 I will call the Board of Finance to order on Monday, January 8th, 2024, the year for finance. The first item on the agenda is the agenda. I would welcome the motion. I would just like to note that there was one update to the agenda item 3.3, the contract for June 18, 2024. There was one very minor update made. Haley noticed that the motion in this item accidentally said June 18, 2023. We just updated it to June 18, 2024. You'll see an updated document on there. That's the only change that was made. And I just want to note that before we move it further into the agenda. I'm happy to move the agenda as indicated on Civic Clerk. Okay, thank you, Councilor McGee. Second by Councilor Barlow. Further discussion of the agenda? For noting that the amendment, Catherine, for the discussion, seeing none, let's go to a vote. All those in favour of adopting the agenda is Sporn or Bordax. Can you say aye? Any opposed? Motion passed. So, you're having a agenda. The next item is the public forum. Is there anyone here in the room this year to speak to board friends in the forum? I don't believe so. Anyone online? And I guess we do have Sharon Bushard joining us. Go ahead, Sharon. You should be able to talk. Yes, hi. Good evening and happy new year to all of you. I had, I looked at this agenda and maybe I just couldn't see it, but I, with the item on consent that has to do with the user fee and a proposal and the bids, excuse me, and then BEDs, ADMS, which also has a selection of a bid. I couldn't see the number of bids or the spread in cost. And so, in the past, I have seen that be brought forward as part of the packet. So, anyways, I just wasn't sure. I thought it would is informative to know if there were a number of bids or if there was only one bid. I always found that useful to know. So, that's just a comment. As far as BED's proposal to make the EAP, move that from a pilot to a permanent policy, it's wonderful. I want to applaud them, thank them so much. And the downside of having public forum is that sometimes you make a comment before you're educated. So, here we go. This has to do with the Urban 3 presentation that you're going to see. And this may really be the wrong interpretation of this. But it looked to me like we were looking at the city and the potential value that each area had. And I was concerned about that because I felt that if that was the correct interpretation, I felt like that was really just giving information to investors and developers. And although there's a desire to have housing, et cetera, I would like to think that there's a diversity of ownership with people that live in the city owning and not just investors who sometimes have only interest is financial. And so, I'll look to see what the presentation says and see if I'm right or wrong. If I'm wrong, I'll be very happy. If I'm right, I'll probably have more questions. But as I said, this is the downside of public forum when you maybe draw the wrong conclusion. But thank you for listening. Hey, great. Thank you for calling in, Sharon. And we are joined tonight by Shomen Akasi from Urban 3. And we're excited to have you with us tonight back virtually in Burlington, Joe. I've seen Joe speak numerous times over the years and I'm excited to have him working at Burlington's tax analysis. So that is not going to be as I think I hope you've seen Joe until the end of our agenda. So we probably have half hour at least, maybe longer before we're going to be able to get to you. But thanks for Virginia. Great. Thanks. Councilman Bergman, I see that you have your hand raised. Are you seeking to speak in public forum? Yeah, I guess so. And the reason is because of the item on the user fees being in consent. And I just want to say, although I could read into the scope of work that will consider but excuse me for my continued coughing. The economic ability of people to pay for things like classes, like, you know, open in, you know, skating, what have you, that it's not exactly explicit. And so I really just want to say that we don't want our user fees to go so high as that poor and working people can't afford them. And so hopefully that is part of the economic analysis that we'll be using. Thank you. Okay, great. Thank you, Councilman Bergman. Looking at the attendees online and not seeing anybody else. Are seeking to be recognized for the public forum and you are online, please raise your hand. Not seeing any other raised hands. So we will close all the forum and move to that consent agenda. And you know, I certainly from my perspective, absolutely this Virginia, those white fees, when I consider raising to take into account on equity, I'll certainly be that kind of, we know we have certain fees where that's a major concern and other fees, but that's less of a concern. That's absolutely going to be part of how we analyze what's possible. And so that will come from it's all of them. A lot of them will come from the administration, the city council. Yes, you want to say in reaction. Thank you. Yes, just to put a little bit more of a fine point on it. The decisions will all still be in the hands of city council and the administration. The point of this user fee study is really to provide these bodies with information that we haven't had before. And the example I give because it's easy is usually about cancer classes. So I'm going to pick on BCA again today and say, for instance, a pottery class. If the pottery class costs $100 at this point in time, we can't say that we know that it costs us $80 to put that class on per person or and so we're making $20 or does that cost us $120 and we're losing $20. So we are a little bit flying blind. And so a big purpose of this study is for us to identify how much it costs for us to offer each of these things and then to present that as information to the board of finance and others to say, do we want to offer classes where it's 100% class recovery or 100% class recovery for some groups or more than 100% recovery for some groups to allow scholarships for others and it won't be a one size fits all. What we decide to do for classes might be different from camps, from public skating, from parking, but we'll have more information to be able to make, I think, better decisions. Great. Thank you for adding that. And with that, we'll move to Consent Agenda. I just want to offer that additional commentary in the hope that we could still support the Consent Agenda, but my counselor showed up a little more need more. We could call the item. With that, I welcome motion on the Consent Agenda. I'll move to adopt the Consent Agenda and take the action as indicated. Thank you. Seconded by Counselor Kang. Thank you. Any further discussion of the Consent Agenda? Seeing none, we'll go to the vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. All right. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. We've adopted that Consent Agenda. Counselor Daniels. Yes. Thank you, Counselor Jang, for pointing that out. Good point, and it might not have been totally clear. To that point, just make sure everyone's clear what Counselor Jang's means. So there's a minutes pass. There was a contract for Juneteenth, 2024 Production Management Pass, and this contract of each of these passed in Recycling Trash. Okay, that brings us to 1.1. Position, Elimitation, and Creation at the Brunner Election Department. Welcome, Vest, to a couple of different finishes of Vest. You got the blue vest in that moment, and everybody didn't get it. Thanks for taking on these items. Would you like a brief summary? Yes. Great. So I think we're on the position update first. We, as we do with every position, if there's a vacancy, we've looked at whether we need to backfill and how to backfill. In this case, we had a position that came vacant that was no longer current position. It was essentially kept for the incumbent, but then would revert to a different position, which would not be ideal setup for us. We actually found we had a need relative to cybersecurity. It would be a better use of the vacancy. And so we presented that position description. And it is a tiered position, as we've done with all of our IDW positions. I want to note for former Councilor Butcher, who I provided confirmation to earlier, the range that I had provided was a little different. I think I provided a range between the upper bound of the A4 and A6 that was around 4,000. It's actually closer to 12,000. But the point being that we're planning to hire at a level that will impact our budget for fiscal year 24. And the position whoever is hired will likely come in in the lower tier. And then we'll have an opportunity to advance to the upper tier based on performance and meeting the qualifications for that tier. We'll have to answer any questions. I'm joined by M.L.A. Sevens Wheel out near Castee. And for an item later on, we also have James Gibbons on Zoom. Great. Thank you for that, Eric. So with that, floor's open to the board for questions. Motion. Okay. That's brought up to me. Oh, yes. Thank you. I'm just wondering about how you came to realize you were so sure. Sure. And I think our IT director is on Zoom as well. Yes. Erica, for all of us as well. So, Erica, I'll start, but do you have anything to add? So, yes, I was just curious if we'd yield for any organization, to go to utilities and to go to municipal utilities, which the actor world perceives as probably relatively less resourced than your privately for profit investor utilities, but yet the control curriculum structure. So it's been a concern of our IT team for decades, probably, but it just grows more and more of a risk. Our news analysts are now asking us about it. About cybersecurity comes up in our audit, and it's just a best practice. So how have we been? Yes, have we devoted pieces of some resources to it? Yes, but has it become more of a full-time job? Yes, that is sort of a great idea to defend a certain kind of integration position that this position would otherwise have in common. Yes. I know that's helpful. And as I expected, that you could be taking time to hear it seriously, just that other people don't need it for us, other positions. Exactly. In essence. So during the pandemic, I believe for this people, there were some potential people, it was actually satisfactory. Well, yes, so back in 2016, there was a set of articles that didn't end up being fully accurate, that indicated that there had been like a Russian intrusion into these infrastructure, which was not correct, thankfully. But it was high-profile, and it certainly drew a lot of attention. I think that's probably what you're thinking about. That's what it was. Yeah, it was actually back a ways, end of 2016, if I remember incorrectly. And since then, there's always different things going on, but we haven't anything that was high-profile like that, thankfully. So, and I think, you know, whenever we talk about cybersecurity, it shouldn't be a person, but it should not be a team. And I was just wondering, with this engineer, would we be able to train the tech team to at least have the basic strategy? Yeah, Emily and Erica could speak to it as well. The one thing I would say is, particularly under Erica's leadership, our IT director, we've had a team approach very much. In fact, we have implemented, this is relatively new, senior team meetings where we do tabletop exercises. There's been an enhanced effort to go after fishing, email fishing, and we do a lot of our own internal exercises around that. And there's even a, there's almost a competitive element to it, in terms of making sure that you don't end up clicking on something that wasn't the right thing to click on. And so there's been education done by the team. So very much a team approach, not to indicate that this person will be solely responsible, but there will be some expertise there that we can draw on that we haven't had in the past. I see Erica is on. Erica, if you want to add anything. Erica, the question is, to what extent will the new cybersecurity engineer position be part of a team? And to what extent will cybersecurity continue to be a responsibility of an entire team and not just one individual? Sure. So as Darren alluded to, we definitely use a team approach. I mean, that is how we're covering cybersecurity right now. The entirety of the team is responsible for this in bringing on a dedicated resource. When we wrote the job description, the entirety of the BEDIT team was part of that job description process. And we added layers of overlapping responsibility, whereas the cybersecurity engineer is going to have primary responsibility, but we're going to make sure that the systems and network engineer and the systems analyst position all have training and responsibilities and awareness to cybersecurity as a whole. I'm very happy to make the most of the plans that you've made in the city. Great. Thank you, Councillor Jennings. Is there a second to the motion? Seconded by Councillor Barlow. Discussion? Seeing none, we'll vote all those in favor of the motion. Please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. And we will move to the next BEDIT, which is the BED Advanced Distribution Management System Project. I don't know if we want to maybe just describe the system that we're procuring. We can mention as well, I hope this referenced in terms of the bids. We did have a total of five bids. One was non-qualifying. Essentially, it didn't fit for the entirety of what we were asking for. So we had four qualifying bids. And I believe after negotiation, the value we're getting here is competitive with the lowest available bid. Go ahead. So basically this project plays out in existing supervisor control and data position system, which is the software that you call the BID device to appeal. And today, the way it's done is to dispatch and operate that system from the dispatch room, but then close devices in the field to isolate the outage. Hopefully it may just work. This system last time it was upgraded was in 2016. And the vendor as of March 31st, 2024, that's it. So it's really done. So we have gone to bids in 2023. We received five bids before we were qualified. We have formed a team of departments initiating dispatch by teams distribution and through all bids, we had demos. We had a bank, Ms. Jacks. And we looked at, we were initiating the scope to work with Surveillance, as well as the pause in the middle of initiating the bids right now. And what we ended up getting is a replacement of the SCADA system. So loss of the enhancement, which is now the management system, as well as the distribution management system. And with those enhancement basically in the future, we no longer be operating from the manual mode. Everything would be automated. So the system by itself will try to sectionalize the outage in the field and restore service to other customers. So what would that do is really reduce the outage duration, reduce the restoration time. And at the same time, it will be getting all the information from multiple sources, from the outage, from the MI meters, from the customers, as well as from the CIS system. So we can also make sure that we determine where the outages are, in addition to any operation in the field, places that exist, which will be available. At the same time, we're going to have a better communication system with our customers. We'll be modifying our customers better, pay all the outages via text or email, as well as we're going to have a website with the outages, where the outages are, that will provide the customer with all the information about the estimated restoration, as well as where the outages are. Okay, great. Thank you, people here. I'm going to give it up well. Let's get there for the questions. I'd more like to proceed in advance for our motion or for the questions. So, Reggie. I'm happy to make the motion as recommended on Civic Clerk. Great. Thank you, sir. Second. Second by Councillor Parhamo. Any further discussion? Excellent. This site definitely makes me feel like I've been here for a long time. Replacing this data is kind of shocking to me. I'm trying to remember the implementation very well, but that sounds like it was earlier. With that, I'm going to vote all those in favour of the questions. They say aye. Any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. And that brings us to the 4.3 last item for our formal recommendation of the night in the last session. BDA, version of the BD Energy Assistance Program from a pilot to a permanent three. So, I think the council recall that during the pandemic, coming out of the pandemic, we created an energy assistance program, which we had never had before, which was initially just a pandemic-related program. We turned it into a pilot rate at the PUC. We're allowed to do that for up to 18 months, where we can offer a specific type of rate with approval. And that 18-month period for this particular program is coming due in February. And so, we are interested in making this a permanent offering. This allows income-qualified customers to receive a 12.5% discount on their bill. And we are one of only three utilities in the state that offer this type of program right now, along with green power and Vermont gas. There have been efforts in the Public Utility Commission and in the legislature to look at doing something kind of statewide around this, but we're in the relative vanguard. And the other two utilities have a 20% discount. But if you look at our actual bills and rates relative to another electric utility, for example, the 12.5% provides an equivalent level of actual value, because our rates on the residential side tend to be somewhat lowest in the state. And our bills tend to be lower in terms of our customer usage of utilities. So, based on our analysis, we think this is comparable to what's being offered by other utilities. Our team is doing a bunch of work to try to make sure we can actually enroll more customers. In the program, we have a few hundred customers enrolled right now. We know that we can help hundreds, maybe even thousands, more customers. So, there's been a concerted effort that ETA in our equity position and Emily's team and others have been working on doing outreach on this program, places like King Street Laundry, the One Community Center in the Old North End. We've developed a flyer on the program that's been translated into seven languages that's available. And we're working on some things, in some cases, in partnership with other departments of the city, where as part of this approval, you would be approving us to be able to auto enroll customers if we find that they're eligible as opposed to asking them to come to us and determine eligibility. We think, off the bat, that could increase enrollment by perhaps 500 additional customers right off the bat and then help us going forward to make this a program that's helping, hopefully, a thousand or more Burlingtonians in the near future as opposed to a few hundred. So, we're excited about this, excited about making it permanent, excited about the work to do additional outreach and make it more accessible for customers by answering questions. Great. Thanks, Derek. So, Laura's open for a discussion with Kesley Geed. Thank you. And thank you for the presentation, Darren. I'm glad to see that this program is successful and that you all are making it permanent. And I especially like the auto enrollment function. I think that is essential for municipal services, that we don't make folks do additional work to save money, that if they're eligible for it and we know that, then that they're automatically enrolled. I think that's important. So, hopefully, that's successful and we can look to implement that in other ways if we aren't already doing with other city services. So, I appreciate that. Thank you. Councillor Grant. Thank you. With regards to the information that's translated in different languages, where exactly can those be obtained? Is that something that'll be available in City Hall or something that we have to go down to the electric department to pick up? And currently, we've been using it at outreach events around the city, but I don't know if we had plans to make it available at City Hall, but it's a good idea, so we're happy to do it. And we've been using it for outreach at different places. We don't want people to have to come to BED. We want to meet people where they are. So, in addition to using it for outreach, we'll certainly work with the clerk treasurer and make some flyers available here as well. That would be great because I've been trying to, I kind of have a plan around all resident voting and utilizing a number of businesses in the Old North End. So, it would be great to also drop off that information as well. If someone could let me know when they're available, that would be great. We'll connect with you. Thanks very much. Thank you. That's a nice experience. I'm just wondering if you can translate, in terms of how much it costs kind of annually? I think we have it, or we have projections. Objection, the after. So, assuming, I can give me a second. I can change that if you want, but assuming we enroll an additional five to six hundred people, the average discount, so to speak, or the credit that the average customer is receiving is about $10. So, doing that math, if we move from about 220 customers today to, you know, 800, in calendar 2024, I've projected about $100,000. So, it seems basically by one year from now, we should be able to keep the 650 that we have. That's our hope. That's right. Yeah. And now, obviously, how are we going to see that running at one start in this data or instead of two? Well, it's the type of program that we reference in multiple avenues. So, we've done things like an important message on the bill, we've done work on the website and social media, but we've had a specific focus with ETA on doing things like what we're calling office hours at King Street Laundry, for example, or being at different community events that aren't necessarily BED events where we can share information about the program. But so similarly, I think, you know, team approach and not only BED, but we're working with organizations like CBOEO to get the word out. We've talked with, you know, Water Resources, CIO, others about sharing information about it as well. So, it's very much a team approach, not only at BED, but with other organization as well. Yeah. ETA, myself, Customer Care, our communications group, we meet every four to six weeks on this to touch base on who's doing what, how did it go, what meetings and what ideas will we try and continue to follow up with? This is a great idea. So, thank you for doing it. Spatially, you get to participate in the great statement you made about it. Here's a couple of words. Right here. Thank you. And happy to make the motion to pass in. Let's see. Thank you, Councillor Jim. I have a second. Second by Councillor Miki for their discussion. Seeing none, we're going to vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you all. Appreciate it. Okay. This brings us now to item five, which is a discussion of the Steve Auditors Audit of the Downtown Kipp District. It's part of the statutory responsibility of the Auditor to your report on three Kipp Districts on a regular cycle, which time the downtown Kipp District is to be audited. We have communicated several times to the Council about this over time. Just recently, we sent you an update telling you that we believe that the audit report will be issued soon. We have gotten a draft of it, and we have, as the process works, responded to that draft of it. We are waiting for the final report to be added. Since the final report is not out yet, there's a limited public update that can be shared at this time. I've given you the public report that can be shared at this time. There is a desire to ask further questions beyond what was communicated to you in the privileged communication last week. I wanted to put this on the agenda in case you wanted to ask questions, but again, it was a fairly comprehensive communication that we sent, but that is a sufficient update at this point. If you don't want to go into the other side of the session, discuss it further, we really don't have anything new or just a model to report on in the shared review. It's pretty communication, but of course, you can ask a few questions that we can. With that, the floor is open. How would the board like to proceed? If there isn't a strong desire to go into executive session, then I'll close the segment and move on and just offer individual board finance members if they have further questions. Feel free to follow up by email and can you answer us that way. We do think this will be a public matter this week or portion. With that, I will close item number five and move to item number six, which is the presentation from Urban 3 about the economics of community design. There he is. He's back. Good. I got it. I didn't send you away for too long. Welcome, Joe. Joe, I spoke a little bit before. I'm really excited to be able to have this discussion with the board and talk about the findings that Joe and his team have put together on Burlington. Joe has really become a national expert in property tax policy and interesting ways to analyze and understand property tax information I have seen his presentations at multiple national conferences over the years and it is I think it's also spoken before some community events here, but this is the first time we really actually had the chance to start digging and work directly with Joe on Burlington issue. It's exciting. It's been, of course, sometimes exciting to be able to get to the stage. Do you want to say anything else to preface this, Katherine or Megan? We brought this to you in the fall of 2022 for contract approval and at the time we had noted that we were interested in working with Urban 3 and Joe specifically to help us take a unique insight and look at how both our budgeting is structured, our taxes, how our tax revenue impacts our overall budget, and help us understand a little bit more about certain land use and policy decisions in terms of how they impact the overall taxable value of the city. So definitely heard the question from Chancellor, from Sharon Buescher during the public forum and really the intent for us is to help give us as city representatives, decision makers, staff more information to understand the potential outcomes of policy decisions that we've made in the past and policy decisions that we've made in the future or we may make it later. So Joe's really going to help tee this up for us. And I think we at a staff level have been able to work with Joe and his team in the Assessors Office to dig into this a little bit more to understand how some of what Joe's going to share dovetails with the reassessment ad hoc committee that was set up and how we think about things like the forthcoming neighborhood code that you'll see this year and other implications for the city's work. This will be something that we'll be able to reference for many different purposes. Great, so, Sarah Reed, welcome. Sweet thanks. And happy new year and thank you all for having me here. I almost said y'all. I grew up and actually upstate New York and my brother went to Rutland for college although I've been down here in the south forever. Anyhow, let me share my screen. And Sharon, I hope I can make it clear. This isn't about investment. A real simple way of looking what we do is I'm trained as an architect and there's a lot of policies that make good design near impossible that make the most sustainable parts of our communities more complicated and more expensive and oftentimes you can't see them until you visualize the policy. And so if there's anything that we can do is to be sort of a visual aid to help see what's going on financially so that you can help make better or so that we can help a community make better policy decisions. So with that, let me share a screen. That's kind of what we try to do is speak in pictures. And here we go. Okay. So y'all can see my screen now. Thank you for taking us on and let us do this project. This has been a lot of fun. It's great to have a community that's very open and willing to have these discussions about equity. This is a matter that's been a national consciousness for a couple years and hasn't necessarily been taken with a lot of seriousness given the gravity of the impact of how people pay for their government. This is the root of it is how you price things. So we're known for making these visualizations but really see these as pictures of policy and what the effects are in communities. I'll explain that in a second. We've been all over the country. We've worked in I think the only we've only worked in not like eight of the 50 states in the United States. We're doing work in Canada, Australia, New Zealand. And it's because of how we present information. I live in Asheville right now and what a lot of people don't realize about Asheville is it was really bombed out. This is a picture of Asheville from the 80s and the 90s. And basically people gave up on what our community was and it was like we're not urban. Go back to Charleston with that kind of stuff. Get out of here. I ended up working having the great good fortune of working for this a philanthropist. Basically his name is Julian Price. He inherited a lot of money but he wanted to create a sort of a community revolving fund. How do you help build community within and invest in the right thing? So we spent a lot of time fixing buildings. We also started businesses, the first vegetarian restaurant in town, nightclub, things that make activity happen in the community, a lot of housing in the downtown for people to live and work in downtown. But we were discovering was the policies and the thinking that is actually makes this stuff difficult and we would talk about it. When we talk with our community, we talk and we use words of the we're a corporation. We're a business trying to function and trying to produce things that the community wants. But so does the community. The community is incorporated just as much as we are. If you look up the word incorporated in the Oxford American Dictionary, it says to create a company, a city or other organization. So you're incorporated. Your county is incorporated. The state of Vermont's incorporated and so is our country. Joe Biden said this on the Stephen Colbert show. The United States is the largest corporation in the world. I'm such a nerd. I looked it up on the bottom of the slide is the US code that lists us as a federal corporation. This is how we operate. So this isn't to say that it needs to be capitalist. It has to operate with some level of financial connection, which is what your committee is doing. So my city of Asheville at $14 billion of taxable value is seven times the value of Ted Turner. Do you expect Ted Turner to look at some financial data about his businesses? Of course. So I should have those same expectations of my community. So my city, by the way, my state made it illegal for my city to annex land. So my city is a finite boundary of acres that needs to be managed. That's it. That's our farm. And when you talk to farmers about real estate, farmers talk in economic terms with the crop yield per acre, the water per acre, the labor per acre. So let's do the same with one of our buildings. So this is a building that we rehabbed. It was an old JC Penney's department store. We put in retail in the ground floor, office on the second floor, and residential above. And we did it because of the city's investment. The city capitalized in the main street and fixed the street, put in bike racks, bike racks, benches, street trees, all that stuff to make the urban realm work. Folks thought we were subsidized for a sidewalk. Okay, fine. Let's say that we got that subsidy, which I could see that. But we took the taxable value from $300,000 to $11 million. What the community got was a 3,500% increase in taxes. That's money that we're paying for the benefit of being in our downtown. And we're gladly contributing to our community. So go out and build 3,500% more bike racks. Let's see more infrastructure. And on the other side of the coin, our city has weird politics. We have hard right and hard left. On the hard right side, people are like, well, you're downtown, you're subsidized. We've got this Walmart over here that's $20 million. And it's like, yeah, that's double our value. I got it. But it took 34 acres of my farm to make that happen. That's apples and oranges. So per acre, apples to apples, we're producing, what, 100 times more property taxes than a Walmart. Double the retail taxes. Who would have thought that a tattoo shop, a beauty salon, and a furniture store is double the production? But it is. Look at the math. Obviously, we have more residents and more jobs. So this is the basis of how to start to ask the right questions about your community is start to make things apples to apples. And realize this isn't complex math that I'm doing here. We already do this when we talk about cars. When we talk about these cars, we don't say what the miles per tank is. You realize how silly that is because everybody's got a different tank size. And if I would start there to brag about my Ford F-150 getting 650 miles per tank, you'd laugh at me. So rather than per tank, we say per gallon and the numbers change, and we should all be driving BMW asettos at 70 miles per gallon. Sorry to the Prius owners, but it's a dangerous little car, though, but it is very efficient. I'm making a joke to kind of get you into the vibe of what we're looking at here. So when we see data across 40 different states, for every dollar of county taxes, somebody's paying out in the county, their brother inside the prime city is paying about five times that. Here's the Walmart, the mall. And this is a two-story building. This could be Driggs, Idaho, Durham, North Carolina, or Dallas. As soon as you start stacking stories, you're stacking your production. And I kept this whole chart under high-rise code. So it's like this is a six-story building. Some feedback that I got early on was like, why do you hate Walmart? You keep on bashing Walmart, which I do. But I presented at the International Association of Assessing Officers Conference. I'm not making this up. This guy got up and presented at eight in the morning, and he's the head of Walmart's real estate. And he presented this amazing show on how cheap Walmart's are to 2,500 assessors from across the country. I mean, this was the squareest conference I've ever been to. It's like it makes a planning conference feel like Burning Man. And I'm sitting there going, all right, this is amazing. Think of how efficient that is. He's getting all of his property tax bills lowered in one meeting. No one questioned it because assessors don't care about that. They care about what the value is, right? So trained as an architect, I was sort of having a coronary because I'm like, how is he getting away with this? He basically walked into the room, announced, we're going to pay the lowest taxes, and everybody was cool about it. So I asked them, I said, Mr. Terrell, what's the useful life of one of your buildings? And he goes, 15, 20 years, we designed the building to depreciate it as fast as possible, we'll build another one and depreciate it down again. We don't care about the buildings. So, okay, their commitment, and it's, I know on Walmart isn't exactly a great example to use in Vermont, but a big box or a dollar general store, they're not designed to last a long time. Their commitment to your corporation is about 15 or 20 years, which is a life cycle of a cat. If you're okay with that, of a very thin level of taxes coming in and cratering, go for it. That's your choice. And you should be allowed to make that choice if it works for your community. So hearing the conversations y'all are talking about is making sure that you're seeing what's going on is music to my ears. I don't know a lot of people that do this kind of interrogation, and it's awesome that you're doing it. So I would argue that people don't know that this stuff is happening is because they're not asking the questions you're asking. And I would say like, if I could show you your your brainstorm activity in blue versus your creative thought process in green, why can't we show your economics? Why can't you show you what's going on? So here's my county, 450 square miles. We've got Mount Mitchell Federal Park right here, part of the Blue Ridge Parkway. And just to be crude about it, I've got the scale over here of high value in purple, low value in green and non taxable is non taxable. So I actually have people in my community, which is kind of wild, where they're just like, I have to big park, it doesn't pay me taxes. It's like, okay, fine. Low value over here in green. And this is called big IV over here. And then you see this big purple splotch right there. That's the Biltmore estate that one property is worth $100 million. Kind of impressive, right? A house for $100 million. But let's be honest, it's 180,000 square foot house sitting on 8,000 acres of land. This is like having the biggest gas tank. So rather than total value, here's value per acre. And I'll just show it to you in 3d. So when we talk in our community about production, I actually have folks in my county, they called our downtown assess pool of sin when I was on the board of directors for trying to be a helper of the downtown, it was like, really seriously? Where's the county getting all of its money? Is that big purple spike in the middle of it? That's where we're producing revenue to afford all of this stuff that we want in our community, like greenways and solar programs. We have to raise revenue somewhere. Now, for folks that live out here in Fairview, who are honestly have no idea what we pay in county taxes, we show them these models. And in their defense, they don't know what property is doing in downtown or in West Asheville, which is our version of Brooklyn over here. That's weight productive compared to Fairview. So just have the empathy to share with people. We think of this as showing the information at an equitable level. We can all see what's going on here. Incidentally, we can see our little village of Black Mountain over here, 13,000 people, you can see it's a little downtown popping up too. So visually communicate your policies and information. So you invited us in to look at Burlington's assessment process, but we always start with the modeling and that starts with your tax system. I'm going to walk through. We make these sort of wikis because we have to learn. I'm sort of this cartoon character that has to figure out your tax system and how your taxes work because we have to produce a model for it to show the cash flow. In North Carolina, our tax system is unbelievably crude. It's just there's a couple of exemptions if you're a disabled veteran and that's about it. We don't have homestead exemptions. We don't have anything that are very progressive neighbors to the South and South Carolina have. North Carolina is pretty behind the times. The only thing we can control is the military and that's our tax bill. For y'all you have an appraised value, which is the property value based on the estimated and fair tax market value. So what somebody would pay for in the marketplace. You have a homestead exemption. So your principal dwelling has the exemption. You can't exempt your second house. All property is considered a non homestead unless otherwise declared. So you have to actually step in and do that. Actually, counselor McGee mentioned automatic enrollment. That would be fairly easy to do very equitably if the mailing address matches the property address. You know that it's owner occupied because that's their mailing address. That could skip a step for some folks if you did that. Tax benefits applies to lower education tax rate is part of your system and basically we're just ran the numbers on $100,000. I know that that's a very low number in your community. We just wanted to pick something that was easy to wrap our brains around. So $100,000. Your appraised grant list value for each of these would be this. So basically you're taxing a portion of a portion to create your value. You can see the difference between residential homestead exemption, non-residential homestead exemption and commercial. Commercial properties are essentially assessed at about 120% of what a residential property is and that's basically or sorry appraised value is. So here's the millage rates and you'll see the split here in the education for residential versus non-homestead where the tax rate goes higher for non-residential and this is your splits across education, municipal and local agreement just as a chart. So homestead ends up when you net that all out pays a lower value in taxes than non-homestead in the education category. But again remember commercial is kicking out more. So when you look at the numbers here at the municipal level that's where the commercial property starts to rise up. Now I will add this commercial isn't all equal. If you make a really dumb cheap box it's going to be very low value versus if you build a commercial product on Main Street out of Brick or Stone that's going to have more latent value within it. So from a tax bill or the appraised grant list value to the total tax bill this is how it works out for each of these properties for the residential homestead versus the non-homestead versus commercial. And you could see the escalation side by side on $100,000 worth of value how it works out. We just want to use this as a little example before we launch into how we had to take this and convert it into how your flow happens. So we're going to train the computer to follow the exemptions and do all this stuff as well. But those are only going to be in the residential areas. Your budget, we're pitchers people we like to show pitchers so we get a hold of your budget. This is called a sand key chart where you show a flow of the money coming in where which fund it goes into and then how it gets redistributed. A lot of people can read spreadsheets. I work in spreadsheets all day long but I like to see a chart. Your property tax is this is your general flow for it. From your property tax bucket into your general fund and some of it goes to the capital fund. But you're looking at about 39.5 million for the 2021 year that we started this project. So you do have capital leases, transfers and holdover fund balances. The reason why this bar in the center is bigger than the bar on the left is you're actually drawing in other accounts from from these funds here. So your staff has been great at sharing this information with us so that we can put it on a chart so you could see it. So you start at 79 and that gets you get a nice boost with that up to 108. And just finally to close this section all states are different in how they operate in the northeast. They tend to operate more off property tax. So in blue it's property tax. For y'all you're mostly property tax. You have some sales taxes and then other other incomes transfers as you sell that come from the state. As you look to the to the right over here states in the south in particular, Alabama, Arkansas. We've done work in these places and it's crazy that they operate off primarily sales taxes because think of what happens in the recession when people don't they don't buy a boat or a car or something like that. All of a sudden you can't afford your government. That's their choice. So it's not all the same. We advocate how the northeast operates because it's more predictable and you have more control. It also has a better connection between the location and how to service it. So for you the the miles per gallon model would look something like this. First of all here's the miles per tank. This is the total appraised value. So you see the larger parcels on the north end up here. Super super high value. So they're purple in color. Green toward the center of town over here in the neighborhoods of low value. Now again that's if you're looking at the total. When you look at the per acre, oh sorry here's some here's some call outs to show you some properties. So you go from total value to per acre. You see a heat shift toward the center because those buildings are highly potent. It's because of the density and the height and mass that they have on the properties but here is in 3D. So this is your if you're to drape a blanket across this model that's your tax rate. It's uniform but the production is non-uniform based on the land uses that are within it. So here's here's your core downtown area and just to zoom in. This is your your your downtown areas. These are the purples in here and heavy reds. Obviously the the newer construction over by Battery Street. They're big buildings. They're super potent. They are what they are. Every community is unique. Your uniqueness is the scale of non-taxable in your community. The call that the university a lot of parks. This stuff is great but be mindful of that. That takes a lot of taxable value off off the off the production which puts the burden on the property that's left over to run the city. This is one of I wouldn't say is the highest. When you get into the Rockies in the Rocky Mountains you'll see a lot more non-taxable because of the because of the mountains but for y'all this is what you have. So here's some some some larger parks and call outs in those areas. So that's that's what that's what it is. Just be mindful of it and also it this could be an opportunity too. We do work with a lot of communities that actually leverage their public assets to do things like affordable housing, business incubation. They can hold the land and then cooperate a development with a university or developers to to do things. So these are this is this is an opportunity for you all. In your downtown this is actually very high. My downtown by comparison here in Asheville we're 100,000 people and our downtown is about 45 non-taxable and we're a county seat. We have federal buildings in our downtown. Y'all are 61 non-taxable. Now some of this is due to the boundary and how it kind of wiggles around and stuff like that but you also have a huge waterfront park as part of that but it is what it is. It's just be mindful of this. This is your most fertile garden is what's in your downtown. So you just want to you want to be cautious about it. So speaking of garden your downtown is about 3% of the city's footprint which is the area that it takes the downtown takes up yet it's producing about 13% of your city's property taxes. So as a ratio of physical footprint to financial footprint you're looking at a one to four ratio of productivity that's that's that's pretty good. When you when you draw out the the non-taxable land you can see the real potency of the of the taxpayers that are in your downtown it's a one to 111 ratio of productivity. A good downtown my downtown is one to nine but you guys y'all are beating us this is this is good. To compare that against another district let's say we chose the the north side the new north north end it's it's about 50% let's call it 45% of the city's footprint it's producing less in value or production about 24% of the city's property tax base comes out of that area. So as a ratio of physical footprint to financial footprint you see it go backward it goes from a one down to a point five. You know it's predominantly residential it is what it is but this could be an opportunity for maybe coaching a neighborhood core like a walkable area with restaurants and and and neighborhood services that could be a little bit more productive with apartments above this this this storey restaurant. Land use types are what make that whole map happen. Think of that map as a bar chart of different land uses. Your residential on average this this would be an average residential property at about $300,000 of taxable value on 0.14 acres. So I'm going to go ahead and use that as like the the bellwether it just happens to meet the median at 2.1 million per acre. We'll leave it down there on the bottom left just to show you versus other housing types how that who's over and under that the median. There there's a this is about 600,000 1.1 million 1.6 million 1.8 million 2.3 this this this starts to jump over the Cuyuga property. This is about five million an acre but your average single family across your community single family detached is averaging about one point let's call it two million uh first thing so under average um with single family you have other typologies a lot of communities don't have this stuff I don't I don't know if you're familiar with the term missing middle but it's the townhouses and mixed-use buildings that were normal pre world war two but they've become difficult to do from a zoning standpoint um it's kind of these are some properties that are duplexes let's just kind of rip through these I want to show you this one over here these are pulling 2.2 2.7 2.7 2.6 and 2.3 versus the average or the the median single family at 2.1 these are basically just bigger versions of of single family along the street here they're just duplexes when you get into this building over here I just going to pull my architectural credentials here but not anything I'd write a home about from our architectural standpoint it's it's just a bar drop drop there but it's actually pretty potent from a production standpoint a lot of times when we see something architecturally we have a bias that kicks in that it may not be that productive but that's actually pretty productive but I'm again I'm not going to give this thing an award from an architectural standpoint but it is what it is it's high density housing in your community by comparison the hula lakeside office parking lot is about 1.1 million so that's underperforming these are opportunities to look at ways to cultivate wealth or cultivate your your value so that you can harvest tax production I would start with the parking loans so just by comparison we're looking at a million over here 1.9 2.7 and 2.4 so all these neighbors are doing way better than that parking lot up to the the multifamily now you're looking at it's it's sort of all over the board but you have from 800,000 this is this is a missing middle right here it's a essentially a probably an eight pack of housing at 9 million in acre so that's that's the old style of doing multifamily within a neighborhood that used to be fairly commonplace the newer stuff cambrian ways coming in about five million an acre of production the multifamily on average is about double single family on average and again I mentioned this building earlier this is it's a big building it's going to be potent this one's coming in at about 118 million let's call it 119 million an acre of production it is what it is it's a very big building it's full of of of higher end units and it's it producing it and it's in its value it's actually the the top spike in the model this is the most productive building in your community so that's just the the cold hard numbers on that from residential over to commercial real quick here's the Ethan Allen shopping center down to 1.2 or about average single family residential Shelburne shopping center is about 1.6 million and I know I'm going fast through all this but we'll have this for you as a as a PDF that you can have a 1.9 million for the Hyundai Subaru is 2.3 million this is a building we loved it's 4.1 million an acre for this that's that's productive it's double the productive of the Hyundai dealer so who would have thought very festive mixed use mixed use buildings now again when you see mixed use buildings for whole communities people have made these things illegal now you're old enough and wise enough to know that they actually work in neighborhoods and you have this one coming at 10.4 million an acre versus the Ethan Allen shopping mall this is like nine times the production of the the Ethan Allen shopping mall right here who would have thought this building is 10.5 million an acre so you don't have to I'm not I'm not advocating skyscrapers I'm not advocating big Manhattan buildings it's just like something like this find find ways to allow this more of this to happen this is a little weird it's 43 million I don't know what happened up here somebody dropped a building on top of it but it's it's productive and then you have these heritage pieces in your community that have been repurposed and recycled and they keep coming back with tremendous amounts of value this isn't designed to last 15 years and it and though it didn't start its life in its current use it has had this ability to contribute in your community which is a great lesson to learn from yourselves 60 million an acre for this building lunegs bistro at 62 million an acre so again you're seeing these patterns I'm just walking throughs think of this I'm just walking through a bar chart here and the three-dimensional model is a three-dimensional bar chart of your whole place on the map this this area here has been interesting to look at so 25 million 15 million 21 million 21 million 6 million 16 million so that it is a spectrum of values across just in that one little corner but it's all that stuff in the middle of your community that's giving you that that a very solid base to build your downtown on so downtown versus residential really quick your average across downtown is about 8 million just averaging the whole lot of it to compare that against a different part of your community your downtown's 8 million the closest one is the the old north north and east area at about 4 million an acre of production uh or sorry sorry the the saint paul south wenuski actually comes in at 4.2 then the old north end then the old north end east and again this isn't I hope Sharon I hope you're not taking away the like I'm let's just make some money out of this it's that's not what this is about I just want you to see what's going on in your community so that you can be better informed on the decisions and have a barometer for some meeting gauge to to start this and here here's a bar chart of those those areas to show how they stack up side by side oh jex before I go forward and you know your community way better than we do you know these neighborhoods far more uh intimately than we do is this lining up with the way that you thought the communities were producing would you expect the far north end to be down in the ones actually let's go to this this will be a easier way to see it the far north end uh down here at 1.4 versus five avenues it almost almost doubled that or lakeside is definitely double that so it's just just let the numbers tell you what's going on and it'll allow you to ask the next question when you get into downtown it pops up over here okay so in summary of this part of the presentation you know what your max value is you know what your your your single family and your multifamily let these be metrics to use going forward you do have a lot of non-taxable land in your community that is actually an opportunity i'm not saying sell it to the private sector saying use it as a as a as ways to help your community move forward and also you've got a really good downtown production you have a great model and you know that the equity assessment that you asked us to look at was to look at the pricing of the housing how it's working inside your model a lot of communities adopted it's called a computer automated mass appraisal system or a camel model and it carries forward a lot of practices and standards that are baked into that system that used to be an excel spreadsheet and before that it was a ledger form longhand list that was written down but all those systems add up and it's not just you nationwide the new york times did a great publication if you want to copy copy of it just google that title and it'll bring up the work of dr chris berry nationwide this is a problem we've actually done this analysis here in our community and found is actually worse here but they did these maps and these studies and basically they found these things i call it a j curve because it looks like a j laying on its side like it fell down but they they did an analysis from the lowest 10 percent of housing to the top 10 percent of housing and what they found is that it's not a flat line it's actually bent in the higher values it just baked into the system and really it's kind of simple when you look at the whole system in aggregate is one pile of housing it's going to find a center point to the mean and if you use that as the math it's going to pull the the lowest wealth houses up in value and pull the highest wealth houses down in value just it's just simple math but you can break that down to do better analysis so this is a a quote from uh from your general provisions the estimated fair market value shall be the price of the property the market is offered for sale and purchased by another taken in considerations of elements of availability of the property it's used both potential and perspective in any functional deficiencies and all other so this is your language appraised value should be 100 of the market value so your total taxable value tax taxable property is about 5.6 billion and total property taxes you're producing about 120 million out of that and municipal property taxes you're looking at 36 million comes to the community the city and 25 million 70 percent of that is coming from residential so the majority of your revenue is coming from the residential properties in aggregate it's just not as potent is the footprint of the commercial stuff does that make sense so the sales ratio if we're to place this on the ratio visit overpriced or underpriced its appraised value was 272 its selling price was 215 so in this case this is a house that was over appraised because the market told you what the test score was so the sales ratio is called a 1.27 this is language that's used in common parlance of assessment world the way that I like to look at it is this thing scored 127 percent on its on its school test which was a sale price so it's over achieving in production which means it's overpaying 27 percent in taxes that's at the top of the sales ratio this is a house that would be comes out pretty good the the camera model got it right it's it's basically hitting the sweet spot this is right on par where it should be this meets the requirements of the of the of the of the of the the the language the legislation language and then here's a house at the higher end appraised value you can see that it came in the sales ratio higher it so the sale or the sale that purchase higher which means that sell ratio it's paying 80 percent of what it should be in taxes and that's the way it stacks up over appraised or overtaxed accurately praised fairly taxed and undertaxed so this is the the language of how we're going to be looking forward into all of your housing going going going into this so if you take all the houses throughout your whole community and put them on a line from the highest value house at the left to the lowest value house on on the left or highest value house on the right lowest value house on the left and break it into 10 percent buckets and what you want to do rather than look at all of the housing collectively just look at it in little 10 percent buckets and say what's the median of each of these 10 percent deciles let's say so are they are they all level are they all being assessed at the same one ratio and when you do that in your community this is how they plot out so the the lowest 20 percent of housing are the highest production so this is this is uh oh sorry before I go further notice how one or paying 100 percent of value is up here that would be if everybody was accurate they would be along that line up there so everyone is being under assessed from one down to 0.92 but some folks are being under assessed far greater than their peers that are in their small a lower decile so this is the difference between the mean and the mean adjusted is this is where it should be up here the regular mean but we're going to go ahead and adjust it and bring it down to just what's the mean of the group of y'all in the sample so who's over the mean and who's under the mean and so this is kind of how that chart looks like if we're just call it over and assessed and under assessed that you have two and a half deciles that are far over assessed a bunch in the middle and then you have one two three four deciles four and a half let's say of deciles that are that are under uh under appraised so there's we just color coded the line so that you could read it more clearly and understand the concept of how we look at sales ratios by decile is it's called a vertical equity analysis when you do it this way if you if there's any economic nerds in the audience but that's I just call it the the sales ratio chart you also have a lot of moving parts in your system uh and how your tax system works we made a we had to make a chart so that we could explain it to ourselves you have your your fiscal year your tax year and you have the lifespan of the appraised value and where the property is linked so a property may be over here but it's linked back to a previous appraised value um I don't know what you could do going forward to line these up more clearly but that's something to consider because you do get lags in certain years where you're drawing backward in time on value that's still carrying forward into the current but anyway I just made that chart or we made that chart so you could see that total residential stock across the community we pulled that in 20 you've you've you've nudged it up a little bit from 2020 to 2023 um and or sorry these are the sales in those years sorry not stock it's the sales of the stock and this is just the data of that the the sales and transactions this is what's giving you your current information about what people are paying in the marketplace and this is what you want to pay attention to um save about four percent turnover and in 2023 obviously the mortgages the mortgage rates are going to slow that down over this over this next cycle um so we went ahead and plotted it in 2020 what your chart looked like in 2021 what your chart looked like and just to show you there in in each of the samples you have these trends uh where it all bends the the same way there isn't a magic cleanup on this this is a lot of movement that you need to work on and continue continue to work on I'll have some recommendations at the end of things that could be the the uh the early steps but basically this is this is you have this trend package in that whole window so here they are just kind of lined up next to each other same information you saw earlier just laying on the same chart um what's interesting to see is that you're actually moving in a more positive direction toward accurate so you're going from you you drop down a year but then you kind of leapt up and 2023 kind of drop down again there's going to be movement in this but as long as you're moving upward toward toward one that's a good direction so continue to do this going forward this is just uh one way of looking at it that I just showed you this would be accurate if you want to if you want to judge fairness this is where fairness is whether or not the fairness is within its same sample so here's fair so you can see how much of the areas are under under fair by year and again for every dollar of taxes paid at the high end in 2020 the uh the the bottom decile paid about a buck 11 cents more is a way to look at it in 2021 we do the same thing for every dollar paid it got worse 25 cents in 2022 it went down to 120 and then last year it got better at 14 so even though they may look like they're still not moving you are actually moving in a good direction here and I hope that makes sense oops sorry I forgot to click the button um pre-revaluation and post-revaluation in 2021 and 2023 here's what pre and post look like so again you're moving in the right direction this is you're doing some great things now just looking at those two years side by side again accurate would be up here fair is here before I keep going do y'all understand the difference between fair and inaccurate what I'm talking about here we're seeing some heads nodding Joe okay um so pre-valuation this is how it looked um and post-evaluation sorry let me go back that was fast so pre-evaluation it was went let's just jump ahead it was 21 cents and post-evaluation it dropped to 14 cents this is another way of measuring it in the gap distance between low value homes and high value homes it's a two 20 percent difference um you're down to 16 percent so you're making improvement the appeals process we went ahead and looked at that as well you've had 440 appeals 5 5.2 percent of all residential properties and the total value of your community went from uh two fifth there's a tremendous amount of drop in your value of your of residential um sorry sorry and it's dropped big on the chart it's eight percent decrease across the system so you've you've got a uh 20 million dollar value drop there uh in appeal as far as homeowners that win their appeals this is a question of equity as well you can see there's a higher level of of participation in appeals at the high end and when you look at um the success rate you know you you see a the $300,000 range and at the over $600,000 range a higher rate it may be worth looking into the language of how people appeal and whether or not they're just saying I don't like paying taxes that's oftentimes those folks may be frustrated but they get immediately thrown out because it doesn't talk they don't talk about the value but anyway these kind of outliers in swings will be worth looking at and seeing why these are such a low success rate now as far as the change in appraised value by the people that are successful this is another way of looking at it that you see the amount of value taken out and decrease as you go up the chain and well obviously those properties are going to be worth more so it's going to be a bigger chunk but you're losing 11 to 12 percent here versus nine percent in the second desk in the $300,000 range and then this is the same information as the bar chart to show you the total discount in houses under $300,000 of value between 300,000 and 350 350 and 400 400 and 500 and then over $550,000 they've been awarded about the top 20 percent of discount just in that one tranche if you will okay it's a lot of nerdy charts it's a lot of data it's not easy to present this stuff at a night meeting so I want to thank you for your patience our recommendations are fairly simple you want to increase the frequency of assessments we work with communities that do them annually find ways to think of the more you're getting feedback the more you're going to be able to do improvements and and nudge things forward it'll just give you more opportunity to see what's going on in the marketplace and be more fair about it you want to incorporate vertical equity into the studies and sales ratios analyses you want to break things down in the smaller buckets basically the 10 percent buckets are what we recommend in literature recommends to basically hone in on the medians you want to evaluate the appeals process while you're also looking at the the modeling process and another another thing you could do is maybe fund a third party organization to help folks with lower incomes that fund the need an appeal our community works with a group called physical legal group that is a a nonprofit pro bono attorneys that help folks with with the appellate process in in south bend the the the legal department at the university at Notre Dame University helps folks so that could be a partnership with the university as well but there's clearly a noise in the in the information that shows that the lower end properties are having a harder time consider partnering with other folks i know that i know i know new england has borders between places but i just wanted to put this in here but your county is about the same area and population is my county and so we have one county staff operating in this boundary and think of all the municipalities and jurisdictions in here could you just share some information we know of property of of of communities that actually buy data from Equifax or that was the other group trans union where you can actually buy what people write down on their properties and get that data i know it's expensive but if you shared it collectively that could help everybody and you're all wrestling with the same problem so maybe pool your resources create a unit another option is create a uniform tax abatement we're working in pennsylvania in allentown and the assessor is contemplating just oops sorry about that a uniform tax abatement of in his community it's 350 000 dollars he's considering maybe try 75 you're going to have a bigger impact on the lower wealth housing because it's going to raise the bottom for everybody it's a uniform abatement across the system you're not violating state policy for your constitution but what you're doing is you're giving a more progressive way of raising the bottom for everybody continue your commitment towards transparency we're seeing a lot of places waffle they went into this great two years ago and now it's it's a lot of habits are coming back so y'all are doing great with that you're a great model for this and i want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to do some math thanks thank you i am an opportunity for some discussion so uh i'd say um floor is open for well we're not here for that proposing uh you know specific actions here tonight um it's an opportunity with uh to talk directly to the people in this report um we can have some follow-up back here as well but floor's open a few questions so thank you this is very comprehensive it was just working when did it start this was um we worked on this for about a year uh not consistently throughout that time we did have a little bit of a pause on our end uh just for some other projects that we were working on but yeah i mean i really hope that we have this five six seven years uh but also was just wondering what do you think we had uh i'm in the room as well so like if any one of them three questions directly towards made out if you want to have the answers questions i think jenna depends on about points um i think some of the dirt would be something about real it's not a burning specific problem it's it's a national problem he's right about models i mean i've been a crazier for over 20 years and it's not just just in tax praises in every aspect of property value um a lot of the things he mentioned are state issues um the i would love nothing more than for us to get with banooski and s6 and share information and share data um but the way vermont is set up it makes it difficult so it's not that we don't want to do it it's a lot of statute and regulations associated with it but you know i i appreciate his information and i appreciate what you said about the um the amount of bound number eight or so see with some of these particles um and that's right and i see that some of the properties that we have that that can produce you know that's a real thing to look at um and i'm glad he was just a light on that but yeah good stuff i mean the presentation validates um some of the things that are going on right now but you know that that parking light you pointed out um that is generating so much less per acre of the city than the lakeside neighborhood is of course we just upped on it dramatically um uh it makes use so that the effort going on the drain benches between the city and the developers there to you know hopefully hopefully in 10 years that that same uh childhood looked very different similarly the neighborhood code worked that um mega-pest failed uh leading really um you know you come at it a lot of ways from a housing production perspective how do you how do you deal with this dramatic supply challenge that we have but you know the presentation sort of points out as if you were trying to come at it from uh taxes generated per acre you'd get to some similar set of solutions for um a lot of the city so that's so it's really nice to see that that it kind of validates that that direction of the neighborhood a lot i think um one thing that i appreciate being pointed out the presentation point that's too although you'd have to it the point that this is a national problem that that's part of how we got here i i read that New York Times article it came out of time saw some of the national discussions of it thought but we were kind of coming out of the rephrase all that we should really be uh doing this you know kind of comprehensive review of how Berlin's doing that i think was there was her point out i think there are many parts of the country that have a far greater disparity or uniform you know you kind of can look at ours and see that i think there is a relative pretty pretty well with pretty fairness for much of the kind of middle you know the 20 percentile to the 90th percentile there's a pretty high degree of fairness is what it seems to me that's announced the show is at the end we have a challenge but it's no like it is and it's challenge i think we all know we need now that we kind of see it if we need to keep working on it do something about it i think it is worth noting it is a much smaller disparity than many other communities have is like the work that's happened before them that there has to be for so there's a buying reaction so i also think um the other reaction that i've had in working with Joe and i think he's mentioned this a couple times specifically in reaction to the question that Sharon asked in the public forum as well um you know looking at the amount of non-taxable land in the city you know one of the things that we talked with Joe's team about when we were making these graphics is just that that's uh really a visualization of Burlington's values we have almost 40 percent of the land area in the city that is in some kind of park or natural open space that we are intentionally conserving so when we then when we look at that in addition to institutional property and other city owned property state owned property we really start to see kind of how that impacts how much of our land is it is actually generating the tax revenue but it's really a picture of our values and so i think that that helps us when we make decisions like you all have been talking about gateway and what does gateway look like that helps us both meet the city's goals and values but helps us to generate new revenue um to develop in there so and lastly i think people may not know the outcome of your administration but from my perspective he painted it out he is very beautiful because one of the biggest buildings that are generated by the citizens of Burlington helped with the administration and i was so hopefully deeply angry about the thinking outside of the parks getting out of Burlington and one of the main reasons you're not able to do this in Burlington is that he has that for the next year um this is great i i need to get a picture of you thank you guys okay um go to council parallel and i see council member that's the end of so thank you very much for that i i like those data dense presentations although i have to confess i was starting to be pretty filled up about 75% really but even even so a couple of reactions when you were showing the graphic of the downtown properties values and the production there um i can't but think back to when we were doing um some of the tax appeal uh site visits after most recently appraisal and um my surprise that the income approach to value that's used to value a lot of those properties um didn't necessarily um value them at their highest value had they been used differently there there's some properties that um in the high value areas in your study that um have you know productive first floor uses but second third floor uses that are significantly underutilized um and that directly um played into the valuations of those properties so as as just a you know from a methodology standpoint for valuing these properties we have to somehow figure out a way if we're going to realize the potential that was described to us tonight how we're going to pivot on the way we value those commercial properties so that's not strictly um current income but maybe maybe more around highest best use um the other the other thing that um i think that you and your recommendations around around doing more frequent appraisal so you know we have a very complicated education tax system in the state um and i think it's almost 70 percent of our property tax goes to pay for education um and so there's a lot of state interplay with our ability to to affect affect property taxes i think in some ways um in terms of implementing those recommendations i didn't know if there was any anything that you thought might hinder us or help us in some way based on that relationship we have with the state on the education property tax uh sure yeah actually um we've been in communication with several members of of uh your state uh legislature that want us to investigate what if you went toward a land value tax so they're ripe for the conversation of wanting to understand i mean that's that's a pretty big move y'all y'all understand land value tax um it's henry george tax uh have have you ever heard of um henry george there's a great there's a great um he's a tax economist from the third the late 1800s and his simple concept was why is it that that somebody could step off the mayflower and own a bunch of land in boston meanwhile we're dealing with all this immigrant population that's coming in and they're being forced into tenements and meanwhile you could sit there with a yard and no building and be taxed at that value rather than what you've taken from society a great book called progress and poverty that came out in the um uh the turn of the century helen keller wrote uh wrote in the preface supporting the book i mean he was the guy was a rock star did lectures all over the country um there were some people that followed him around and they were known as known as georgias and new york times did a great article on it recently because detroit is considering going toward this tax system um one of my favorite side stories of this is one of the followers the acolytes her name was elizabeth maggie phillips and she was a georgist and she realized adults get to it always gets complicated for adults it's like well well let's kind of talk this through and she's like let's i'm not going to work with adults anymore so she invented a board game called the landlord's game it's now monopoly and think about the rules of monopoly location land assembly and you put a building on it so as you're having your discussions think about it what's what's your two drink minimum for a property so how much have you invested in snow plowing a sidewalk a garbage truck has to go by yeah you're not using it property owner but we've already invested we need our revenue we shouldn't let you under build or under develop on our community there's a base that we need to hit and and this is the thing as you talk about i mean you talked about this with the pottery classes why not talk about it from your city's perspective so that's where land value taxing taxation comes in um is like raise the base at a level that's fair across the system and if you want to choose to speculate and do nothing with that property and keep it a surface parking lot good on you but we at least need to recoup ours you know and that's i think that's the the psychology to take into it but also since your state is talking at that level it's good to it's good to open the door to them and say we have some other ideas you know it's like they know that the system is screwed up too and their hand is in on it does that make sense there are two more two two more things since you mentioned what other places this is this is let's see if i can do this right this is your sales ratio you go from 0.9 down to about 0.75 right below the below the limbo bar up there would be fair this is my community of bumping county the poorest are being overtaxed at about 1.18 while the wealthiest are done at 0.9 so this is this is a problem that we have all across the country and just no one's never really looked at it this way so this isn't your assessor's fault it's not the camo model's fault it's what it technically is but it's it's no one's it we just kind of carried forward these these systems that have been in place two books i'd recommend that and then i'll shut up this book came out a while ago you probably all know about it color of law the the follow-up book is called just action and there's a lot of great ideas in here about how to help that you're actually doing some of that right now so i don't know if that was part of your plan or not that's we um for four years uh joe i i hosted an occasional book group called the mayor's book group and we read the color a lot as one of them a number years ago i've not read the follow-up that'd be that glad to know i actually didn't know that came out that's great um counselor berman go ahead thank you i will hope not to cough too much every time i talk i do that so you're lucky um it would so i really appreciate uh the the presentation i actually think it's a great intro and i echo much of what uh my fellow counselors have have said already i think it would be very helpful to me to get more granularity on the numbers and the locations for the like the low income houses i mean i'm i'm suspecting that two hundred thousand dollar houses are like falling apart and it'd be helpful to know sort of like it's in the 10th but you know actually i think if you're doing 10 percent so you had those but that would just be helpful and also the locations in there i was struck i represent the old north end um in sort of the well the the center part of the city and i was struck at the numbers there in our ward and i've lived here for almost 40 years or actually more um compared to the new north end no offense to you mark and and ali but um i mean that was just striking and i know that our folks are you know primarily um low and moderate income folks and and renters so i um and they're suffering wicked high um things so it would be really helpful i think to get real clarity about about locations as well as numbers that you know um yeah yeah you could see that i mean that that that was striking i think i saw it in in the presentation and the other um thing that i would hope that um we could get and you started to allude to it with the color of money and the follow-up book but you know you have example you had one example of a an alternative excuse me uh the abatement you know just making a flat abatement but there and you just raised that the land tax which we've been looking at uh people in in my caucus have been uh interested in as well so you have some local folks who are interested in that idea but you know perhaps there's also a municipal equivalent to the state education fund where there is income sensitivity and it would be very very helpful to sort of understand the panoply of um ideas and the extent to which we don't have the statutory authority to do them well that's never stopped me from trying to get the statutory authority so um i i don't think that um uh just because it's not uh in the range of acceptable opinion it we need to accept that i would like to open that window um significantly um farther and but thank you very much thank you that's a great thank you i just wanted to repeat um i agree with but a counselor bergman just said i i too am a counselor from the central district which is the old north end and i found um i need to go back and listen to it again because i am kind of multitasking still at work but uh yeah some of these numbers were just very telling to me and also some of the numbers around the reappraisal the the reappraisal appeals were very very rough very problematic um in fact we had a whole committee to review that process because of the complaints around it so um i didn't find some of that to be surprising but um yeah it's uh it it's just kind of a grave concern considering the people that live in the area and um i guess there's really not much more to say than what what counselor bergman said i just it is very telling information thank you thank you joe could you just i just want to make sure especially for the last couple comments um we're all kind of sharing understanding what's driving that disparity between like the new north end and and the old north end and um you kind of discussed two different phenomena here at least one more than two but two big ones that came up a lot what's shown in this graph is um not really necessarily related to the j-curve that you were talking about before this is to a large degree a function of density right and the amount of land area built on setting aside the town for a moment but the the old north end is very it's quite dense the lots are small a lot coverage is high the new north end is a more suburban area the lots are big um the houses and many neighborhoods are actually quite modest houses and with a fairly low locker bridge ratio i i my sense is that's driving a lot of that that difference there is that exactly okay exactly yeah this is that that's not a sort of sense of fairness necessarily in terms of what the other charts we're showing of is a fairness correct yeah yeah maybe i could be more clear yeah this is this is thank you for everybody i just want i just want to make well i want to make sure i was interpreting correctly and and and yes this was it was surprising even for me who understood this to be about density it still is surprising to see the old north end compare to these other neighborhoods at this higher valuation well i get picked on here in town i mean trust me that built more family lets me know that they don't like me showing that model where they're where they're building just kind of flattens out to nothing you know like could you please stop showing that i'm like no it's data you know it's just because they're proud of their property but it's like come on now it's 8000 acres it's 180 you know so it just it is kind of a little bit of a joke that they blow all of that real estate but would our community be different if we lost them definitely i mean they it's it's a tourism attraction we're proud of it to a to an extent there's a legacy here that we have to still wrestle out a little bit with the Vanderbilt wealth in our community but um you know it's just a bigger it's real simple a bigger property is going to take all of that so when you do that just realize there's a trade-off you know that that property is now maximized its frontage i mean just think like a snow plow does do you pay more with the snow plow when you have 200 feet of frontage versus somebody that has 50 feet of frontage should right um it's just thinking that thinking at that level and just asking yourself to go through these questions allows you to rethink yourself a little bit about what biases we carry uh and in our properties this is this may be jarred some biases by putting that out there and and you know i think it will be very interesting if we if we ask the neighborhood code and then in a lot of ways what the neighborhood code would allow is more of the city to be built like the older sections of our city like the old north end and it might you might you know in 30 years there might be considerably narrower deviation on this everything it says when you say yeah definitely and and in the context of the neighborhood code we've not only been talking about what types of poems joe referenced multiple times things that we've made illegal over time which is certainly true here in burlington um but even just how we have separated the uses that are allowed in different parts of the city so councillor jang knows that we've been talking about having a new north end plan and one of the things that we've heard over and over again as we've been doing outreach related to the neighborhood code is people not only saying yes let's have more housing choices within these neighborhoods that are largely single family neighborhoods but also let's better utilize the avenue and let's make opportunities for like not only the Henry four Henry street delis on the avenue but more of the um property that was there at the intersection of interrail and north street i really can't see any you haven't seen the streets have you been saying we need a new north end plan tv and and we've been just seeing the example yeah okay um so uh do you want to say any final thoughts on where this goes from here and maybe the councillors might expect to hear more on this or or happy to answer more questions about this information and as um joe and catherine and i have been looking at bringing this project with joe's team to a close we've been thinking about ways that we can utilize this information in all sorts of work that we're doing as a city so whether it's uh about the reappraisal process itself um whether it's helping us understand our budgeting process or even as it's helping us understand policy decisions about land use certainly a way that we see ourselves kind of coming back to this information and i was taking some notes about questions that the uh members had asked about potential other steps that we might be able to take this as well great so we'll follow up on um all right i was about to wrap up but uh councillor graham would you like to get back in some i guess i'm starting to mold this a little bit and i am you know me i'm always talking about um equity in our city our city has a lot of issues around the lack of equity um and there was uh the way we were hit during the reappraisal some of the highest increases in the city on um the majority of the people who live in the area um have a lower income so this is just really um i'm really kind of thinking about this is it because we are close to the lake we're close to the parks you know because sometimes you go and you look at some of these houses and the reappraisal was basically the teardown value if you tore down this this this building that was on the verge of collapse anyway and you built something new then the assessment would be appropriate uh we we definitely saw a lot of that where people didn't they felt that you know they're not looking at the condition uh they're not looking at what i can afford to do to to fix this place up or not be able to fix it up uh so i um yeah i think we need to to to really as a city look at this in terms of fairness and then around how we handle future appraisals and future appeals toward appraisals um because these comparisons are pretty stark thank you thanks cancer grant yes the point of doing this is to look at all our processes i i do hope the point came through clearly that the reappraisal helped dramatically we are substantially fairer after the reappraisal than before a little bit less so over time as the appeals process the appeals process i think really there are some structural reasons why the appeals process do benefit higher income people over over time and this idea that maybe we do something to assist people at the lower with lower value properties is a really interesting one that is sort of a new idea that uh i think it's a definitely a significant interesting thing to come out of here and so the reappraisal process not not perfect there's instruction i think the point that joe made uh it you know that was made repeatedly here is like there's some structural things in just the way america does property assessments that uh and the the averaging that takes place in it that are almost by definition gonna create that that g-curve and that growing tens is less than a lot of places um but i do absolutely agree that this raises a lot of important reason we did this is because we were aware that this is a phenomenon and thought we should really dig into it and uh this gives us i think more details to dig into than than we've had before and everyone the reason we did this we did that so we'll we'll see you can also have access yeah we'll make sure that everybody has access to the great so uh jewell minna cousin thank you very much again uh i hope you since you've sparked an important conversation here in the community thank you for your hard work on this and your leadership on these issues in general and uh look forward to it yeah thank thank you all and if there's more that we could do to help you just let us know and i guess that might my takeaway and i what i've heard in this meeting is like and now you know you know so that's a good thing so thank you all for having the curiosity and the um the the interest to do this we appreciated it thank you thank you jim take care you too so now you know the recommendation will be clear and i would just now read about what i've been asking about in terms of implementing and doing more research in the state yeah so i think this is where um like each of the departments that work collaborating on this project will need to do some work in terms of how we might implement the recommendations that are relevant to our work um i think there was some discussion about some of the things related to the appraisal process are things that joe and kathryn will work on um particularly as it relates to changes in state law and changes to state process um from our perspective we're uh from a planning perspective we're starting to implement some of these recommendations with the forthcoming neighborhood code with the zoning changes that you'll be receiving so um we're trying to at the staff level start to think about how we operationalize the different pieces of this that's a really good question um i don't know if you haven't thought about that that's taxation is a little expensive i know girl um but certainly the rpc has been a really good partner in helping municipalities like they've helped us share data in other ways so we could bring the idea to them um one of the things that was even recommended to us by this group is not so much about doing our appraisals together but about looking at data on sales at a multi-municipal level to understand um kind of how this is happening across the county um certainly then there were some ideas about actually like sharing those services but the basis of it all is based on those transactions so if you have the transactions near the sales that that creates a foundation of accurate information to form the assessment offer so when you can collaborate and share this information across borders then it just makes everyone's information that much more accurate um so you know they even said this is Joe we're having a meeting i said more information you can give me the the more efficient effective and accurate it's going to be so in the states working on this with act 68 and they're trying to get a statewide assessment program and they have the right idea um it's just you know getting more information and working together on something it's it's really answering but it's part of Vermont i mean people people want to keep keep their communities so so so cracking that egg is a real problem for the accurate information and assessment of the new problems next step okay thank you everyone it's uh this has become a making meeting but i think uh just i think the interest in this was uh it's great so Megan thank you for leading the process on this bringing us another another brief piece of work coming out of your department uh if there's no objection that is all it's ever right that's a whole bunch of that we gotta go turn we uh our turn is 731 p.m