing that does have spinoff which really is carbon pricing um a few years ago I introduced legislation uh chris actually back when he was in the house introduced legislation that was even stronger than what I had done with David Dean and we couldn't get it to move at all and it was pretty darn frustrating because I totally agree with you that it is the way to go and when you start pricing things that you shouldn't be doing like emitting carbon all of a sudden it starts dropping so unfortunately you know working in a democracy you've got to bring you know 50 plus one percent along and uh at times it's frustratingly hard to do I also sponsored a carbon tax and I did make it to a hearing in the Ways and Means Committee but I wasn't asked back so Joel Fitzgerald again Matt I do yeah I like the idea of a carbon tax so um I just have a couple comments and I'm probably going to be the elephant in the room I normally am but um I want to go back to the minimum wage you know and as a parent and as a as a trade worker most of my life you know we're we got a big push goal enough for trade schools and all this stuff but if we're also supporting minimum wage at $15 an hour what do we encourage it you know and that us as parents and trades people and you know I I get the fact that workers need more but if we're saying good enough for $15 an hour for minimum wage is good enough how are we going to encourage these kids and and these young folks to go after the $24 an hour trades jobs when at $15 an hour is good enough and I know that a lot of the people that I work with within the trades and all that stuff that's why we don't support $15 minimum wage because it's too easy to sit there and then get aid on minimum wage when we have all these jobs that we're trying to promote to keep these kids here at 20 right now I'm hiring people at $24 and $28 an hour and I can't get them off the couch but you know and it's because they're happy making minimum wage or $14 an hour and and I think that's one of the problems with the state and that's why you know it's really hard to to get on the bandwagon with $15 an hour and I don't know what's right or wrong but I that's that's one thing that we see you know amongst the trades guys and then the health care you know I heard on the radio that the governor you know and I don't know if this is true or not I listen to the big guy he says we're looking at $80 million shortfall in the budget now whether it's true or not but but then we talk about child care for for people and stuff you know that's the other thing is that you know a lot of us had to figure it out we had the same issues we had child care and this and I you know my my first wife worked nights and I worked days and we didn't have any child care and there was a lot of hard work and and you know some some people feel and again the trades guys that you know it's you know what do we offer and what what are we encouraging if we just keep giving this stuff away and then when I listen to the governor on the radio say we're $80 million how do we pay for this stuff and my question is I would love to do a lot of programs as long as we figure out how to pay for it and then the last thing I have to comment on it on the marijuana bill being going back to the trades is that you know and people driving poorly and all that stuff but when you're working with people smoking marijuana all day it's pretty it's pretty dangerous so I'm not a real supporter of that but I do for the painting but as far as the other thing I'm just not a big supporter of that but the minimum wage that's proposed is evolves over I think a five-year period and I I certainly understand tradesmen you know are being paid a lot more than that and I certainly understand that we do need plumbers and electricians and carpenters and masons and that we need to start to address that issue and make sure that young people know that those are very well paying jobs and they are you know respected trades and and there's a lot to be said for them but you know there's a number of people in our state that don't have that education or the opportunity to have that education and I always think of those female heads of household that are struggling that are living in homes that probably aren't terrific settings that are working two jobs perhaps raising a family trying to keep their children in school and you know prospering and doing the right thing and you know I think most parents try to do that but it's a real struggle when you don't have the income or you don't have the education and we have failed a number of people in the state I believe over time and and we need to address that issue I just wanted to comment I think we start every year with the governor saying we're at an 80 million dollar deficit and this last year we what was the surplus that we ended up with it wasn't even a deficit it was a surplus and so that's just I don't listen to that to tell you the truth and the way we rather than saying we don't have money we are in equitable taxation is what we need not a no new taxes no new fees thing we're going to look at where you know we can raise money and you know there's certain taxes that I I'm a big fan of the sugar sweetened beverage tax that actually benefits in many ways it makes people healthier it reduces Medicaid costs and we you know it's hard to get support when you have the governor home veto it just to post script on the minimum wage issue at the other end of the population we can't find enough people to take care of our elders the jobs pay horribly and it is incredibly hard work and obviously the press is now covering the problems that that runs so there's another good reason I think to you know when I in 20 years I want somebody to pay well yeah mary you mentioned cost benefit and I think that's the way every program should be looked at one of the things that I don't know where I stand the minimum wage I do know that when you bring on untrained workers and say you will earn $15 an hour the next skill up the line says wait a second I think I deserve $20 an hour and the next one up the line says well if if he's getting 15 and and now she's getting 20 and at my level I think it should be 25 there's a cascading effect that that small business that I've spent 40 years in Vermont working with small business I'm a CPA they can't afford they simply cannot afford that kind of wage pressure on that that the minimum wage brings on so I think it's a factor to keep in mind there is a cost there is a benefit I keep hearing the benefit I'm I'm not hearing the cost the income inequality in this country is completely out of control as I think a lot of us read it's like worse than it was back in the building age just before the great crash and the sorry I forgot the other I think the arguments that you have posed I have heard each time we've raised the minimum wage and they've never really happened that what you say you know that business people find a way they raise their prices actually and you know the fact of the matter with that increase in minimum wage that those are dollars that are spent immediately in the village center so it is really a mini economic development tool to a lot of places in Vermont because that money is not going to Wall Street it's not going to any place else it's going to the grocery store and the gas station and some other place in the downtown center so I think we ought to look at it in a positive way and the benefits that it can bring to families in Vermont and I just wanted to I did think of what else I was going to say it was that I think if we took I don't remember the exact numbers but if we took the minimum wage I think from the 60s and just carried it forward with a cola we'd be at something like $22 an hour right I appreciate that you just said that and we could probably talk about minimum wage for a long time and I think there's I don't know if there are any economists in the room they probably have a lot more something salient to say but and I appreciate everyone's different views on it the way I look at it having been a social worker in Vermont for 25 years working primarily with women with young children is that the cost of regular life driving people into poverty not not bad choices that they made not anything just life here because you can't live you can't house your children on $11 an hour even if you are working two jobs so we have a problem that I think we can't we just can't avoid that and if you look at all again I'll go back to the science all the science about what's happening with kids between well let's say prenatal the six we don't even have to say birth to six that there is so much evidence to show that those years are critical and people and that and that living in poverty is the main factor that is going to drive all of the learning problems criminal justice problems down the road issues for people so we can turn a blind eye to that and and I feel for that the economic cascade I worked at the Howard Center for 23 years trust me you raise anybody's salary it's it changes everybody's salary and and you have to start looking at that but we can't avoid the fact that $15 an hour in Chittenden County is barely a livable wage anymore I think it's 18 is in Chittenden if you were a single a single person raising one or two kids so I just don't know how how much longer we go on saying we we can't afford to do this when we can't afford not to do something um that's my rant about it anybody else we have some more time here for our reps I have a question I mean there's a lot of talk about $15 an hour and single women raising children having a tough time I worked for the Burlington School District for 16 years I was an educational every year that I worked I started at $8 and 34 cents an hour over the 16 years I invested $20 an hour every year with a little bit more money we got benefits if you didn't take the benefits you get a cash out check at the summer for not taking the benefits if you had a spouse that had benefits there was always an issue with our contracts where they kept us just under so they did not have to offer us retirement benefits the last contract that we had we were 14 minutes shy of them paying us retirement benefits so with those with the minimum wage being gray you know $15 an hour you have somebody who's single who's raising children and they're getting some benefits but no retirement what happens there and why is the city allowed to do that why is that why is the school districts allowed to run their own gamut like that to people who work with the most critical children in the school system and having to basically you're their caretaker for the day we have the answer that's recognized though the hard work that people like you do and the challenges that you want to present every day with some kids that I wish I could quote chapter and verse on this but I'm just not prepared to but every time I've heard this issue discussed and heard the argument that you've made that small business people are put out of business essentially if we raise wages I'm told that the outcomes when this has actually happened in practice are exactly the opposite and if you think about it if I own a corner store selling groceries and I'm paying my employees a little more what are they going to do with that money they're going to buy more groceries for me or somebody else also just the idea that around the world if you want to fight poverty you allow women specifically to make more money and the entire fortune of the village goes up sure so um we have come to the end of your time mary and joy we really appreciate you're coming here this evening and yeah telling us what you've got in mind for the session and what you've been doing over the the summer and fall and we look forward to hearing back from you at the end of the session so next up we've got chris pierce and philip bereuth who are going to talk to us about what they've got in mind for the upcoming session what they've been doing over the break and then we really welcome your comments and questions for them is this for the room oh and in good evening everybody i'm phil bereuth one of the chitin and delegation of senators and um should we just give you a couple of minutes on what um what we're working on or what's the format yeah i think you were indisposed when we talked about it so we're going to talk about what you've done uh during the the break in the the summer and fall and then what your goals are for the upcoming session and then we'll hear from the folks in the audience okay great um i know you've been uh talking about the minimum wage i think it's fair to say that there's broad agreement in the house and the senate to move a paid family leave bill and a minimum wage bill to the governor's desk as quickly as possible when we get back those were things that evaded us at the end of last session um and there's been a good deal of work done by our leadership teams on both sides to try to bridge the gap so i think that's that's a good thing all the way around i will say for myself i've been on the judiciary committee and i chair the education committee so i've been doing a lot of work with um prison reform and the problem of uh well we have the women's prison um here in south burlington you probably read the expose in seven days horrific in many ways um if you did and you're worried about that you should know that the um joint justice oversight committee freed up money along with the finance committees to begin design work on a new facility um so we have money underway options coming back and hopefully what we wind up with is something like what we saw from the state of main which was a brand new cutting edge facility with much more humane treatment policies and facilities than we see here currently um the other thing that i've been working on a lot is gun safety and so there are two bills that i plan to push for you might remember that last year the governor vetoed a waiting period bill um so the intention is to go back again stronger this time on that bill and also to try to change and strengthen the domestic violence red flag bill that we passed that allows guns to be removed from uh situations where it seems as though they're in imminent danger of being used um in a domestic violence incident the other thing that i'll say is um just a couple of days ago i finished work on a bill designed to restrict carry of assault style weapons in the public square so in auditoriums churches stores political gatherings outdoor music events all of the places where people have a genuine right to be worried about mass shootings the reason for that if you remember back in august there was a mass shooting in al Paso 22 people killed 24 injured and that happened in a walmart about five days later a guy in vermont i'm sorry in Missouri decided he wanted to test his second amendment rights so he dressed in body armor and went into his local walmart to make a point and caused mass panic and injuries for first responders trying to get people away from the store he can't be charged because Missouri is an open carry state so what they've done is to charge him with a terrorist threat which it looks like they will fail to ultimately get through a jury so my intention here is to make sure that vermont being an open carry state we begin the process of defining where we do and do not want assault style weapons so those are a couple of things i'll turn it over to my colleague uh senator pierce thank you phil um i serve on uh the senate ag committee i'm the vice chair of ag and force products committee and i serve on the finance committee which handles revenue taxes and also insurance regulation broadband it's a quite broad jurisdiction um and over the summer i i also serve in a sort of less formal role as co-chair of what we call the climate solutions caucus and mary had been the media press co-chair so forgive me if she mentioned this but we did a lot of work this summer bringing together people about a week after adjournment and forming work groups through the summer to try to come up with policy proposals we could move that we could get to the governor in one session you know we work for four and a half months that would be so that were achievable and that were also significant um and really trying to lay some foundational work on uh addressing the climate crisis so out of that process came 30 pages of ideas and the other co-chair sarah cobra hands us from the from the eastern part of the state and i uh whittled those down into four or five topics i won't go deeply into them unless we want to but the transportation uh building efficiency these are one and two sources of our emissions uh energy and energy efficiency and also accountability so we have this uh in the last two months spent i think now we've done 15 public forums around the state really trying to inform people get feedback and importantly um you know climate activists and and people at the grassroots level are passionate of course we've seen here just downtown we saw the climate strike with with our young people speaking out but what you find is that there's no you know every climate activist is kind of interested in different topics and this reflects the challenge uh you can't just say well we want to solve a climate crisis what has Oregon done you know you could take little examples from Oregon and maybe British Columbia maybe Vermont and maybe Europe but there's no cohesive package do this and we're good right and so the activist community reflects that so we've been trying to help people say this is what we think we can do it's not enough it's not anywhere near enough but you know given the political makeup of the legislature the governor uh in the four and a half months we have this is what we think we can do we we have had uh i think sort of surprised ourselves it's been pleasant we uh received we've had uh you know we had 120 people the other night down the road to be ed and 60 people the night before monday night uh in bristol you know so bristol winds per capita but uh and and really good conversations and the conversations go something like this there'll be a couple people who say it's all a hoax and there'll be a lot of kids and they say this is kind of weak what you're suggesting and and then people in between so you know which sort of reflects the reality of what we we deal with in my opinion so i've been very proud proud to play that role this is a battle that i've been uh interested in invested in for many years for the reason i got involved in politics um there are other policies outside of that that i i'm working on and i'll just mention one because i particularly like it and i think it has a shot main uh no new york michigan new mexico or again have all made an investment in farm to school as we have but they have done it in a clever way that we want to replicate and that is to say in new york they say if you're meeting 25 percent of your local school food from local products will give you 25 cents a meal that's a huge chunk for our school lunches cost about a dollar 80 so that's a significant investment this seems to me uh the right kind of incentive it's idiotic right that we have farm struggling and kids going hungry and even connected these dots and when you start uncovering it there's a lot of system problems of getting you know in sx the principle stops by a local sugar maker picks up maple syrup puts it in the backseat of his car and brings it to school we don't quite have the systems down and i've been racking my brain how do we how do we deal with the systems and someone brought this for it and said maybe you don't deal with the systems maybe you make it clear there's an investment coming and the systems kind of build themselves so that's our approach uh i think it's you know it's it's not solving the agricultural challenges we have in this state but it is a significant piece and and i think um you're also seeing some of the farm to school work that we've done around the state so far and we are doing a good job compared to our neighbors but we have a long way to go they're paired not only with local food but curriculum so kids are gardening there's a whole there's a whole piece to this that's it's much more important or as important as the local foods and one of the things i learned recently sadexo who does all the food for uvm they under a lot of pressure grassroots pressure agreed to invent by 20 percent of their food locally and what what we're hearing is that the kids who came from vermont schools who came from from farm school farm to play schools i'm not saying that right who went through a program locally where there was the local ag piece are really intense about sadexo and holding sadexos feet to the fire they get it it's working and the way i think of it is this if you have local squash in the cafeteria nobody eats a squash you haven't solved any problems right and so part of what they're able to do through the curriculum and when the kids are touching the vegetables they're producing and then ask to eat them well they try it and turns out they like them so it's it's interesting to just learn that how connected these systems are i'm really looking forward to that discussion i think it's actually a modest investment and could make a significant improvement so there's a lot of issues we could talk all night about that but it's probably more important we hear questions sorry about the buzz christ how how can we make it affordable for a family farm and dairy to both make a living and to treat their animals humanely well if i knew that charles uh you know um well this is a big question and they're workers yeah so i mean we live in a country that basically has a broken food system right and our farmers are struggling for all sorts of reasons mostly because of the commodity market is completely abusive to them and this is decided at wall street in chicago's exchange uh and by the way we're paying for it in the lake water quality we're paying for it in you know all sorts of degradation that is a side effect of that and not to make add uh challenges to the table but we might as well talk about it our dairy farmers are aging out and three quarters the open land in brahman is controlled by dairy and their kids don't want the farm they look at the lifestyle and they're like no thanks so we have we have a real imperative to try to figure this out at the same time telling farmers what they should be doing is a risky endeavor especially maybe if you're a young whippersnapper from chitney county so there's what we've been trying to do is figure out what are incentives that we can create that would help people make different choices at the same time we hear from young people who want to get into farming that they can't find land so there's also a timing thing and i'm sorry it's it's it's not a one second answer so bear with me so a dairy farm is struggling struggling struggling gets a milk check and that's it they just decide this is it we're broken and they sell the cows and the bigger farmer up the road has been keeping their eye on it and we'll say no we'll take that land or we'll lease that land we'll get you out of this pickle and so what we're seeing is a consolidation actually we're not taking acres out of production we're not actually taking cows off necessarily but we're consolidating ownership and i i think there's strategies that are an option for us to break a bit of that cycle in a way that could allow different caretakers onto that land that are maybe more interested in diversified ag which has a little less of an impact on our water quality as an example but the other reality is if anybody thinks we're solving the climate crisis without ag as a partner you know we got a lot of we got to talk because this is vital in a couple of ways one is when we have a sustainable future we're not trucking tomatoes from california and apples from new zealand the other is farms actually are an enormous resource in terms of carbon sequestration phosphorus sequestration holding on to the nutrients in the soil so one of the things that we've set up in the last years underway right now it's a project that people are talking about it's called the ecosystem service payments and it it reflects the idea that if you a farm let's say this table is a farm if you are paying farmers for one service which is milk they're going to put all efforts into milk and they degrade the land frankly and then they add imports i mean we're we're we've got a phosphorus crisis we're importing phosphorus i mean this is somewhat say insane so ecosystem services says well we're going to pay for milk but we're also going to pay you to build soil and to put carbon into soil and when you regenerate soil you help us handle flood mitigation which is a huge problem in and of itself and also means the sun the soil gets spongy right and so we're vermona seeing seven to nine inches more rain every year this is how climate change is showing up for us and by the way even even though in these forums as i go around the state there'll be some climate deniers none of them are farmers they'll tell you straight up oh we're dealing with this all the time and water is a big deal for them because a lot of them are in low land so when you wait if you can build soil you have flood mitigation you have some carbon sequestration and you find a way to break through some of the dangerous economics of the current particularly dairy we are the state that is the singly most dependent on a single commodity of any other state and this is just part of our history and we've got to break free and and a lot of us are looking at ways to incent more diverse ag so that as it shifts and it's kind of inevitable that it'll shift out of dairy we can keep our working lands in production and this has come back to the farm to school stuff this is you know we ordered also an analysis that we're getting any in a few weeks now like what's the capacity in our schools for eggs for instance or you know pick your pick your like like help us understand what could we do locally if we were really committed to this and i think somewhere in there are parts of the answer that i'm hoping we can push for but it is a huge challenge it goes central to our cultural identity and it is also trying to impact a part of the economy that is frankly not so interested in a lot of oversight maybe from Montpelier so you really got to figure out how you can be in the room be invited to the room and actually have a meaningful you know shift in what our historic practices. Bob Lady I have a couple questions one is how is the district going to be broken up and the second one is relative to mass incarceration which it seems like we have this opportunity to change our model from a punishment model to another model and we also have this opportunity where we've had three colleges closed in Vermont is there a way to repurpose those buildings into a into a new model for incarceration so that's three or four questions layered in together now just remind me what was your first one redistricting yes so all the members of the chitin and senate district all six of us have come out in favor of breaking up the six-member chitin and district now if you've ever been through redistricting before I've been through it once in the legislature it is a crazy process because what you wind up with are a series of maps one after the other Joan can attest to how this works it's a series of maps everybody trying to solve the unsolvable problem of how best to represent different areas how best to in this case break up a six-member district traditionally that now can't be according to the the bill we've gotten behind larger than three members per district so you could break up the six-member district into two units of three three units of two six units of one and everybody's going to make an argument about why x y or z makes the most sense what I will say in terms of my own thinking about it I think there has been in in many ways it's undemocratic to have a six-member district it has also been advantageous to people in chitin and county traditionally to have that so I would be for two three-member districts rather than uh breaking it up any further because I do think there's uh there's strength in those numbers with that said I don't see any way that you can look at the demographics and not anchor one of those with Burlington and one with Essex so Essex and Burlington are not going to both wind up in the same three-member district or the same two-member district so I think however you look at it you're looking at an anchor of Burlington in one Essex in the other then it's anybody's guess how those other communities are shaped around those anchors but if you're from Essex and and I go out there pretty frequently and hear the complaints people have a 30-year gripe which is that they have been a very rapidly developing community second or third largest in the state always and they haven't been able to get people from Essex representing them in the state center so fair enough I think their their long drought will be over one way or the other on the on the idea of using campuses that are shut down as institutions of higher learning and reopening them as places for incarcerating prisoners I'm I'm skeptical myself and I'll and I'll tell you why people say the same thing about child care centers can't we just put them into unused parts of public schools and the answer is yes you can do that but those places aren't designed for toddlers there's a different matrix that you want when you have zero to three then when you have five to eight or five to ten year olds in a building different safety concerns different things that you want to be soft instead of hard different security concerns I fear the same would be the the case with trying to repurpose the buildings on a college campus we'd wind up retrofitting them in ways that were not really suitable for the kind of therapeutic environment that we're hoping for so I'm supporting the creation of a new facility we had presentations from the state of Maine and they have an amazing thing going on a brand new state of the art campus that has three different facilities on it one is for their female prisoners to be incarcerated but also a step down facility as they get ready to end their sentences and the other a larger facility for male prisoners very much state of the art much less punitive a more open floor plan with behavioral systems that go along with that something that came out of the Scandinavian model so I'm not I'm not opposed to reusing a campus if it could be shown to be in line with what's actually best practice I felt your your discussion of the gun venue the ideas you're working with you were you were speaking about assault weapons and the press is reporting your ideas had to do with semi-automatic weapons which would include handguns and long rifles could you clarify that and the the follow on to that was I always question how those are things are going to be enforced yeah yeah so Vermont Digger reported this and changed their headline because they didn't feel like it was fully accurate but it it refers to semi-automatic weapons so semi-automatic pistols semi-automatic rifles and it draws those definitions from legislation in California that has been vetted through the courts so the basic argument that you hear from gun rights activists is that semi-automatic weapons are useful to them to hunt and to target shoot this bill doesn't touch either of those functions it doesn't say you can't have them in your house doesn't say you can't have them in your car what it does say is you can't bring them into Walmart it does say you can't bring them into a church a bar an outdoor music venue and so on and so on including child care facilities so my question back to those people is hunting and target shooting are protected why do you need them in a child care facility why do you need them in a church and the answer is always and my colleague John Rogers very prominent gun rights activist said in the Digger article that he needs them in those venues for self-protection and I think that's just a ludicrous response to a very real challenge in our society so Chris I guess this is peripheral to the marijuana legislation but you seem to be know a lot about agriculture is there concern or anyone talk about that when hopefully when it's legalized that the hemp and the marijuana production among farmers will reduce their farming of vegetables etc and drive up those costs I'm sorry so are you worried that we're displacing vegetables yeah farming I think most people see not that concern but I see the opportunity and hemp is proving this to be an ancillary source of income for dairies for instance who are really struggling and say okay we'll plant an acre of hemp take it out of corn put it into hemp you know with marijuana is is there's I think some potential for it to be a boon to the ag economy but I also don't think we're going to be driving down the road and seeing instead of corn marijuana plants you know there's a whole security issue that you got to deal with you know you don't have a distillery in your front yard right it's the same same kind of challenge so most people that I mean I think most of us think there is a potential to strengthen the rural economy by bringing marijuana economy above above board I don't think it's a panacea by any stretch I think somebody mentioned marijuana revenue in the question with our house friends you know at some level the joke is we've spent that six times it's not going to be a huge windfall I don't think see Phillips got another bill I do too you know and we're pretty serious I think about investing in prevention and education you know this is not people giggle about it but it's you know you got to take it seriously I don't think I don't know I just want to make sure you said when we legalize we have legalized today when we tax and regulate and regulate is what's exciting to me you get a lot of benefits of safety of understanding pesticides and how interest interests we've seen all that seeing the headlines about vaping most of that's marijuana you know we got those are out there we've got a the only shot at making that safe I think is regulation stronger than I should so I don't know if I got to your question we've got 10 more minutes so please chime in if you'd like somebody has a hand okay I wanted to talk a little bit to circle around to what was brought up earlier in the evening and had to do with affordability in Burlington and we're specifically like housing in this sort of thing so today I went to realtor.com just to get an idea of what house prices were like and I was quite honestly astonished now I don't know how believable and nor is our I would expect that they would probably be pretty reasonable but it turns out that the median household or the median residential value for a house in Burlington was 411 thousand two hundred and fifty dollars and then they broke it down by a few areas like the south and four hundred twenty six thousand dollars the old north end four hundred and thirty two thousand dollars downtown four hundred thousand dollars and it was just a lot of money so I was looking at a little bit more closely and looking at my tax bill that's been progressively going up and up and up and I was wondering if there's anything that you have on the hopper this year that's going to give homeowners in Burlington some tax relief because the compound the matter I think about a year and a half ago the income sensitivity amount was dropped down to four hundred thousand dollars which means like if you make if your house is assessed at more than four hundred thousand dollars you lose the income sensitivity and you're going to bear the full brunt of the hurricane and I was doing a little bit of calculating and it's a dramatic increase so I was wondering if there was anything that was planned for this any kind of relief because to make matters worse we're going to be building a new high school and that's going to also add to the property taxes over the next five to ten years so what I'm kind of concerned about is that we're like we're you know we're we're building ourselves into a perfect storm that really needs to be addressed right now because five to ten years down the road is probably going to be too late so I'm wondering if there's anything that you have in mind as far as property tax relief and they would probably also affect affordability because if someone's going to go in and buy a house and spend three hundred and fifty thousand dollars and also face a mortgage and a tax tax bill which are going to be about the same how they're going to afford that um so a number of thoughts jumped to mind the change that shifted the cap of your property value didn't say once you're over four hundred you get nothing it it can't I believe in looking at others to make sure I have this right it said that the income sensitized will be up to the up to two hundred fifty thousand dollars of your home value so the amount on top of that you're paying full freight but you're not going to zero just to understand the current system for many years I have proposed that we make everybody income sensitized and when you do that you get a lot more money from the very wealthy and it allows you to subsidize the rest of us about a 10 break that's been tricky I haven't gotten the votes for that this year I um have a colleague uh it's colorful in the senate mark mcdonnell from orage county and he was around when we created act 60 and act 68 and he will say often 80 percent of remanergies to be income sensitized and that number is down to about 67 percent and I said all right you know and by the way the the very wealthiest in reman have had a huge boom thanks to the federal tax cuts trump tax cuts like like about 170 million dollars worth of tax breaks so the idea is well could you take some of that savings and apply it to ease the rest of our tax bill so I asked our fiscal office to say what would it look like if we set an 80 percent target and say the bottom 80 percent of remaners are going to be income sensitized and I was surprised to learn that in fact they are income sensitivity eligible but for that that gap there from 67 which are taking income sensitivity up to 80 percent they're better off paying their property tax so that wasn't I've been exploring that hoping this would be another approach that maybe I could get by in we face a real quandary we keep voting for school budgets we voted to build a new high school and and we keep complaining the property taxes go up and I mean I don't you know I pay these two and they're it's a real burden but we sort of want to have it all and this is tricky and and we of course want to invest in our education system and we need to and so the funding finding a better solution has alluded us it seems to continue to elude us I have been advocating now that I'm on the finance committee which deals with the property tax rate there's been a anytime there's a surplus in the ed fund we tend to use that surplus to buy down the rates and and I sort of looked at that last year and I was like well this is ridiculous why buy down the rates this year we're going to crank with the rates next year wouldn't we why wouldn't we smooth this out just like you would in a you know if you suddenly had a windfall in your steady budget at home you might you wouldn't necessarily blow it all at once we got I think we proposed to keep half of it that way and that got further well down so you know but that's not going to really hit it but it's you know make a real impact even if I had gotten everything I was asking for there we're trying to make it predictable we're trying to make it smooth we're trying to keep the rates down and people keep voting for school budgets and and so we I'm not satisfied with our system I think that it does it is a regressive system it you know very wealthy people are paying about one percent on their property tax one percent on their income at most if not a half percent income sensitivity gets you about three percent so so it's clearly a real problem for working people and and then we keep voting to approve school budgets and I support that too so it is you know we're we're sort of stuck here and I don't have great answers and the answers that I have and I've been very vocal about this I tried to put forward and I'm looking at Joey years ago I mean one of the first things I ever did when I was a house owner of 2007 was staying with Joey and a Republican and we said we should pay for school based on our income tax and you know we generated some discussion but it didn't go anywhere and this is this is a vexing problem I don't know if you the only thing I'll add is I when I came in you were discussing I think the administration's projections of shortfall of 70 million dollars for the coming year that's based mostly on the projections around health care growth in the educational system so v high the group that puts forward the plans for teachers in this in the state they are projecting an 11 12 increase over last year and that's not because we are exceptionally generous in Vermont that's nationally those are going up in those ways so Tim Ash who's not here tonight but is the Senate president pro tem he likes to call health care the blob that's eating everything and I think in this case you can see that the property tax we think about property tax we know there's a direct connection to education I think over the years that has led to a demonization of teachers demonization of school staff it's not teachers it's not school staff it's health care and health care if you look at it it goes like this over the last 15 years so Bernie is out campaigning for Medicare for all Democrats generally are campaigning for things that I think will should they become law help to flatten out the growth rate for medical costs but you see the pushback that Democrats are getting everywhere around the notion of Medicare for all as though it itself would break the bank when in fact it's not doing something systemic for health care that is breaking the bank not just in Burlington not just in the school budgets but in municipal budgets everywhere around the state I'm just wondering you have one minute okay well 30 seconds I think we have to talk about UVM frankly they put a lot of pressure on you know having having half the students roughly live in in town means that investment properties for landlords are really attractive and then they push people out and and you know I've been on my friends on city council to try to push back there has been an effort to get UVM to house more people but I think there needs to be an ongoing campaign there the other thing I would say is affordable housing generally in Chittenden County and across the state is a real problem we have attempted just last year Senator Sorokin another Chittenden County senator pushed for a $50 million housing bond you know this is great economic development and this is an ongoing crisis for far too many families to afford basic housing we didn't get that across the finish line but we simply have to do a better job of creating affordable housing and trying to balance this out thank you thank you very much to both of our senators we appreciate your being here tonight and thank you to all of you for coming and for your questions and your comments and your interest if you enjoyed this evening please tell your neighbors let all your people in Ward 6 know about our meetings they're the first Thursday of every month our next meeting is February 6 we hope that we see you all we've had an increase in our budget fortunately which is allowing us to provide meals and music at this meeting so please come back save the first Thursday of every month for free dinner except January yes in July and August yeah please we hope to see you all in February and lots of your friends and neighbors and thank you to all our presenters we appreciate your taking the time to be with us tonight