 So what we call the special meeting of the city council and senior staff on the budget retreat December 15th 2023. So I welcome you all. I thank you for taking the time. So she's a counselor so we don't all kind of meet during the day. It doesn't affect me because it don't work but for some of you it does so I appreciate that. And so let's get going. We've got a lot before us. We've got a couple hours and I think it should be a really interesting and informative conversation looking forward to hearing from each of the departments about the budgets and the life itself. Do you want instructions? I guess you all know how to exit the building. Go out that way. That's nice. There's the public safety professionals here if you really need some help. Okay and then oh people are online so we aren't taking comments. I mean we might take comments but the written part don't chat us. Yes if you're participating online and would like to speak please indicate you would like to speak in a chat or to your camera on otherwise we're not monitoring the chat comments. Sorry. How do great of an internment practice. Okay so item three is the agenda review. I believe there is a small addition. Yes we do have one late item all of that. Yes so as I sent a note to counselors we missed our notice that when we have a paper for the second council hearing on the city plan I apologize. Our recommended addition for you is to open the public hearing as scheduled on January 2nd and then basically continue it to January 8th of Monday to just keep it open for notice purposes. We'll advertise it in the paper for both of those dates which will mean our minimums and then at that point you would be able to either adopt upon closure or you still have time at that point if you are seeking changes to still hold your additional public hearing at the end of January as previously planned and scheduled. So if we do make changes then how does that affect the final there's a time frame when this is due what happens if you're late what does the state do? So if you don't so if if there's a plan the plan expires on February 2nd at the end of the day on February 2nd if the city has no plan then in the short term you're not eligible to amend your zoning your official map things like that you're not eligible to apply for certain state grants and then the other piece of the puzzle that's a little bit trickier is that there is no plan for regarding Act 250 reviews so one of the criteria under Act 250 is conformance with regional and local plans so there is no local plan upon which to compare something. I don't know how much lease law there has been on the subject as to whether that would then apply only to an application received at that after that date or any pending application that was in front of the council sorry that was in front of the Act 250 commission so those are the in that the world does not fall apart but there are some effects. Okay so Bo can you can you just uh Bo to modify the agenda to add this yes I'm sorry I thought it was it sounded more like an announcement but yes so we'll add that um can we add that just right after public comment get it out of the way. Sure. So four points or B and a comment for A so um hearing that and the rest of the agenda there's no other changes um all those in favor of amending the agenda I'm sitting by by saying aye any opposed so that carries so we'll get back to it just one second okay are there any comments and questions from the public not related to the agenda there's no public people in this room so I'll go to the screen is there anyone okay seeing none um we'll move on to four B which is what I started early so you wanted Paul to so I think uh just this is I was not sure Paul was actually human this is proof that Paul is actually a human that makes mistakes very very rare that this happens um so the can you repeat Paul just what you need them to approve tonight so uh my request would be for the council to vote to hold a supplemental public hearing on January 8th 7 p.m. on the city plan so we also need to know if a quorum of you is available on January 8th that's not that's a normal no it's not it's a special meeting it's a special meeting but it would be at 6 30 or something like that 6 30 on Monday and it would be this one issue yeah so it would be brief okay yep um is anyone not yeah I'll be in the case oh so you're I spent two January 7th this is Sunday have you seen January 8th excuse me so Andrew can't be there is there another used to the quorum we just need a quorum okay and so Larry you can eat it okay all right so that sounds like that's doable want to move it uh motion yes I do like it would like a motion so I move that city council one or a special supplemental city council meeting on January 8th 7 6 30 p.m. I'll second and just to just to clarify two four you said publicly public hearing on the city plan or the use of a public hearing on the city plan okay is there any further discussion all in favor okay so that's thanks everyone I think added yes all right so now we get down to the real business item five is the department presentations great so if I can just do a little table setting one thank you all for being here and giving up your time on a work day we really appreciate it the leadership team has put a lot of work into not only building the budget for preparing for this conversation we only have a few this is kind of our only opportunity during the year to really present to you a comprehensive picture of our municipal operations and your organization that you lead so we have prepared presentations to walk you through those things we feel like it's our professional obligation to share the expertise that we have make recommendations to you I would argue and I know I'm incredibly biased but this is the most talented group of municipal employees that exist in the state most of them have decades of experience in their sphere of influence and are extremely smart and great excellent resources excellent services and resources to the residents of South Burlington so in front of you you have not only the official agenda for the meeting but also kind of an annotated agenda that talks to you about how those these presentations will lay out we've only allocated 20 minutes per service area public safety community services in court government and 45 minutes to public works which is the largest portion of our budget across multiple funds for the first half of this conversation the department heads will walk you through those presentations if you have any clarifying questions or operational questions feel free to ask at that time the second half of the conversation is really meant to be your conversation about how you want to take this proposed budget and make it your own we are happy to cost out any scenarios that you would like us to cost out but then I think if we get some of those requests today we could do that this afternoon or Monday in preparation for your conversation Monday night and with that any questions about process or what's going to happen today all right so first up we have chief perk if you want me to share your slides please if you can go right to the orator that would be great medically sealed nobody is so is it locked no i don't think so oh no not these are also all the present for those participating online or for the council at a later date these slides are also all available on the city's website under the fy25 budget page under presentation so you can link them could you go yep as stated good morning everybody my name is shanberg i'm the privilege of serving as the city's police chief the slide before you lays out our organizational structure it includes the administration of the police department which is the chief and the officer the deputy chief direct reports there are executive assistant in the community justice center we're one of two police departments in the state where the community justice center is embedded within our operation and housed in in our building which is really really special proceeding down the chart we have two divisions essentially the police department we have the patrol division and the administrative division both are commanded by lieutenants in the patrol side of the house we have our complement of patrol teams that work a 12 hour schedule essentially a full deployment for us in today's numbers involve a sergeant and three officers we do that on the day and night shift and then on the swing shift we have a sergeant as a buffer and available personnel that come online as depicted there also in that division is our contracted a co animal control officer on the administrative side of the house we have a sergeant that supervises our dispatch center and overseas our training we also have our bureau of criminal investigations where we have detectives assigned in house and that coosie which is the county sex crimes unit as well as the vermont drug task force which is run by the vermont state police we have our youth service officer our traffic safety officer our records division in our human trafficking case manager coordinator that's a person that is employed with us on a state grant and provides regional support direct support to those suffering in the throes of human trafficking next slide a success that we had in f y 23 was the first time in the last couple of years we were actually able to hire more police officers than we lost through attrition we were able to bring eight officers on at a time where five officers separated from service but as you can see in the preceding years 21 and 22 we we weren't able to meet that same metric so what that means for us today is that we have funded 39 positions in the police department we have staff 34 positions in the police department so thinking back to the work chart those vacancies are somewhat absorbed in the 12 hour patrol schedule we don't need as many officers to make that functional and then in large number are the special assignments particularly in youth service and in our bureau of criminal investigations we have those vacancies additionally in the dispatch center we're authorized for seven full-time employees at this time we only have six full-time dispatchers a challenge that we are currently facing in f y 24 is that we've had an inability to hire any police officers our application numbers are near zero as and that holds persistent in the dispatch world too we've had our vacancy now for a number of months and been able to unable to identify candidates higher next slide please in terms of quantitative data you can see the chart here of our raw incident count is the balloon number roughly a little over 13,000 incidents trending downward in 2022 which matches our head count and then we see a bit of an incline more recently to just over 11,000 incidents in a similar fashion you'll see our arrest numbers slightly over a thousand trending downwards significantly to about 645 in f y 23 this is really emblematic of two different things so when we have more officers we have more officers doing the calls for service that allows for we call it free time but it's available time to engage in proactive enforcement such as traffic stops or community engagement foot patrols of areas of public interest or directed patrols areas that we know have experienced a crime trend when we have fewer officers that work just simply can't be done in terms of arrest this is really something that we're seeing on the backside of the criminal justice system there's fewer arrest warrants coming from the court there are fewer conditions of release being issued by the court and we're simply arresting fewer people given our inability to do proactive measures like DUI related to traffic stops there's also been some legislative changes around possession of marijuana and also driving wild license suspended those are now essentially decriminalized offenses so that accounts for some of that a growing area of service concern for the police department is the chart on on the right of the screen depending on how you're oriented to it unmet social service needs this is a catchment essentially of five incident types intoxication mental health welfare check overdose and suicidal persons as you can see coming out of the pandemic this line has been trending upward in a very persistent fashion FY 23 over a thousand responses by the police department for incidents related to these unmet social service needs this is again seen across the entire public safety spectrum and it's an area where we do have a relationship a contract with our Howard our partner Howard the community outreach team which is extraordinarily effective but it's really a symptom of the overwhelmed system of care that are trying to treat our neighbors that are suffering in these ways and it's an area where municipalities are tending to throw police officers at it and firefighters at it because we're accessible and the problem with that is once we get there the community outreach team can offer almost like a safety valve and keep a few people stable in their situation but for the most part a lot of these folks are ending up either riding in a police car or an ambulance back to the hospital back to that same system that's been overwhelmed so I just call this out I don't think that it's a municipal solution but it's certainly having a dramatic effect on municipal operations in terms of crime trends that we're seeing I know everyone's heard me speak a lot about this we've seen over the last three years FY 28 FY 23 to be precise a 68 percent in reported retail threat and retail theft a 100 percent report of increase in report of larcenies particularly larcenies being stolen from cars and then a 439 percent increase in the number of stolen cars now I talk a lot about ways that this could be mitigated if neighbors would lock their cars and not to leave the keys in them they would not be susceptible to being stolen and likewise if neighbors could take their valuables and lock their cars when they leave them parked in either public spaces or in their driveway we would have much fewer reports of these crimes retail theft is is an area that we're trying to work with our business partners in the community but really there's an emboldened nature of what we see in our recidivist community and time and time again they're simply going back to major major retailers here at the university mall or hardware retailers stealing the same exact products we arrest them in the same exact way we put them into the backside of the criminal justice system that does not have a swift and accountable measure for these folks and they spin back out on the street a lot of those folks again fall into that earlier slide with on that social service needs and there's just no solution and again I highlight it because it is absolutely impacting this whole operations in FY 25 we are looking to restore our youth service sergeant position so this has been vacant since 2022 the utility of this position is a few fold actually it serves as the direct supervisor for our officer that serves in schools it's also another youth service officer to serve in the school community it would also be a position that begins to supervise our traffic safety unit and then bring more of a community-based policing model to this group of officers and be able to engage once again with crime prevention measures with the business community and also neighbors right now we have been unable to offer meaningful crime prevention engagement to our retail community or a number of neighborhoods that are looking toward what used to be known as neighborhood watch or other ways to engage with the police department to help us really in partner in public safety and reducing crime in the community we're also looking to establish a municipal funding source for one of our employees in the community justice center so the community justice center is funded by a grant almost entirely from the department of corrections and we have an executive director who has historically had two part-time employees worked for him he has brought forth a proposal to move or merge those two part-time positions into one and offer full-time benefits the grant can cover the salary of the full-time position but there is not a funding a funding source for the benefit levels for this employee why we see there's a benefit is the employee that we have in place wants to do this work is capable of doing this work and it would finally offer stability in the cjc where we've had a lot of turnover particularly related that it's not a full-time job then the last ask in our budget is we need an increase in our vehicle and radio maintenance lines essentially we've got you know a few patrol cars that are giving a little long in the tooth they're costing more money to maintain at a time where we've seen about a 24 increase in the cost of parts labor has been fairly static to maintain our cars and then on the radio front we have a public safety radio infrastructure that both police and fire rely on there's a series of antennas throughout the city that operationalizes it at each site there are multiple like marine deep cell batteries that are at end of life they need to be replaced at a cost of about 25 000 dollars likewise our portable radios that officers carry on their belts are at the similar stage in life where those batteries are dying and the cost to replace you 30 or 40 of those batteries is fairly significant to the tune of about 8 000 dollars has there ever in terms of the batteries the first time i've heard about that those are pretty pricey but they're clearly absolutely essential is there a plan to like replace them on some kind of sequence so it's not one big hit for however long we last yeah that's a great question and it's actually something that we need to consider on the entire radio infrastructure so when the initial bond was taken out everything was new and now we're about six or seven years into that and we didn't have a replacement plan up until this point but we're starting to try to think more strategically about that okay well it'd be good but you have to get them all this year right yeah you can't have a couple antennas that aren't working right and i think that's one more year on bond payment and then that radio infrastructure bond gets paid off and then you'll shortly it'll be capacity there and then it'll be on going directs from that money so sounds smart when did that bond start is that part of the tower 16 okay that's a tower next slide yeah sorry yeah in terms of police department request in cip we've requested funding for two new patrol cars we have been buying the last a couple of years the four hybrid it looks like a Ford Explorer they call it a police interceptor they're great in Vermont because they have added ground clearance that our chargers don't have and they're all wheel drive they're also a ride height where our officers don't have to constantly lower themselves into it or yank themselves up out of it we're waiting to see with some long-term data what we're actually gaining with the hybrid technology they are about 10 percent more expensive than their gas counterparts but it's finally technology and policing that will manage our idle time so when you see officers either at a traffic stop or a crash scene and the lights are going and they're using the radio all of those gasoline cars are idling the hybrid actually turns itself on and off as the battery needs to be charged and i anticipate that's where we will see the most capture and not only fuel consumption but almost the immeasurable of how much greenhouse gas these units are producing and the reason why we are continuing to invest in the hybrid technology as opposed to the EV technology is that the limited number of offerings and public safety EVs don't do it all so like if you research what new york city uses a Ford EV Mustang for those are officers that are leaving the station house and going out to a foot post and coming back we need to go out and answer all of our calls if we arrest someone we have to have a vehicle sufficient in size to put them in the back and then if the court orders them to go to st alvin's the only male prison facility we have to be able to drive there and get back without worrying about a charge plan we also don't have sufficient enough vehicles to manage the downtime of charging each yet but we have our eye on that technology and are anxious to see where it off and then the final slide i just wanted to close today with some interesting data here so the graph is the most important part and what i was able to go back through and find through our department history is our staffing our headcount of sworn officers from 1970 through 2020 as it compares to the population growth in the city and then lastly as it compares to our incident response numbers so as you can see in 1970 we had 19 officers as the population the city was about 10 000 that team was responding to 6 750 call for service i don't know what a call for service was in 1970 as population begins to trend upward as does the headcount of the police department up to a high of 42 down to where we are hopefully in f y 25 with 40 sworn officers see the incident rate tracks along the population growth up until about 2010 and begins to trail off a lot has happened in policing post 2014 the berguson effect proactive measures or proactive activity by police officers has actually dwindled it's also a time where thinking back to that unmet social service need where our operations began to be really hampered by the amount of time that we're spending in on those types of calls and then more recently this dramatic uptick in crimes that need fairly robust investigation stolen vehicles will retail thefts strings of larcenies from cars and neighborhoods so what that delta between the blue line in 20 and the red line in 2020 actually represents is a saturation point our officers don't have the time to be in the field engaging in any really measurable proactive activity and what that actually really looks like is we have enough officers to respond to the calls that we have to and then all of their downtime essentially is spent catching up on investigations and reports and we're doing virtually very little in terms of our community engagement and our proactive in patrol and I think is our city continues to grow and diversify that this is an area of focus across all service all city services particularly the police department and what we need our police officers to do and how many police officers do we actually need to get that work done if you were fully staffed would that address the issue you're calculating or you'd suggest that you need a bigger team so I'm thinking that perhaps if we were fully staffed perhaps that maybe these lines would be a little bit closer but what I'm seeing in terms of growth in the social service needs and then the investigation that residents expect so given the amount of technology in communities ambient video and what people digest in terms of like television programming they think that we can take a CSI approach to every single one that's just not that's just not the case but do we do our best to run down all of those avenues of investigation and get those answers for our neighbors we do try to do that but it's at the cost of other operations you know so the other the other point of this too Andrew and I appreciate bringing this question up is that I you know if we were at full staff we would have a little far a larger footprint in our youth service work we would have not as much of a stress we have one officer working all of our public schools right now and she's amazing but she's getting tired and the schools are getting more complicated from you know a societal standpoint as well so we need to make some investments there which really won't help our incident count and then we also have to think about other emerging trends that we're going to have to address in terms of gun violence and also drug the associated drug trafficking and perhaps we need to make some investments there that wouldn't necessarily you know do much to our day-to-day call lines so go ahead okay that 2020 number for instance is that the 2020 number itself do you have a 2022 number on hand yeah it's about the same right now it's about the same because I'm going to say 2020 was sort of a light year because everybody was inside going you know yeah yeah uh that is true but we did plenty of welfare checks of suicidal persons and you know folks that are struggling in the community that were houseless that needed to get into a hotel whether they wanted to or not at the time on top of all of the compliance checks that we had to do for the AG's office on the complaints of the violations of the executive orders I have a question in terms of the impact of 54 percent of multi-family do they impact this in a greater effect than single family so I don't want to I don't want to create additional stigma around what I'm just curious in terms of as we plan for things if that's a factor I would like to plan it into our um so budget what we do know about folks that live at or below the poverty line is that they have fewer opportunities for health care they have a disparate level of suffering with mental health crisis a disparate level of suffering with s you know substance use disorder and do do um you know that does that segment of the population drive our calling yes they do but you know as a community we are open to and welcoming these housing opportunities we just have to have the recommended services to meet the demands if I could just add a sentence to agree with everything chiefs just said important to keep in mind that in our multifamily housing growth only a small percentage of that is the population that the chief is mentioning much of that much of those residents are market rate renters for sure that are making either a choice to live in a rental space or are waiting to buy a home in a tight housing market so it's so true and it's not 64 of our residents are meeting that uh income threshold oh for sure but it does go back to those those units we go to way more often and it is a stigma but it is absolutely true that that that you know that unit those units were there on a much higher frequency so we need to think about the level of services that we currently provide to maybe change some of those numbers like more services right but we have to be very very thoughtful so we haven't had uh we haven't had call and give us an opinion on this but I know that we talked about it with the department of public safety uh legal team in that we just can't say we're not going to those kinds of calls because potentially that would be a violation of the ADA by depriving a public service to someone that is um you know protected class so we have to be careful and very very thoughtful but again I just to bring it back to that earlier slide when you when we send our municipal resources we're just bringing these folks back to the system of care that's overwhelmed that can't serve them so it's really a vicious cycle right I'm not suggesting that we have a limit or like oh in there twice this week we're not going again I'm just trying to understand as we um welcome and um encourage more multi-family housing for um affordable housing that we recognize and include the services that are needed to change those numbers and that we don't just say oh well you know they have a person in the building so everything will be taken care of because apparently that's not the case it's it's kind of like the school right the school creates these normalized people population numbers right to develop the cost for people right so it's just x number of kids in the school they actually inflate a little bit based upon the number of services they need so for budget planning purposes we need the police department it's almost like if you're projecting the population out over 10 years and the types of housing is going to accommodate them and you end up with a normalized residential population then you want to base your policing you know number of sworn officers on that future population that gets inflated a little bit because of the of the burden you know to that part of the city that's a good plan just a different twist on that idea uh geographically is there a difference in what side of town your your data is do you have it broken down between one side and the other I don't because uh we have three patrol areas defined patrol areas that I think are just became with the place and I think if we actually did a little bit of data mining we would probably warrant those a little bit differently but just like any other municipal police department we go to where the population is so we're we're on Dorset Street a lot we're on Market Street a lot Farrell Street less than up on this side of town and it's rare that we are you know in the east in the Chamberlain neighborhood is very very rare any any discussion of a substation on the other side on the children roadside response time is not our problem it's not a problem you've been getting from there no and now that you know the officers have this technology on the dashboard it's substations I think will will remain in large metro areas but would not would not be effective here thank you okay thanks so we're moving on to the fire department and we're just in time that's going to take me a minute full technology or he's always losing data good morning everyone um so Chief Corbin and I are going to tag team this so the first slide is is our organizational chart and really is our department's broken into two divisions prevention and operations uh Deputy Chief Corbin oversees the big part of the house which is the operational division we uh we break our people into three shifts ship one two and three each ship works at 24 hours on duty and then they're off for 48 and it's a revolving a revolving cycle there are 36 folks who work in the operational division and then Chief Corbin makes 37 on the prevention side Chief Francis is our fire marshal we have an assistant fire marshal an electrical inspector you'll notice in a dash box we put in rental registry if uh if you often move that in that direction that's where we will uh that's where that division if we believe is going to be situated unless you make a decision to put it someplace else um next slide please so this uh this slide talks about our successes so we were able to fill all our vacant positions um and so if you remember last year when I was here I talked to you a lot about overtime and mandatory overtime so in the first five months of last fiscal year we had spent about 5400 hours of overtime on the first five months of this fiscal year and we spent just over a thousand so the the ultimate of that is call it a work-life balance and quality of life our firefighters were working a tremendous amount of mandatory overtime last year but the impact of having uh fully staffed positions is that we have a real good work-life balance now we implemented a new records management system which provides much greater documentation ability to document our incidents and our pre-plans and our inspections we created our first community risk reduction community risk assessment standards to cover which was a foreign concept here but basically has us look at our risk assign how many people we need to that to manage and mitigate that risk and then deploy our resources through computer a to dispatch to that risk so we're sending less units to this uh before we were sending basically everybody went to everything and now we're really trying to dial that back and send only what we need cardiac arrest we still send everybody because we know we need eight firefighters and so that's what we're really trying to get is to a model where we send the right number of folks um to the right to that type of incident we've been able to grow our paramedics so uh last year we sent three people so the first time ever that the city supported people going to um financially supported people going to school we spent we sent three people to uh Paramedic school one has already tested the other two will be testing in the next two months and then we uh just started two more of our staff in paramedic school and we've made two conditional offers uh to employees that will start next next month that are paramedic so we're really growing the highest level pre-hospital medicine available and uh you know so we will almost now almost always have a paramedic on there have been some short blocks of time where we can't offer the highest level of service and earlier we uh we did i think we presented it to you but are we developed and presented our strategic plan for the next five years the chart to the right shows call volume for the last uh last 10 or 11 years so we are seeing a steady increase i think the FY 22 to 23 we saw about a 9 percent increase in call volume and over the last 10 years about 58 percent increase in call volume it is just uh similar to what the police experience of a lot of uh we see a lot of the same people every every day every week and um and it is a vicious vicious cycle um that is and it's not just here it's certainly nationwide what's the dark blue versus the lighter blue medical calls versus um medical calls versus fire calls so the fire is the lighter blue yeah actually i think that's medical calls versus total incidents oh okay yeah dark dark blue is total incidents light blue is medical calls so we're about 70 percent which tracks pretty much national uh national numbers 70 percent of our call volume is for medical calls the remaining 30 percent of fire alarm activations are or we deploy fire apparatus too um and we are on track this calendar year the first time ever be uh we're over 5 000 calls for service this calendar year so we're again we're continuing to see growth in numbers that um that have not that this community has not seen before have there been any study that um equates that to lack of um appropriate health care or is it just people dial right away you know there's a little incident at home and yet just hit 911 because it's been advertised as such so 911 has because is the catch all for pre-hospital medicine and and actually for almost everything today a police and fire and ems respond to calls today that they never uh used to they're certainly calls every day we go to that are not a virgin but they call 911 and we can't say i would love to say we're not going we go to the same woman every day between 6 a.m and 8 a.m every day i bet the only days we haven't gone to her this year is when she's been kept over in the hospital overnight she's not back home uh every day we go and it is completely demoralizing because it typically comes this morning it was 7 10 so they work the 24-hour shift they're about ready to go home i just want to say can you wait to 8 0 5 because it's you know they're they want to be here winding down your shift and you know your development you know where you're going and uh you're picking up the same person every day so you're taking her to the hospital they're the same hospital she has a care plan she has a care plan where they give her some medicine and and release her with very i say very quickly if they can get hurt right and know if they give her they give her a bolus of medication that if it was given to me would kill me um so and then there's nothing to do with the ssta for instance to get these people to the hospital in a different way i mean it almost is like you're taxing it is a tax it absolutely is a taxing cab ride our medical director given the call type and what the medication she said her won't allow um won't allow us to say no we can't go we don't have to go and they've asked us hey will you have your paramedics go down and just administer the medicine and leave her there but our paramedic then would have to be tied up down there for uh probably 20 minutes to a half hour to stay with her and at this point we can turn we we say it's a taxi cab ride it's very quickly uh so and i'm not going to take on the liability of giving that the the quantity of opioid she receives every day um is is because again she gets every day she great uh has a so it's it is it's a challenge for us but that's that's what we're that's the type of business we're in right now so there's probably an aspect of maybe not with this woman but others for mental health issues that that exacerbate the and one one well and i think the chief berks point there you know we are the service i mean i think at some point we nationwide we can't continue just to throw firefighters and police officers that these problems there has to be a third leg to the stool um that puts a greater focus on you don't set the fire truck but maybe let's put that there you know unless our ambulance is not available and and uvm or burlington or shelber are coming in then we do it how is berlin do you know if berlin has data on their little overdose uh team yeah i can't speak to exact numbers um but i have sat down with their fire chief and he has some pretty impressive uh reductions in unit movement so their fire apparatus their ambulances aren't going to as many calls um a pretty good reduction in the number of actual overdoses that they're seeing uh because of the community engagement with those firefighter EMTs that are out in the street uh every day and uh overall a real positive impact in the community you know they're also touchy base and and with business owners residents that sort of thing so not only are they reaching out to the population that needs them the most but they're also supporting you know church free businesses and that sort of thing so they're making sure that the business community the general public as well as the people who need all know that they're out there and able to help are you looking at that for our city um i think there are a lot of challenges with it just because of the staffing requirements you know right now they're doing it on voluntary overtime um so they're taking people that want to work overtime and putting them on you know on that vehicle so i think that's their short-term solution their long-term solution i think is what they're trying to reach with uh you know showing the data that it can really i think that our community is saying different which is probably more like mobile integrated health which is a nurse or paramedic community paramedic who goes to the people who do the slope trips and falls so much broader than much broader than opioid abuse but more in terms of those people who need who need other social services um and so i think our model would be different but there's definitely a need that i think is going back to what we're talking about building it with something beyond um firefighters and police officers well it seems like it requires a different skill set i mean it would be like having a crew of paramedics say you're going to take all the suicides oh great you know after a while it's yeah you see demoralized you see across the country with uh agencies that have community paramedics community paramedics they are much they're trained in things from you know wound care and advanced medication administration all the way through to social services and that sort of thing they really they're also able to provide they have direct contact with those other services as well so if they go to those community paramedics and go to someone who may need a certain social service and be able to connect them with that social service right then and there it's a pretty in-depth process so how many people do you do this kind of service for and how big of your expense you know page does that count for at any given time i would say throughout my career every fire department i've been a part of has a series of high frequency users four or five people four or five people per day no four or five people place a huge burden on our system they're the same people and one of them recently passed away um someone will there's a matter of time there will be someone new who starts to become that high frequency user and that's and i think that's the population if we could find a way to to do with with a different service would be beneficial so we're talking about that regionally because if there's only five in each community you know you could have a regional base unless they all are six o'clock in the morning all right so we have not talked about regionally i i do think one of the things we are talking about regionally is there's a local service provision part of that and then there's the social service network part you know there's only so much we can do if folks aren't otherwise connected to case managers or therapists or pts or substance substance misuse treatment programs and those systems are crumbling in for month you just don't have enough workers to provide services they're a long waitlist there's no emergency placement treatment program in existence um so i think that the managers are talking about how to support Howard center turning point this advocating to the state to to better fund and situate those services in communities because just us solving the problem isn't actually going to solve the long-term service needs it's not sustainable i mean looking at the expenses we're looking at this year in the upper valley uh that the hospital supports the community paramedic in leviton and harford's looking at it right now um and we've had discussions with the medical center here certainly my time in burlington the hospital has stood up their own team and they are addressing county-wide some of the high-frequency users but typically the people that work that that are the biggest burden on us are the people that don't want to be connected to services they resist they resist the connection um and that that's that's really tough and that's in the four or five yeah let's try to stay on time yeah i'm sorry it's definitely a big nap uh can you just do the next uh so revenue changes a lot of our the majority of ours obviously just comes through permitting so these projections are based upon what we the last three or four years or i've seen a lot of new building going on so increase our inspections for our fees for both electrical inspections and for permitting for new construction and then that with ambulance building just you know taking and putting the second ambulance in service this spring will allow us to we were giving away a lot of calls and so this will be new revenue generated by that second ambulance so those are for us to other communities no this is charges to so right now and we don't transport the patient you only we only can trans we only can invoice if we transport so and when uvm is or burlington are taking the patient to the hospital for us that 23% of the time they're they're billing that patient we're not so we bill insurance we bill the insurance for Medicare Medicare Medicaid yeah insurance as far as expense changes uh in the 24 budget we have six months of the second ambulance the expenses for hiring the staff so in 25 that increases to the full fiscal year of hiring the staff as the chief said those people those individuals have all been hired and will start on January 8th which is exciting for us uh training over times increased by $25,000 it's important to point out that roughly a third of our organization has less than 18 months in the fire service and I don't just mean 18 months a third of our organization has less than 18 months and that's not 18 months in South Burlington that's 18 months of ever knowing what a fire truck or an ambulance is uh so we have an extremely young department we also have some of our higher ranking officers that are nearing probably you know within 12 to 24 months of retirement so we have a very young workforce that we need to make sure that we can at every opportunity provide them with the training and professional development they need to move up the ranks in a fairly rapid pace much more rapid than you know I ever did or you know earlier on in the careers of most people so are you getting takers I mean are they interested in having this training and yeah absolutely absolutely yeah I would I would say the last you know out of all those that last third and not to take anything away from the two thirds but the third of those employees are just smiling year to year every day just taking it in and want as much as they possibly can without a doubt here's um protective clothing increased uh right now we're looking at about seven thousand dollars of firefighter to outfit them with their structural firefighting protective equipment uh when you add six people for an ambulance obviously that increases that cost and that has about a 10-year lifespan but each of us needs well I shouldn't say us but each of the firefighters needs two sets uh so if they are contaminated from a fire or a medical call a vehicle education they can take that off decontaminate that and utilize another set so there's an extreme expense there we try to cycle that in as much as we can but with the amount of people that we've been hiring recently we're constantly you know it's it's made to fit them so we're constantly buying new gear uh to fit them we are lucky where we keep a pretty good inventory of older still valid gear uh for people when they come in as a second or third back we need to increase that on computer contracts increase significantly and that is based upon two major factors one being the uh records management system that the chief mentioned that's now one stop shop all of our training our scheduling our fire incidents our emergency our AMS incidents our patient care the fire marshal's office everything's run off of one system now uh it's accessible and all the apparatus so they have all the data uh buildings and that sort of thing that the fire marshal's office inputs right at their fingertips uh and the second thing is computer a dispatching uh that is uh with being new that adds a significant expense every year obviously has a lot of benefits to our deployment model and setting the right people at the right time and taking some of the decision making off of both the dispatchers and the office uh the shift commanders and saying this is who is going to go to this call for these reasons uh but there's an expense to keeping that upgraded both uh the yearly subscription and also our agreement with burlington new host server on the system uh capital expenditures uh the station alerting we talked about this a little bit a couple of mondays ago uh our station alerting system which for lack of a better term wakes everyone up at night turns lights on uh broadcast the emergency dispatch message dispatch message is about 20 years old now with CAD we can dispatch certain units and not necessarily wake up everyone in the entire department at night to send them somewhere uh this station alerting a bit will also give us a greater ability to do that as well as again uh it's digital so it would actually take a little bit more workload off of the dispatch center and the call takers because once they push the energy information push the button a computerized computerized voice would actually dispatch us um ambulance loading system so one of the things that uh we see now which has been pretty common for a while is the structures are battery powered there's also a power eye system that actually mounts into the ambulance which lifts the stretcher off the ground uh so less less wear and tear in the personnel less risk for injury uh also safer for the patients it's actually the only true way that a patient can stay secured in the stretcher inside the ambulance if there was an accident uh so it takes a you know a lot of concern away from that as well with having a second ambulance staffed we need to move into having three ambulances in our rotation and this would outfit the loading for one of our current ambulances that doesn't have that system in it uh administrative vehicle fire marshes office the assistant fire marshal right now uses a vehicle that is uh 20 years old just about and dpw somehow putting inspection sticker on it this year so uh with some bodywork and some uh band-aids here and there uh so we definitely uh you know they're they use that vehicle you know five days a week and uh definitely need to replace that and part of that is in the 15 grand out of that money would be to look toward uh electric vehicle uh to replace that and then thermal imaging cameras our thermal imaging cameras that we use to see in zero visibility uh smoke and fire conditions are old they have a lifetime lifespan uh and they're one of the things that for several years kind of continue to fall off of the uh the budget cycle so we're just trying to get that back in to get on the cycle of replacing those new technology uh kind of just like a portable radios the batteries eventually die and as they change technology they don't make the batteries anymore so uh kind of like goal of trying to get that back into a replacement cycle what is gfsca general fund and climate action climate action it's our attempt to show you what would be in that operations budget and what is in that climate policy budget so our emerging issues um our our prevention division we have uh three people in it and two i suspect one's going to retire in the next six months i suspect the other one in the next 18 months a lot of institutional knowledge there that will be uh difficult to fulfill so that's going to be a challenge for us while we have built all our positions um we we have done it in a manner that we i have never seen done like we are basically calling people up saying hey i interested here you're in a class are you interested coming to work for us uh chris has become a recruitment officer actually calling people saying why don't you send us your application come on in for an interview uh and that's been the only way we have been able to fulfill our positions uh we do have to make uh we have maintenance needs in our stations and to modernize them i'm excited that over 10 percent of our workforce now is female which is beats that certainly beats the national average for the part of service um but our facilities are not set up for females um and we that is one of those issues that we're going to have to take care of uh training again as the deputy said training opportunities for our junior staff when a third of them have less than 18 months on the job um when you come to work some days you look and you look at the parking lot and you see all the young people working it gives old people like me a little bit of heartburn going oh my goodness you know do we have is the team going to be ready when the when the bells hit and so again young staff uh we really need to support them dedicated shift commander our shift commander is an operational based company officer it's dangerous when there's fires um and you know we were unsuccessful some of you remember we applied for a grant that would funded this position 100 percent for two years um we were unsuccessful it just they ran out of money with a good application but they you know a fully Philadelphia got 22 or 72 million to fill a whole bunch of positions that they had laid off so again this is a nationwide program we were in the queue but uh just did not have enough funding nationwide to support all the requests and then ultimately the rental registry and the inspection program that would go along with that should you choose to implement that will be um a heavy lift of heartburn so that's our presentation can i just ask if the training opportunities include there's just something on the news about how challenging it is to put out um electric or EV fires yeah yeah yeah certainly some one of our guys was uh training last night on it it is an emerging issue nationwide there's a lot of discussion on it you know for me it's you let it somebody just let the thing burn as long as you can get in a place that um you know we've had a couple fires small fires of beta and so it yeah it's it's different um but a lot of times you just have to let them burn or use other other very different factors so can you tell us your numbers just an overview of your numbers for how many people in the department in the entire department so there's 30 36 that work the 24 so 36 that work in operations chris and the other uh chris is 37 three in prevention makes 4441 are you in the prevention line i'm in the half time right oh yeah okay okay all right any other questions for fire and a lot i'm sorry um let's move on then to public works everybody doing okay this is uh this is a big one feel free to get up and get off the you know we want a promise for five minutes yeah oh no she's good she's been in a request over the summer so oh stop right well i figured it was a it's a very tough that budget and christmas party on the same for a holiday party on the same day so i had to wear a good dress red you know we're red too was that planned okay we're in red all red time oh i didn't even think about it more the blue for self-brought in the red for the holiday yeah okay greenish it's gonna put a blue sweater on but i was like steves you know i didn't wear jeez me either and that's a miracle i almost i almost texted this morning he said damn day but i chose i figured i could get in enough trouble i came in a little excited and punch you this morning but you know what i'll do with it or not there's only captain any coffee so uh watch out just throw things at me that's if you have to i think it's if you would say well i'm sure he threw a fair enough fair enough i mean i tried to find wanted to set up a routine uh christians have things to do the first no just have to kind of wink at each other yeah for our two shares one shared slide listen let's just uh make a plan you want to start and then i'll be as far as i think that's but i mean this year um i'm maybe the last two sections and i have a feeling i'll be go back to you and the last one we'll do the same let's do the same you start and i'll finish that we're not and then i have to see if you change finally got a staff photo taken but it's too late the deadline i mean that's okay i saw i know that's coming 45 doing good yeah that's part of why i like having you all and it's a good idea or that's still your right no it's nice to you're still elusive there is a somebody doing work a lot of gosh i say one just out of the way i guess they're not used to being on media tower i have to say maybe do like it this is a chimney rock true to edit in it's chimney rock uh no that is on its way like that that was a oh Okay, let's get there. Yeah. We'll move on. And if public works, keep talking, we'll take their time away. 45 minutes. Good morning, everybody. Welcome back. This is the public works portion of the program, which includes a variety of topics, including your highway department, parks maintenance on three enterprise funds, stormwater wastewater and drinking water. So you've got on the screen here is our work chart. So we have 39 folks depending how you count the water department. I would like to remind everyone that our water department is contracted out to the Champlain water district. So they have about nine folks over there that serve a variety of different water systems. So they're contract employees, not city employees. So if you don't count those folks, we have about 39 people in public works. You can see on the screen the position titles and little blue boxes. Those are just last names. If the box is empty, but you can't read it. That's an open positions. We have about five open positions currently working to fill out of the 39. So that's a mechanic to folks in highway to truck drivers, parks maintenance person, a work specialist. And we are proposing to add an additional highway staff. This is today by 25 and it's budget we're talking about. Okay. So would that put it up to 40 then? I'll put it up to 40. Okay. Okay. So just some general metrics. So folks can idea how big our system is. I think what I'll point out here is the growth from when I presented these figures last year, which jumped out to me because everything's a little larger, of course, but really is on the on-road bike facility sidewalk shared youth path sign. We've really grown that system in the last year or two. Something as simple as striping on some air street increased our on-road bike facilities. Those folks may have recall those working 12 foot lanes brought down to 10, which gave us some extra space for those on-road bike facilities. So that number jumped up. Just through that action. So that's it as far as overview of the whole department. What I'm going to do now is go into each division or fund and review sort of their successes, budgets, kind of highlights and CIP things and emerging issues. And this is going to get tag teamed with Erica as we get to the funds, especially. My name marks maintenance. So our FY 23 successes. I think the big one there is paving of doors to the street. I know it must feel like a long time ago or at least it does to mean that. And we paved that third section of doors to street up to Aspen road. That happened in FY 23 and FY 24, our paving budget went to all of the roads in the city. And in 25, I guess we get to that, but it's going to go back to Dorset Street to finish that up. And our other big success is opening of the Wheeler dog park, which you see a picture of there on the screen. I drive past there frequently and it is very heavily used. So it's been a great addition of the community. In the 25 budget, a couple of line item increases. The first is tree care. So councilor may recall a couple of discussions about ashtree treatment programs. And we're going to go back to that. So councilor may recall a couple of discussions about ashtree treatment programs. So those dollars are in the maintenance line item now, which increased by about $14,000. We are going to bid that out any day now. We just bid out the new tree planting work. And so we'll be implementing the treatment or bidding it out, increasing the curb and sidewalk line items. That was about $23,000, which doesn't give us a big opportunity to do a lot of work and repair on our curbs and sidewalks. So it's a significant increase there would allow us to address a kind of backlog of maintenance needs on sidewalks, especially. I'll just jump to that high chart on the side. So we have started an evaluation with some interns we had this summer to look at it. And so they got through about a quarter of the city just under. And in general, the way they observed or they were marking sidewalk panels had distress or not. They're not only 1% of those did, but that's still about half a mile of sidewalk. And, you know, maybe they weren't in the right part of the city where we see more distress. So that's just a work in progress. I wanted to point out is 30. So once we get through that inventory, I think I have a much better. Okay. And we're going to talk about the CIP to answer that question. So will you have interns next summer to do another quarter? I mean, is this a. Well, let me get to the CIP. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is the CIP portion here. We can talk about that. It's a good question. Does the sidewalk include correct paths as well? It does not. Okay. So in the previous, this current budget year, we put money in for the shared use path. Paving maintenance plan, which wasn't there before. She made a call. So this would be separate just for the sidewalks. So that's what we're going to talk about. And then we're going to talk about, you know, how we're going to move the street signals. So hopefully folks are noticing that some of the signals are functioning a little better as we're putting in the new hardware, especially at the major intersections of Dorset and Williston and Dorset and Kennedy. Now that all the lanes are open too. And so traffic is moving a little better. So that project is ongoing. We talked about not just the new hardware, but the adaptive technology. So that's what we're going to be talking about. So that's what we're going to be talking about. That money or the cost for that software is actually included in the budget. That's expensive. And we talked about previously in the end. We were able to do a minor increase in our line. Include that. So that'll be implemented. Fully here starting in probably March. Let me get. From Williston to Kennedy. But, but all the ones in between as well. Right. Everything in between. Yeah. Absolutely. Cool. Yeah. So that's, that's, that's what the treatment. Otherwise. This is treatment. That's an ongoing maintenance treatment, but replacement is still in the CIP. With the, its own allocation for the removal replacement. A couple of highlights from the CIP. Paving. And I've got a couple of extra slides about paving coming up. We'll get the $5 million in there to pay for door street phase 404. And that's from aspirin down to Kennedy of those four sections of Dorsey street. We expect this one to be the most expensive just by the width of pavement and other factors in keeping in mind, this is in front of both the fire station and the middle and high school. So this is some paving. We'd really like to do in the summer months. Also in the budget is dorset street school zone. So we are in the early phases of working with the consultant to define perhaps the school zone and some traffic coming on Dorset, kind of right by the high school and 575 Dorset. So we allocated $100,000 at the moment as sort of a placeholder for those costs. Once the engineer does some more work, we'll have a better idea of what that might be. It'll be in that ballpark is what we suspect. So that's currently in the budget as well. Getting back to the sidewalk question. So again, we just had interns out doing some simple inspections with iPads. We've got $60,000 in the CIP, do a full assessment. So the plan there, we need to hire somebody to do that work, wrap in the work the interns have started, and have a full assessment available. So then I can come back and answer questions about, well, how much money do we actually need? How quickly do we want to make these improvements? We can have that maybe a year from now. That would be included in the next budget year, 25, yeah, 525. Yep. And then Market Street and Heinsberg Road. So Erica has been working with a consultant on our city center traffic plan for evaluation, which should be available soon. But one of the things we know from looking at the early data that we got back is that a signal is warranted at that intersection. So trying to move that forward as quickly as possible here, work with VTrans. Heinsberg Road is a state road, and make sure we can get that signal installed to alleviate some of the pressures there on traffic. Will VTrans help pay for any of this? No, at the moment, no. It's their road. So I know we're going to get to this. What's the normal way that signals are paid for? Like I'm going to put that kind of impact fees, traffic impact fees, something like that. But is it just unusual, like? So I think we're still working to update our impact fees for traffic. It's possible. I am not personally going to go into that in much detail. That may be a question, Paul. I might ask you to help answer. Sure. Identify the projects that go in there and ahead of time. So there are times when it is a city-driven project, just like we have done various, it's in our own policy. There are times when the private sector pays for a portion or all of it. So in the impact fee ordinance, an identified project can have a signal as a part of it. The catch with that is that impact fees can only be for the incremental traffic that a intersection can handle. So going from a stop sign to a traffic signal isn't zero to a thousand trips. It's some portion of it. And then the general taxpayer is responsible for the rest of it because the intersection was already being used and already allowed a certain amount of traffic to go through. And then there's a third category altogether where a street is functioning fine. And then a new development comes in and triggers a point at which it is no longer meeting our traffic expectations and standards. So the signal at Allen Road and Spear Street with South Village was an example of that, where that was borne by them, not as part of their traffic impact fees, but as the street, the necessity of a signal was created by that developer. City center is a complex area because it's been such a public private partnership of who's paying for what, that it hasn't really fallen into any of those categories. Can you strike me though that it's much closer to the last category that all the new development in city center is why we need that signal? Well, currently the 650, 250 is being proposed to be from the impact fees. Only 250 of it. Only 250 of it. Because a substantial amount of the traffic that goes through there already goes through there today and was able to without a signal, that's the challenge. Well, we still have a fair amount of development to go in there. I mean, to your point, in terms of the impact fee. Would future impact fees be eligible to be used to pay off this recoup? It is, that is possibility, yes. As long as future is not 30 years from now, but in the coming years, it could be done just as impact fees are used for the police station. We build the police station, we put in the impact fee at the same time, and the police station was designed to handle our capacity needs for officers for 40 plus years. And so it was built with that additional capacity in mind. If an argument can be made that the signal creates additional capacity for future development of the coming, say, number of years, then yes. But that doesn't necessarily mean that's more than the 250 that's already planned to be assigned. That's the challenge. Because it's still only, you can only assign the cost associated with new trips that that signal enables. So the stop sign enables a certain number of trips already today. It's only if you get 30% more vehicles can come through, that's what you can charge the impact fees. Well, with all the growth, I think there'd be more than 30% more trips. Was that intersection really heavily used for all the new- No. The button is useful to get to the school. And that was an alternative to Wilson Road. That it was only open the full length part of the year. Certainly, as we're going through it, we can ask our consultants who has done this analysis to say, we always look to maximum. Maybe sharpen it. Yeah, that would be good. I guess what I'll just say here is we're trying to do this as expeditiously as possible right now and try to get this in. Designed from, you know, Sure. We'll zero our right sign and install it. So that's what we're moving forward with now. Our next slide. Just continuing on the CIP. Just a couple called out here related to climate action projects. So our DPW facility expansion, part of that is going to be some EV charging stations. And then fleet. We've gone through our large spreadsheet of vehicles and equipment, kind of made some initial, provided some initial thoughts on what could be electrified. And so one of the things this year that is up for replacement is one of the mowers we use. One of the zero turn mowers. And so that's something where we could put a little bit of funds towards sort of our climate action project. Get the crew used to using electric mowers. You know, we've demoed a couple already. Which ones would be demoed, just curious. I can get you a list. They didn't let me ride them. I can do it without me. It was two or three that folks. Well, you might have to use it in the kinch. So it's probably good. We don't have to use it at all times. Exactly, yeah. The work has a commercial, it seems like. Yeah, after all the rebates, and I don't know how long the rebates are around, the conditional cost wasn't that large. They can. In these cases, yeah. And so, you know, over those panel, because, you know, the salesman told us, we can do it now. It's this. We can do that in a year. So, 10 years. Couple slides on paving. So, had someone go back through our budget books and pull out all the paving budgets back to 2002, must have been the books I had in my office. And you can see sort of how our paving budget has increased over the years. I took a quick look, though it's not on the chart, at the cost of asphalt and paving, right? And this tracks pretty well to that. So that would be kind of a next level, interesting analysis we could do here. The rest of the barrel of oil. It tracks pretty well to that. Yeah. Well, we've added more miles, too. And we certainly added more miles. And so I guess that would be the interesting analysis, and I don't want to go down this rabbit hole at the moment. I should say we have a whole other presentation on paving that I would be happy to come to discuss with council. But I only pulled out three slides from that sort of high level here today. Because you're putting roads on schedule, it's not part of the presentation. Yeah. So, what we've done here is this past summer, we've worked with Regional Planning Commission to go through and get a pavement condition score, a pavement condition inventory for all the roads in the city. The last time that was done was in 2014. So it's provided a good kind of benchmark of where we were, where we are now, and how our roads are looking. There's a lot that goes into that scoring. Again, if folks are interested, we can come back and provide all those details. But we've split our roads into three different categories, and we've set sort of a goal score. I'll write 100 as a new road scale. It was zero to 100. And so our arterial roads are doing pretty well. Our collectors are like a white street that collect folks out of the neighborhoods, bring them to our arterial roads and then our residential streets, which are the majority of our streets, also doing very well. So overall, our pavements about 73 on that scale. And if you go to the next slide, there's always a question of, well, how much do we need to be investing in our roads and paving to maintain sort of the condition or improve it, or how might we expect them to deteriorate depending on different funding levels? So we have a piece of software where we can plug in these scores now that we've got them updated, and we can plug in different funding levels. And so what you see here is just with no funding, we go from about that 70, and it drops down into the upper 50s. And kind of the top line, the yellow line there is $2 million investment, which you'll see an increase. And about the steady line, maybe a slight drop off according to the software model is about a million dollars a year. Does that assume that our current miles of roads stays the same or increases? I believe as soon as they stay the same. As soon as it stays the same, and it assumes kind of standard degradation rate based off of previous, so this gets more accurate the more times we go out and score those roads. And the last thing it does is that you can give it an assumed amount of inflation for the cost. So we put in what we paid each time we did a job in there. And so it will make an assumption around what type of work and try to optimize where and what type of work it will do. Like any model or data, the better it is too. So I'd love to do this more often than every nine, 10 years to keep up on this over time as well. Are we seeing any improvements in asphalt technology where it becomes more durable than it has been in the past? Or is that a function of how it's laid down on top of the issue or a mill in a shoe? There are some different strategies we can use out there, Tim. And we implement a few of those. I don't know that a lot of folks in the state have implemented some of the newer stuff, the micro resurfacing and things like that, but it's certainly something we're gonna look at as we go forward. This past year and where we are now was just getting a handle because again, it'd been nine years since we've done this evaluation to allow us to get through Dorset Street, which is choose up all the paving dollars in a year, right? And then really make that plan going forward sort of where we're at now and looking at some of that. Is this from software that's made by that company called Beta? No, it's not Beta. Not by airplanes, but there's another company Beta that does. I did the same thing at the conference. I thought that was Beta Airplanes, but no. No, but I did chat with them and some of the technology that I'm referencing is that they have similar software as do other folks who use MicroPaver, which is sort of the industry standard for a while. New players came in. A related question. So who were there like green asphalt technology with asphalt? Is it a lower temperature? And it's less fumes, it's less CO2. Is that something you're familiar with? Is that happening for a long time? Did, I think maybe you're forwarding an email about that while asking me, I did some investigation into that. I think it's not widely being used. If I remember, we had over guys. So I learned about it in Vermont. Apparently New Jersey's adopted it across the state. So I don't know if it's in Vermont, but it's supposed to be better for the workers. It doesn't get fumes, because it's at a lower temperature and it's better for the environment. Then the cost is equal or more? No, I don't know. It's always more. It's always more. And so just our emerging issues, staffing. So like I mentioned at the top, we've got five open positions. I mean, we're adding that position in FY 25, which is great, but we still need to fill it. And then other emerging issues, just kind of our pace of development in the city is great, but just to remind folks that what comes with that is more infrastructure to maintain. So you know, I drive through the O'Brien development just as one example and look at the roads out there and the additional sidewalk and shared use path that comes along with that and additional parks, et cetera. We got to make sure we're keeping up whether it's at a staff level or an equipment level as we go forward in that that infrastructure gets transferred over. And I think another emerging issue is we have some great data for our infrastructure around the city. We've hired some new people into new roles, younger folks that love working with data. And so I'd like to do more with managing that data so we can make some more data-driven decisions so I can have even fancier charge for you in future years. So that's something that would be wonderful for us to move into here and using that information, updating it more regularly. So is that, that's the hope. There's not a budget line for, so you actually funded this last year and it's a position that is on my to-do list to fund and just another priority or to hire. Oh, okay. I already isn't hiring yet. So, so you've already funded it. The emerging issue then is hiring a person. Yes. Okay. Not that you need it. I would say our GIS software too with a new update, it includes so much more than the last version. So things that are built in for managing, whether it's street lights or street signals, signage, whatever in the past year to develop that on your own, now with the fee we already pay, it's there. So we can do more with that. And we have a person to actually do it for. We will, yeah. We haven't hired the GIS person. No, I haven't. We funded it about two years ago, no? No, last year? With the budget structure. Oh, that we're in here. Okay. Is there any progress in the lead python inventory? Yeah, I'll get to that in the water side. Yeah. I don't know. Sorry, yeah. The bar position, is that a new position? We, no, we've had one person in there since we created it. That person left, they took another position at local farm. So it's been open for a little bit. So we're working on this or, so do they deal with the basis? Yep, that's part of that, Tom, yeah. So interesting. Fun fact is we've talked about the first time our workforce and other presentations since Tom has been director of public works, every internal, not counting internal hires, every external hire we've made into public works has been a woman. Because they've been the best candidates. They probably were before, but. They probably were. Now we're recognizing it's okay. I think that's a fun, great question. Yes, it is. All right, sorry, Tom. Okay, so actually that was the end of the highway portion of the presentation. I didn't realize how. So anything on highway, I guess I would pause after each division that works for you, Jesse and others, just to kind of wrap up that piece before I get into the enterprise funds individually. Yeah, go ahead. Come back to the 300,000 increase in highway payment. I think that's the minimum, Tom, you think you really need to get it done. This number right here, we went from 850 to yeah, really to 15. We've got cost estimates from the engineer, what Dorset Street section four will cost. And he actually provided an update just the other day that Mark and I were talking about. We were pretty close with this number actually, which is great, mostly because the pavement costs have not continued to escalate. Again, oil and fuel prices dictate a lot of that. So yes, to do phase four or four in FY25, this number or slightly more is what we're gonna need. But then when we get back on the schedule that we're not doing these huge expensive charges at Dorset, we can talk about going back to that chart, what's the appropriate funding level? And that has a pretty direct impact on the condition of city streets, right? And actually out of that number, all you mentioned 150 to 200 is grant, so it's estimated to be grant funded. Okay, yeah, we get $200,000 grant from Featuran, almost every other year for paving class two roads, which we broke to apply for and presumably received. That comes in a different line, that comes in the revenue lines thing, yeah. Is paving in front of the fire station gonna be real problematic? Or is that just, it's not a big problem because you've got it all planned out for a second. Sure, it'll require coordination. So yeah, with the fire department and the school, so that's why I'm really hoping to do this and really trying to line up all the different pieces of this, which is not just engineering associated with the paving project, but also the school zone. So really trying to go as quickly as we can with of course the appropriate amount of public input to get that school zone design so that we can start that this summer and not have to delay till next. So that's been a very big focus of ours recently. I just wanted to note, at the last of airport commission meeting, the airport has one of those machines that does the lines. They don't use it all the time. So actually the rep from Winooski wanted to know if they would ever like rent it out or, and Nick kind of said, I would never really thought about that, but that could be a new revenue stream. So I'm just putting it out there. If that's, I know in the past, there's like one line company in the state. So they get backed up. So I'm just curious, one more thing for you to follow up on maybe is to see if that's a collaboration we could have with the airport. We can do, we have a striper, electric striper. Crosswalks, turn arrows, things like that. But you have the long lines is where we struggle to find a contract. So that's what they can do. Yes. Well, how long the groceries are. They line them. Yeah. So they're pretty long lines that they put down. So it's just a thought if you get kind of caught or something. Don't want planes letting in most of them. Yeah. One more writing. We did get a note from like pet committee, asking for some really modest adjustments like another 10,000 for shared use and striping. Just wondering what your reaction is to that. Is that something that would be used like, I guess I'm not sure what request we're referring to. It came in from Bob last night. Last night. I mean, last night I was still preparing this. Yeah. So I have to look into that. They've got a long line. But the summary is there. They're asking whether it's possible to increase the striping budget by 10,000 and the shared use path maintenance budget by 10. I think you know, both of them 40, they're asking for them to each go to 50. I would say it's never been a lack of work that's held us back for the striping. It's been finding the contractor. We come and do it when we need them to do it. Thanks. And on the other side, I'm sure we can find more shared use path work to do. One of our requests is a pavement inventory. One of our requests to RPC to help us with will be a pavement condition inventory of our shared use paths. So we've got some funding there. We've got some bad sections we know about that we're picking off. But again, it would be really nice to have that plan where we lay it out for, since we had all the condition, all 24 miles of shared use path, what we need to do when we're actively working on. Never, it's not going to hurt. We can certainly use it in the short term. That was on council one, et cetera. I'd be fair. I'll move on to the stormwater portion of the presentation. So our stormwater utility at FY23 success. The stormwater utility is fully staffed. So that's great. One of our divisions fully staffed. That's on the maintenance and sort of engineering design side, management side. A couple other successes is in 23, worked on three different construction projects. So a project out in Lindenwood, one on Spear Street, that is a portion of the Burlington Country Club in South Burlington, but really a big chunk of Spear Street flows into this. And then Kennedy Drive on to folks may have seen by Timber Lane. And so pretty happy with those and a good chunk of grant dollars that came in for each of those projects. So again, the stormwater utilities continues to be very successful bringing grant dollars to their work quality work. Is there any measure of the impact of all the stormwater maintenance over time? Impact, so from a... Approval of quality perspective. Okay, yes. So the state of Vermont has a variety of models that they use. Whether it's a flow restoration plan model, this thing, BMP DSS, their phosphorus model for Lake Champlain. So we do work and we report back to them and they can update those models to show us kind of where we're at with the goals and targets, requirements. I guess they've set in our permits. So they have all that information. They haven't updated some of those in a while and that's something we're working with them on because those are large watershed, kind of multi-community models. Be great at some point to... But we've had some estimates where we've had like some metrics like the generalist work and it's resulted in, like you said, the decrease in phosphorus is just something for the community to celebrate the success if we can. And we've had some of those charts in the past. So if there's something specific that council would like to see for phosphorus, for example, I'm sure we can pull that together because we've done that in the past. It can be hard to do that for just South Burlington. The watersheds are, you know, there's studies done by... Can you measure the content in each of the... Well, they are measured now by the stream team group and that report is out-action. So with the Windows Key Valley? Yeah, okay. But it's not, you know, it's congregate, I mean, congregate to Engles Beach for the short term. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I can find that for you, too. Be great, great. A couple budget highlights. So a very modest increase in the stormwater system maintenance and materials, about $15,000, just to keep up with the cost of materials and doing work replacing and kind of managing our stormwater system. And we've allocated 5,000 within the stormwater budget whenever existing and sculpting line items to support the hiring of a fellow who is going to look at regional stormwater services. So kind of a Chittenden County-based, regionalized service. So a number of different towns are involved in that. And so that's just sort of our share that we built into the budget. And just a council action on this, and you'll see this repeated a couple of times here as I go forward, the other enterprise funds, council will need to pass a resolution to update our stormwater rates prior to the new fiscal year. In the case of stormwater, as you may recall, from the city manager's previous presentation, that's 3.1% proposed increase. And should that be done after the budget is adopted? Yep. A couple of highlights from the stormwater CIP. So Bartlett Bay Road, off of Shelburne Road. We have had that on our list for a little bit now as a culvert that needs to be replaced. It's sort of undersized, it's aging. So moving that project forward, so we have money in the budget for final engineering. We have a variety of these flow restoration plans or these large stormwater capital projects in the budget. It's about $1.5 million worth of engineering construction, et cetera, for those projects. And then we have a sinkhole that we need to address, logwood, and so we've got some money in the budget for that. And within the box at the bottom, I just wanted to point out, trying to tie this to some other plans. I think most of all the investments we make in stormwater really increase our resiliency and improve the city's ability to withstand large storm events. So you especially observe this past summer, right? Where we were able to send our folks out to help other communities. I just remembered back a dozen or more years ago, before we'd done a lot of the work and we got our storm like that, I knew we would be down in Laurel Hill and about our farms, et cetera, et cetera, our crew would be busy. Those areas are, at least for this past storm, we're well taken care of. So it was really a wonderful position we're in. I think in a large part, it's to the investments we've made and continue to make through the stormwater utility. Where's the sinkhole on Loughwood? I'll get you more information on that one. It's no danger. No houses are going to be swallowed up. Just getting back to any answer to the question about and losing your partner. I mean, I think resilience, as opposed to, you know, foster is going to know that. And that's a great, to me, that's a really meaningful measurement. Neighborhoods being protected and so on. If there were metrics that we wanted to measure resiliency by, you know, that would be certainly something we could talk about. Well, I think we should. I think that's the story that we need to have the public share or understand. Next slide. Emerging issues. So again, well stormwater utility is fully staffed. The chart on the right shows the number of systems we've taken over. I'm sure he can't read that because I can't read that for you. But that's from when the utility started back in 2003 to today. So we maintain about just under 100 systems. I'm sure we'll surpass that 100 stormwater treatment system threshold, either FY 25 or 26, depending on various things progress. And we continue to work on three acre sites. Zoom back in for me a second, Desmond. And so there is grant funding that's been made available. Like I said, we've been very successful obtaining that. The outlook for that may not be the same because so many communities are gonna have requirements to construct things associated with this three acre permit that's come into effect. And so it's gonna get a lot more competitive across the state. So we may see our ability to pull down grant dollars and keep our stormwater rate increases, less than 3% level. If we were not able to get those grants that may start to creep up, but it's just more of a warning in general comment here that the three quarters on a million or more dollars we bring in each year, that may not go on forever. Well, that's probably why it would be really important for the community to understand what we've done so far and what those investments have done. And we need to continue. This time maybe on the tech, their utility charges versus state dollars. And then I'll move on to a couple of slides on wastewater. So our FY23 successes, I think the big success there was the community support you received for the bond that covered both the upgrade refurbishment of the Bartlett Bay facility dealing with we call it the Queen City Park Pump Stations. It's actually four pump stations, three in Queen City Park, one on Bartlett Bay Road. They are some of our older pump stations in the city. So we've got the bond funding passed for that and also improving our solids handling. So all the materials that kind of settle out as they move through the wastewater treatment facility and handling and manage those solids were made some improvements there all covered under that bond that was previously passed. Our two wastewater treatment facilities the airport parkway and Bartlett Bay facilities were recognized nationally with silver and gold awards that our wastewater superintendent applied for. Also that was some nice recognition. How did Bartlett Bay get a gold and just cherish it? I think through the operations and the quality of the effluent we put out is the phosphorus content for example, is very low relative to what we are permit to put out. And that kind of goes to the way we manage the system and this wastewater moves through. So good because yeah, the infrastructure clearly needed to be upgraded. So the fact that it was still so high because it's high performance. It's high performance. What do we do with the solids? Is that used for compost or is it used? They all went to everything before parkway where they go through a heat process suggestion process. And then we have a company, we have a contract with the company and we use them in different locations typically not in Vermont. It's one of the spreading that occurs in South State, New York. I think they spread it. Yep, so when we keep going you'll see some emerging issues. This is always, before I get to that. So some highlights here. A lot of this is just stuff we've already talked about the companies and software handling, Bartlett Bay upgrades. One thing I do want to highlight that I sort of skipped over in the initial slide was we have 32 pump stations. We're looking at adding more with some of the new development that's come online whether it be spear meadows or example, that's one that will eventually presumably become a public pump station. That's more than any municipality in the state. So if you figure, you can do it address the pump station or refurbish upgraded once every 20 years. We really should be upgrading a pump station or two or two every budget cycle. Some of the smaller ones are less expensive. Some of the larger ones, those would be upwards of a million dollars. So that's something we're working to include in our CIP as we move forward. Developers pay to put in the pump station for their development. Do you oversee how it's built and that it's up to specifications? So we're not inheriting the dog? We do. And there's plenty of times we say this isn't up to standards. You'll have to do these three, four things before the city will take them over. And we've got a lot that are sort of in that situation right now. We release the inflection to say a lot. But others that we've kept up on like the one spear meadows, I mentioned that one already, that one was built to our standard. And so after the warranty period, assuming all as well, that will become a city maintained at own pump station. That was a complaint during the DRB review of the night houses across from Sadie Lane when the design was deemed insufficient. And so the developer wasn't happy to spend another $300,000 for a bigger pump or whatever it was. So I remember that. So our standards are out there from we mentioned them frequently. Okay. And then a couple items here on the budget. So I believe folks have heard me talk about chemical costs at the pump station. So while that line is increased by 60,000, it looks like these costs are stabilizing. So I do not anticipate coming back next year with another large increase here. But again, to continue putting out the low phosphorus high quality effluent, we need to use these chemicals to adjust the pH or help flocculate whatever's in the wastewater out. And so the cost of that has just gone up over the last couple of years. Increased costs associated with our contract for dealing with the solids has gone up a little bit. I often just wanted to mention one of our policy prayers and strategies is the design of the Bartlett Bay plant. And so we're looking at that through energy efficiency, climate change lens as we move through that process, which we're really just starting to get into now at the engineer. And again, council will need to pass the resolution to update our water rates and allocation fees and things at some point here before the quite 25 budget year starts in July. And then again, our emerging issues. So I'll start with the staffing piece, I guess. We currently have a single employee down at the Bartlett Bay facility, just one person. We have others that kind of go down and check on and help out with things as necessary. We really should have two people down there from a safety perspective. So that is not in this budget year ask, but as we move into refurbishment, upgraded construction of that plant, it would be really beneficial to have that second person down there. The staff person that's there has been there. He's one of our longest tenure employees in public works. So his retirement is on the horizon. It would really be nice to have someone in there that can see the work as it's being constructed as we go forward to have that knowledge retained within the department. How many are at Airport Parkway? Oh, Robert, two, three, Jennifer, four. I know we've got folks that go around and look at the different pump stations, three folks there, and they'll check in down at the other plant as well. Is that like a $100,000 cost? Sorry, which I think we typically carry about a $100,000 for a new employee. I think this is on the enterprise fund side, just to remind folks, this isn't a general fund. And all of those positions are required at Airport Parkway. It's not a matter of just moving one of those employees down to Bartlett Bay to help with the safety issue. So because of the solids handling that goes on at Bartlett Bay, it's additional labor. And so those folks are there. We have our lab at Airport Parkway. So things, samples get collected down at Bartlett Bay and brought to Airport Parkway with Jennifer. Runs the samples and yeah. I think the facilities at Airport Parkway are better too for our field staff that are checking on the pump stations. So as part of the upgrade, we'll improve facilities down at Bartlett Bay. So perhaps some of those folks can operate more comfortably out of that different plan as well. Is that self-having trucking of the solids up to Airport Parkway so they can come back just in? Is that what happens? Yeah, everything is trucked right now. And how many trucks run a day? Just one truck a day. But it's a good chunk of that employee's time every week to just truck materials up. Is it the possibility for like just remote management technology so Airport Parkway could watch and manipulate stuff electronically and have cameras on every tank? And, you know, so you didn't have to have somebody there 24 hours a day, but is it feasible that you could possibly do it remotely? I think we're always gonna want to have somebody at that site. A lot of this is monitored like that already. Okay. Now the technology, you know, and so the person that's down there, but there's still a lot of hands-on tasks. Yes, I lived it. No. We don't staff that 24 hours a day. Yeah, that's true. Cute little home. There's a little bungalow there. And just again, that's what we're concerned. So PFAS, for example, if rules and regulations change related to that, the cost on our operations, specifically solid handling, you know, if we couldn't spread those in certain places, that may change. I'm sure that would have a significant impact on our strategy. How do we measure PFAS in more? We've done PFAS measurements with the state of Vermont and they have all that data. And just again, the chart on the right here, I always think this is again, I've mentioned it a few times. We always talk about phosphorus, but the biochemical oxygen demand and the solids that we remove as wastewater moves through the Bartlett Bay plant, you can just see the difference between the two barters there, you know, coming in at almost 300 milligrams per liter and discharged at a rate of 1.2. So the plants are doing a great job cleaning up the water. Excellent. Oh, and that's it for wastewater. Anything else before I move on to drinking water? They're really eating. Okay. All right. So... Don't waste what you drink. Drinking water department. So kind of the first bullet here is that lead service line inventory. That is something that our water superintendent and his folks have been working away at the past year that's gonna continue on. It is for those that may not be familiar with a federal requirement that we look at all of the service lines. So these aren't just the city-owned lines. These are the lines that go from where our ownership stops and private ownership starts. We are looking at those lines and making sure they're not wet. So it's a lot of record research. If they are found, then they have to get replaced. So we are still in that records research phase of this project, which is significant amount of work. One of the highlights here is just the number of water allocations. So the bars on the right are the number of different allocations and then the line is just the gallons. And so you can see we've been somewhat consistent, fairly consistent with the number, but the actual gallons or the volume of those allocations has gotten up pretty significantly here in FY23, and that's largely associated, not just with city center, but partially associated with city center about some other large businesses that have moved into the city and obtained allocations in that timeframe. What does that mean? So that helps us to budget forward of the allocation? What exactly does that mean, a water allocation? So we have 2.1 million gallons of tank and we're gonna talk about this because this is the water tank, right? Coming up here. But we need to expand the amount of water that we store in our high service area, which is basically everything east of Spear Street. So it's served by that. And that's the sum of the allocation. So yeah, we have 2.1 millions. We have to, what do we use and what are we allocating out? And we have reached that limit. And so as we track that, as we're required to, right? And we sell the allocations, we have an allocation fee to bring money in for capital projects associated with things like building another water tank. But so the allocation maybe is not what's actually used, like a budgeted use per development, is that what the allocation is? Yeah, so we can look at the water that's used out of the tank right now. And then we can look at when we issue these allocations, there's a whole hermit system that goes in depending on your use. We expect you're gonna use this much water, how many gallons per day? So we just track that. And so it's sort of a combination of what we're actually using that we can measure, what we expect to use, because we see those businesses and land uses coming into the city. Back when we were talking about the city center, we, the council agreed to allocate additional gallons, I guess, to this development, just so we would be sure that there was enough. And again, just one other one, since we have so many valves and pipes and things and the crews does a great job going out, twisting all those valves, checking on them every year. And so, you know, they've twisted over 1,500 gate valves over the past year, and this fiscal year, make sure everything's operational. Next slide. A couple of items in the water budget, so you'll see an increase in the professional services. The name of that line, and that's really the deal with water breaks and other maintenance needs, so as you're the aging water system. So as our system ages, we have more frequent maintenance needed and just we'll see more breaks. A lot of that is winter dependent, temperature fluctuations in the soil drive that too. We have kind of a one-time increase here for computer services, for our meter reading or Neptune software system. There's an upgrade necessary there. Otherwise, generally stable within the water budget and three council to-do items here. And the first is the resolution I've mentioned, like for the other enterprise funds. We will be asking for a bond vote for the water tank in the high service area on town meeting day. So we'll be preparing some presentations on that coming up very soon in the new year. January 2nd, your meeting will highly focus on the water tank votes you need to take to enable that to be on the ballot. And council should expect to see in the not too distant future an updated draft of the city's drinking water ordinance, which if you go to the next slide. Oh, I guess there's a couple of slides. I don't want to do this surprise. It hasn't been updated in the most 20 years. So that's a need of an update. I mean, we've been working on that. Capital plan, I've mentioned it already, the water storage tank. Our standard, we replace so many meters every year. So same funding in there for meter replacement and just ongoing work associated with that lead service line, inventory, research and replacement program. Is the fit paint for that? $193? Federal dollars, thank you. So those dollars come down to the state of Vermont and for a variety of factors, we are not eligible when we're in the few communities that weren't eligible for some of those dollars. So due to size, median household income, et cetera. So we do have some, we have some grant funding but not the amount that has gone to other communities in Portugal. And so if you find lead in somebody's service, they've been set their cost to replace. I believe that would be at our cost. Maybe there's some, I can look into that. I have talked to Jay about that. We're still in the, where is the lead? Is there any lead phase of this? But that has been specified in the regulations. And like I said, so emerging issues, just the water ordinance needs an update. It's been about 20 years. This bond vote, which you will hear much more about. And I've been to council earlier this year to talk about our rate study. So within that rate study, as folks may remember, just we need to adjust our rates and fees to address just the increased cost. Could we purchase water from the Champlain Water District? Those costs go up every year. And just to meet the needs of our aging infrastructure and the amount of water we need. So our rates are going to be going up as we move forward here to meet those needs. I think the proposed ratings, there used to be nine and a half percent. I remember the discussion. It's going to be interesting discussion in the future too. Champlain is a water district offered in the park as well this year. They are. Yep. Yep. And you've probably seen information on that already. Actually, I think it was in the last city news. They have something in there as well. And that's it for that. So I'm going to turn it over to Erica here. Hi everyone. Thank you for sticking with us at Public Works. We've got a few things going on. So I'll be talking about bicycle and pedestrian projects and that kind of division and fun and then also the open space. So bicycle and pedestrian is primarily penny for paths and grant funding. And I'll kind of run through how that has been working. So, and this graph really highlights how successful the penny for path initiative has been. So I'll start there because it's good background about this. Went back the two years before the penny for path ballot was approved. And you can see there was not much money that we could use because we were another place kind of buying for the general fund dollars. So really not much able to be done. But then starting with penny for paths, you can see and over time, it's been shown to the state and the federal government that we have the money to match their grants. And so they've really shown up with a lot of grant funding. So the dark blue is penny for paths funds that we've used, the light blue grants and then other sources, things like impact fees are primarily the other source that bike path projects come from. So a couple of big successes. All of our RFBs, we have about 36 of them. Citywide, they're now fully up to date. They all have signs on both sides, lights on both sides. The buttons are able to be upgraded to continue to evolve with particularly accessibility standards. So. It was the yellow flashing lights across. Sorry. Rectangular rapid flashing beacons. Which doesn't even tell you any more information. But yeah, buttons that you push, the lights go on ideally car stop. And you can- Well, I noticed that the large silver button had to be replaced by a rubber grommet type button. That's some of the ones that were silver power. Yeah, so a lot of that is because the older buttons couldn't be upgraded to accommodate sound to tie into that. And also the viral tactile, things like that. And more and more are moving towards the ones that have the arrow that you can feel also. And like Tom had mentioned, the city really moving to 10 foot travel lanes wherever we can, unless it's a place with really high heavy truck volume where they really need the 11 feet. So that has brought a lot of new bike lanes online. And the bike pad committee was really instrumental in pushing for that also. Does anybody complain about the O'Brien squeeze on Kennedy Drive at that new curb cut? Because it takes out the bike lanes almost entirely in both directions. Yeah, I haven't. I think it's because there's the path there that most people stick to, because the speeds are so high, that most people stick to the path there. But I have not. Okay. So the wide end shoulders are awesome. Is it also kind of best practice to put a bicycle picture in lanes every now and then or some other lineage that helps delineate and indicates it's for bikes? Yeah, and because a lot of the striping happened later in the season than we would have liked, putting down stencils is a lot harder. But yeah, moving towards more stencils there and also the signs to say that this is a bike lane. I have a lot of plans. Yeah, yeah. Adam and I talk about that and laying it out. But yes, a lot of those streets will, eventually all of them will have those types of markings. So just some really nice pictures and perks of having a photographer on the bike committee. Although I did take that nice Kennedy Drive West when I was one. A couple of these showing the RFBs here. And you can see someone yielding to the pedestrian there. That's actually Havilah, the chair of the bike committee. But I thought a resident sounded better. And the bike committee, since they've been so instrumental in getting Penny for paths, we went out there and stenciled that as on the new JC Park crosswalk, which was technically FY24. These are really nice enhancements. I'm thankful. We've heard some really good things about the Williston Road ones also. Have you heard any negatives? We did for the first like two weeks. Oh, till people got figured out. The people started remembering that it was there. We did have one person hit it within like a week at one of them. They hit a sign, the sign got launched and as it's been quite guillotined some of the wires, but it's been replaced. It all works. I think we're also on the telephone. But no, since the first couple of weeks, we've really only had a lot of feedback. Some people even came to the bike committee just to say thank you. It was very sad to see those wrapped right after they were just cut up. Oh my gosh, I know. So the FY25 budget, since these aren't line items, I really just want to lay through how the funding, the balance has been moving around. You can see that the funding, the revenue has really grown because the grand list has come in. So 1% means a much larger number now than it did when it started. And so some of the years it kind of fluctuates with how big our expenditures are, which is why the balance kind of ebbs and flows because design takes a few years and then you'll have a summer with big construction. So FY26, two of our biggest projects will really spend down that balance. So it looks like we're taking in more money than we could ever spend, but it's really just that kind of natural flow of the construction and design cycle. Eric, how do you think about the 24 path kind of segregated account versus the amounts in the general fund for shared use maintenance and striping? You just think about those collectively? Are they in your mind for different things or? Based on the ballot language, they are for different things, penny for path can only go to new items, which is kind of a difficult piece, honestly, because certain things like shared use path maintenance, we could get a lot more done if we could use some of the penny for paths dollars, but we can't unless we were to make an eight-foot path at 10-foot path, then you can make the argument that's a new facility. Right, and so it is up in, we have five more years of this current ballot language. I believe it's FY29 is when it comes back around. So you were saying you think it would be more efficient to use some of these dollars for maintenance then? I think it's more flexible, at least to allow the same way the open space fund does, it has half-cent going to the specific locations, but then there's that 5% kind of general maintenance that we can tap into. Why don't you think about putting that on the ballot to adjust the use of those funds for new and for maintenance? Well, they go away in 2019. I mean, the penny for path is in you. I don't know, but for the next five years, we did, we did that with the open space. It was in calendar year 2018, it went into effect in FY19. So if I use a new ballot language. So 2018. Can we adjust the existing, like, wasn't there something with the open space right, we did that, we put that one because it had about five minutes. Well, it's a gas and a bank and head committee, what their thoughts were before we go ahead with just, yeah, we'll take your money. Thanks for doing all the work. Speaking to them every month, I don't think they'd be upset about at least, even if it was something like open space fund, how it says a percent of it each year can go towards maintenance. We could do touch base before we launch into that. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, that's very, and that's true, they would be very receptive to a conversation. So, Andrew, great questions, two points. I'd like to quickly make one is just a historical point. Previous, the person who previously managed the pay for pass and open space fund sat in the manager's office and we intentionally moved that position over to public works two years ago to make the link between the capital investment and the maintenance needs stronger. And I think Erica and Tom have done a really great job linking those two efforts over time. Second, this is my personal opinion. What you're talking about is exactly why dedicated pennies are difficult. When you have dedicated pennies and a general fund budget, you take away council's nimblism about those funds over time. So just something to think about into the future. We can discuss that with our language like we've done before with this one. You absolutely can. If it was just the council had decided to fund a percent on the tax rate or a penny on the tax rate for pass and kept that policy decision over time, there's no need to have ballot language at all. It's just a policy call you can make during a budget process. Would you run the fear of you put it out there to change it and people voted down? Does that mean that the penny goes away or just the, you know, or it's just that the flexibility just went out there? Yeah, I wouldn't want to put it in jeopardy, just because. Yeah. You'd have to write it a certain way that it wouldn't go away. There are many, many conservation slash open space punch examples as I've dug. It's been amended many times. So moving to the next slide, looking at the CIP. This is another example of just showing how much we can leverage using penny for pass. Over half of the funding being used in FY 25 is grant related. A lot of that is the Hinesburg Roadpath grant, which we were very, very glad to receive our full request on. So there's $950,000 in spending there. 180,000 is directly from pennies for path. And we're moving into some very exciting construction projects in 25 and 26 on the Spear Street shared use path and Dorset Street shared use path, probably constructed in the opposite order. And $100,000 here, that's mentioned as climate action related, is that more general project shown in the CIP as just active transportation projects, which is a way that we've laid it out to try to get some of that flexibility with the active transportation plan in the works. There's gonna be a lot of recommendations that come out of that, some of which are in the CIP, some of which are not. So starting at $100,000 to get into any types of studies or design and then that number increasing with some grant assumptions over time. And so that's part of that policy budget being proposed. So some project highlights, really just ran through those there. And the 8% for ARPA is the assumed Hinesburg Road path allocation that we've talked about. But there are places, if the council chose to shift where that is, that's a conversation we can have and other places could potentially absorb some of that. Does that design go all the way to, does it need to press the road? On Hinesburg Road? No, it is the one mile from Williston to Kennedy. And for reference right now, talking about how costs have gone up, shared use paths for a 10 foot asphalt path, currently is about a million dollars a mile. It's the kind of quick hitting. That's what the state used to be years and years ago. I'll know you've got some time. Yeah. The spare street path was more from spare to the farce. Yep, from Swift Street at the crosswalk. We've extended it around the corner so that there's not like a hundred feet. So from that crosswalk on Swift Street around the corner of front of the church, it crosses at Songbird, where it connects with another path under the bridges and that connects to the existing spare street path. So, and what's the timing of that? Is that to begin externally? It depends on when right of way is always the biggest issue. That's why we're a year behind on the Dorset Street path. Construction was originally hoped for FY24 there. So that will be dependent on things. We've tried to do a lot of upfront coordination about the bridges in particular. But FY24- And the funding is all in place. It's just depending on the right- We have $300,000 worth of funding. The project is looking like it's about one to 1.2, even though it's less than a mile, it is much more involved with the bridges and stormwater treatment. And so I think it's on your consent agenda for Monday to approve another $300,000 ask from the same grant program because they have raised the allowable cap for grants from that funding source. Will the require an RRFB at Songbird? Yes, yes. It's a really popular crossing. And the other side of it is also in the CIP Dorset and Songbird. And I'm sorry, I just related to this. There's a little piece of bike path behind Spearmeto's that doesn't quite connect yet. Yeah. So that is a separate CIP project. And that is where that is the only general fund asking here that 13% is for the, I believe it's listed as the Spearmeto's path connection. That's a separate project because it's coming from different pots of money. It's on a different timeline because we're working with developers and going through the VM land where easements have been going through their process, but it is in the CIP for 25 and 26. Will it hook back to the existing RRFB or get its own? It would hook into the existing one. So we'll have to, you don't have to switch back and cutting and then at West, right? Yeah. So it would make kind of a loop, but yeah, if you wanted to go West, you'd have to go East for a few hundred feet. Yeah. Crossing the West. There's also the Williston roads streetscape. That's separate. That is Alana. Yeah. Yes. There are many bike. Projects. Yeah. So all of the TIF funded ones are shown separately. So city center area. And so emerging issues. We've talked about maintenance a lot. So I figured we'd show off a beautiful section. That one is on Nolan farm. Oh, yeah. Nolan farm as a whole is pretty rough. It's a, it's on the list of where that 40,000 of maintenance. Yeah. And so, yeah, that's one of our biggest emerging issues. I've mentioned it also is that we need funding and staff capacity for maintenance, especially without being able to tap it to penny for pass for maintenance. Then it is going to have to come from a general fund there. And so we have really big goals with the climate action plan, which are great. And I think it is a really important way to get people out of their cars. They don't have to. Infrastructure to be on, but we have a small staff. It's really rough. It's just coming up. Dorsen from Kennedy to get here. Honestly, I think roughly Nolan. From. Take both three. You bite. I was a rubber. The paint. Yeah. We have a pretty hefty set. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We have a pretty hefty spreadsheet. Our areas. And so yeah, we have. In order to really need these climate goals, we need to, we need to work quickly and then be able to keep up with. What goes in there? So now moving into open space fund again, because it's a dedicated special fund. It's going to look similar to the penny for pass one. one. So FY 23 successes here. But you jumped. Where's the, where's the middle picture from? Wheeler. Okay. Yeah, Red Rock, Wheeler, and Overlook. We've got here. So in FY 23, we all remember back and forth on Hubbard, but design is still progressing on that path and all of the design elements we landed on. And another big thing is Red Rocks. There's a lot of stormwater and trail improvements there. We have secured most of our permits. We're just waiting on the Act 250 for the last one. But that is really moving along. And I was not at the public meeting, but when Tom was there for the Queen City Park pump stations and this seemed to be well received. People were happy that the outfalls and erosion will be getting improved. So again, looking at how the balance shifts, we've had some pretty lean spending years because things haven't been going to construction quite yet in open space. We will be tapping into those more with Red Rocks and Hubbard. And then that is a lot of what's on the rest of the, the acronym is Grape, the O SNAP list, the open space natural area priority list for projects. So that we're going to have to look at again. But so this is just the improvements and maintenance side that half sent. This is not include the land acquisition half sent in what you're seeing on this table. The repayment was for, what's the note for? So that was taken out when it was the conservation fund. Then the way that it went was there was another ballot item where a $1.3 million note was taken out and to be repaid through the Hubbard or what was that? No, that was for upfront costs for upkeep. And it identified for national areas and open spaces that that note can be used for. So that's where the payments come out for these improvements. When does it? We only have two more years of payments. Okay. Yeah, payments are about 125. Yeah, I think there's two more years FY 25 and 26. That's our hopeful confirmation. But there are only a year or two left on that note payment. But we have a very healthy balance here. So we have the capacity to be taking on some more improvements in the open space area. Do we have flexibility to use that balance for acquisitions too? The other half sent, the note repayment, the note. No, this is $7.20 in the balance. That's dedicated to maintenance that can't be. Improvements and then 5% of that can be used for maintenance. The other half cents are the other $206, $208,000 that goes into an account that can be used for land acquisition. This can't. Correct. This is for the improvements. And how long did we do the half sent? That had a time frame on it too. Is it not? The note repayment had a time frame. The conservation fund, my understanding of the ballot was that was in perpetuity. Oh, absolutely. And then we changed it. Changed it to the open space fund. I don't remember if that division to the half set was. I thought there was a time limit on the half set. Like a 10 year maybe or something like that. It was time limited. Yeah, it was with the same time as the note repayment that it needed to be spent in a certain amount of time. Is it 10? Yeah. It's either 10 years for the financial equivalent of 10 years, which might be a slightly different thing. Yeah. This fund is, would it be eligible to use costs for conservation easements in any of city lands from this fund? I'm going to look at Paul for that. From the half of it that is not for maintenance, yes, it is either the acquisition of or conservation of. Not this one. Not this half. Right. This has to go towards the projects on that priority list. But there's a huge list of projects. This doesn't. Right. Because the list on maintenance is specific to, there was an adopt, there was a sheet that went with it of the types of projects and that's specifically at Red Rocks, Wheeler, and Hubbard. That came out of the open space task force. But once the conservation easement is put on the property, there are some ongoing maintenance costs, right? Right. And that's 5% of the annual revenue can be put to any maintenance. And the half set there is for these three places only, Red Rocks, Wheeler, and Hubbard. That was what was given to the voters and then approved by the voters for this tenure period. And our CAP will show how we'll look at using that 5%. That isn't enough to do all the planning. Because I recall what we identified as needs at Red Rocks and Hubbard and Wheeler. Correct. That's what this is allowed to be used for? Yes. I know it's allowed to be used with the changes at Hubbard. There is a lot more funding availability. Because if that were to be used towards everything that was shown in the visioning in 2015 and the 2018 master plan, that's a much more expensive project. I'm just recalling Red Rocks dollar figures. Because that was redoing the bath house, right? That is kind of, no, that comes out of a different source of difference. Because that was huge. I mean, that was a lot, several hundred thousand dollars. I wouldn't mind at some point just going over that $2,000 item. We don't have to do it now, but the way I read it, it says to allocate not more than 50% of the open space fund to repayment of the debt. I quite see the rangeness of the division you're articulating. It happens in three different ballot items. Yeah. Because I spent probably like three or four hours one day reading it and like calling other people into payoffs. Is this how you read it too? So looking at the CIP here, so in FY 25, the goal is to be completing the construction on the Red Rocks improvements, which would occur as two separate projects. One is primarily at the beach for that outfall and formalizing a trail and the rest are the spot improvements of erosion and stormwater throughout the area and the Hubbard path project. And like I had mentioned, the costs are going to be a lot lower than what you've seen in previous CIPs, scaling that back to just the path and parking lot and some of the other pieces there. Does the tree management include removing a buckthorn? So yeah, so tree management is like a big term. And so what we plan to do because so many things are just beyond the capacity of our loan arborist to go out and take care of things. That over the next four years to tackle four different areas. So on some of the areas of the Spear Street and the paths along 189, the paths kind of surrounding Samanski, the ones in Farrell, and I forget what the last one is, but to kind of take on each one of those sections one per year for the next four years to catch up on a lot of those things like buckthorn have really overgrown or dead trees have become a safety risk to catch up so that then we can move more into a typical maintenance program. Is that something we look for resident volunteers to help with? Not with the scale it has gotten to. Some of them are going to be really big. Need a lot of mechanization for buckthorn because it's really hard to cut. Yeah, and you have to go back three times. I mean it isn't just a one cut. Because they're having things like the weed warrior program. Sometimes you cut and then you have to go to each one and you bag in or put you know. I just want to remind everyone we're supposed to be almost done. I've been working, you know, worse than anyone else and interrupting with questions. So maybe some of our questions so including some of my own are probably more focused or appropriately addressed under the discussion part. So I have one last slide. So in our emerging issues here talking about conservation there's a lot of balance that needs to go on. The city plan looking to maintain 51% as conserved in open space and still making sure we have certain needs being met around if it's a path connection or a future water line going into a development to make sure that we can really meet all of those needs and meet those goals. And a big thing and you'll hear more about it from Adam and Ruckin Parks is that we'll be developing a parks master plan and open space master plan to help guide that next round of priority projects. Okay. Thank you. Five minutes. We just limited to five. I'll set my timer. Be quick. Five minutes. Make it quick. Good question. That's the question. You guys are so engaged just because they've been amended in various ways and to take out the no and out of the payment so far is that what you're saying? Well, that was a little bit of a challenge. That was a little bit of a challenge. This year, oh, yes. And I'm wondering what the council is going to be doing in the next five minutes. The main one is what you're having east. The final answer is what you're going to be doing in five minutes. Yeah. So, of course, it's not the same. So, I'm just going to say, R.E. definitely talks to you guys very well. Thank you. I think we had a lot of fun this year. It was a lot of fun. It was really good. It was really good to see you guys take so many photos. I wish I could give you a picture of me. I have a horseshoe version of that happen every other day, but if it works, when you're wearing like boots, but if it works, because I know it's got stocked up as well, I like to cross forever. Have a look at how long it's been here. Look at Jason's also. Grants from the question, just turn seven. Parts of rec going first. Doesn't matter to me. They're the same. Like, they're the same, but you're doing a joint. So, reading, I guess, is now a sport, right? This was my, in the attempt to actually be efficient with time this morning, which we sort of done. I asked Jennifer and Adam to do a joint community services presentation. They are doing amazing work partnering on how to serve all of our residents across the two service areas. So they put together a great presentation. So, yeah, it's a bit of a hybrid presentation here. There's a couple slides where we do kind of joint together. And we'll also dive into each individual number. So the first slide shows some of the joint successes that we had, which just is in regards to providing services to more residents in the community. With the recreation and parks that goes into the programs and the events that we use throughout the course of the year. I didn't go past or further back in 2022 because you start to get into COVID, which greatly impacted the amount of events or two of the numbers there. But the differences between 22 and 2023 community events in 22. We had 22 that increased to 34 last year. Community programs, we had 16 and 22 that increased to 36 last year. Of the programs, there's multiple sessions that go into each of them. The sessions went up from 61 programmable sessions up to 256. This past year, and that's likely a past fall. Soccer, lacrosse, swimming. And on the library side, that slide is only referring to the number of items that are checked out from the library for those years. And I took COVID out as the primary two years for COVID. But it also is kind of a symbolic of all of the services which are all being used more. So our number of visitors is number of visits is up. Our number of programs is up. Our number of program attendees is up. We have almost 100,000 visits in 2023 and almost 10,000 attendees at programs. So everything's going up, and this is just one example. So with the successes, now we're going to outcome more into the rex department here. So a few of these successes you'll see in the other presentations. It just shows kind of the cross-glanding when it comes to projects that are done in the recreation parks department. Obviously one of the big first ones there is the court recruitment at Samansky Park, opening up those pickleball courts when it comes to the demand and interest that we had there. Tom mentioned earlier the opening of the Wheeler dog park, providing more opportunity space and services for dogs in the area. Illuminated Vermont, this is a small role in this event that takes place that it's all different of the departments here as well as externally sponsors and volunteers. And then one of the other areas do that I also wanted to kind of mention that ILITS is the senior center. A lot of times people when they recreation and parks, you think of the physical locations etc. or the Dacey Park little park etc. or the youth programming when it comes to youth, baseball, soccer, etc. But the senior center is a huge of ours. It makes a gigantic impact in the community. For example, the meals that we served in 2022, we increased from just over 1500 meals that year to 2023, we served over 2200 meals at the service center, and the hours programmed in the service heard in the senior center increased to over 1500 hours that we had last year. Who makes up the department? So there's four of us currently. I just started here the other month. We have Rebecca who has been here since the senior center opened. She's our senior adult specialist. We have Travis who's worn a handful of hats within the department. He oversees operations and events. And we also have Brett Lambert who's been here since 2015. He oversees a lot of our programming as well as our program side of things. We do have one vacant open position with our youth programming as well as expanding on to our clients. List out the mission there. But at the end of the day, I think the department was a unique role, especially in our current day and age, when people are becoming more and more connected through their phones, social media, in that regard, or becoming more and more disconnected with actually interacting with your neighbors and their community. So it's through our events that we put a unique opportunity to kind of thread everyone together, whether it's neighbors from their local community, whether it's neighbors from across town through our events, whether it's kids who go to Orchard School interacting with kids who go to Chamberlain before they go up to Tuttle. There's a lot of creative ways that we can do that here. The budget, I'll hit on the capital items that's listed out there in the 100,000 increase on the next slide, but a few of the other increases that we have are $5,000 towards special events that's allocated with the assumption of a full staff being able to expand our special events. What is unique about this? Obviously, it's an expense increase, but by doing more special events, there's actually increases in revenue opportunities. That is the one area with recreation that we do have some revenue generating size of it when it comes to sponsorships. So the more events that we do, the larger opportunity there is to get money from outside companies to help increase money allocated to other programs. Youth programming, obviously as the city continues to grow and develop here, it will be expanding our youth programs and what we have to offer, and this $10,000 increase goes towards helping alleviate some of the staff set up by utilizing paid seasonal staff to help run some of those youth programs that we have. Also in the budget for this upcoming year is money allocated towards save fund action number 87, which is helping to develop a part-taster plan. Here's a little help guide, kind of our plans going forward when it comes to the utilization of CO parks just in the short term, but we'll have them done. Hey guys, the new guy is specifically referencing the action items in the city plan. Kind of jumping into the capital approval plan. So this is what we have listed out for the record parks here. As I just mentioned, we have money allocated towards the parts master plan, both in 25 as well as money allocated in 26 for that. Veterans Memorial Park multi-use field as well as storage. This is a two-year project which we have money allocated for. It goes towards permitting and planning in 2025 with the idea of creating a new multi-use field at Veterans Memorial Park which will help alleviate some of the use and demand currently when it comes to the soccer and lacrosse field and then looking to future years down the road. It would also allow us to kind of rotate out of the field so that we have time for service and repairs during the course of the season. Veterans? I was just curious, does that construction include a resolution of needing space that we were using and we are all to evolve 577? Or is that a different? Yeah, so the storage, yeah, so that is part of it. With the storage element, we do need storage because we are going to be getting out of that location. And is that what that money is for? The storage element. In 26, I guess it is? Yeah, in 25. For 25. Okay, good. There's a design and construction element. So the baseball field reimbursement, this is obviously an issue at Veterans Memorial that everyone is aware of when it comes to the drainage situation that we have there and obviously it was highlighted even more this summer with all of the the rain and weather that we got. This is also a multi-year project, installing drainage around the baseball field areas in 25 and expanding that out into the soccer and lacrosse field areas in 26. This will allow us to have the amount of the fields had to be closed off. This has some of the disputes the lack of drainage because we help alleviate those issues there. A few of the other kind of ones just to kind of highlight and bring out the dugout replacement. That's just kind of a continued project which had money allocated in 24 of this current year. So you're continuing status of replacing dugouts throughout the community. Bleacher is the same setup. There's money allocated this year. Four sets of bleachers and it's been continuing that process going forward. And then on the bottom with regards to the cleats. So currently the Rec and Parks Department gets hand-me-down vehicles from the Department of Public Works. And this is starting to build a reserve fund. So that down the road or the purchase of our own vehicles and that would prevent the maintenance of constant upheaval expenses that we have going around it. Emerging issues, I'll add on a few of these. Before we get there, I think these items are so designed in the request by Parker Mix to be funded by Offer for those different items. I know that Parker has a bunch of maintenance things. So in parentheses is where the money's allocated. But they had requests to fund. I thought the baseball field was in there. I'm just trying to understand are we already satisfying those requests that they made for these different items? I don't think we've done that crosswalk back to that request. That was a request from November 2022. I'm not sure. We talked about it in the City Council a couple months ago is allocating some of the offers for their requests. Yeah, I don't think we've done that crosswalk. Okay. Emerging issues obviously with the Parks Master Plan. Once that rolls out, the impact that we'll have and then also providing the resources and the funding to kind of act on that plan. What is provided in that report. Continue to look and to distribute our resources appropriate to the surrounding areas. Remembering any barriers that we have when it comes to transportation. We'll be able to participate both in our programs as well as our events. Financial and time restraints is a big issue that we also have. And then continuing to balance both the developed side of things as well as the undeveloped side of things. The community rules and identity housing is a large part of that. People will continue to have a lack of space in their own home locations when it comes to opportunities to have active recreation. So there will be a higher demand kind of on our parks in that sense. And then one of the big things is hardly an emerging issue. But one that's been on the radar for a long time and will continue to be is the indoor programmable space. Currently, we are actually doing control when it comes to our own programs. And we turned into a seasonal, not that we're not doing things year-round, but we're a very, very heavy seasonal project department where all of our events get thrown into a warm-up window and waterworks. And a lot of our programming does as well just because we don't have the control when it comes to the scheduling of the school or we get second tier times. And it also has additional cost for us. Library. So some of this is reiterating again that we are consistently growing in our manner as far as serving more residents, serving residents more fully. These are just some examples. And I think the library programs being up 36% to several almost 10,000 visitors is really important. And that runs the gamut from book groups to English as a second language, meetings to climate change, lectures and upcoming book groups, hosted events around race and revolution. I mean, it's just, it's, and then story times we have a number there that's specific to them. So just a reminder that it really is across the board that we're really trying to ensure that we are providing information and social interaction and entertainment across the board to residents. And also a reminder that it's not just our residents who are attending, that we do have people from towns all around who are also coming out regularly. This is to collaborate. So the final item on that list is about our library of things. And if you haven't used anything from the library of things yet, don't hesitate. I personally just checked out two ukuleles because my family decided it would be fun to try to learn some holiday songs and sing with ukuleles. But there are lots of other possibilities if you have old film that you want to, you know, review from your grandparents or your parents time and you don't have a way to do that. We have a projector. We have a slide projector. We have gardening tools, various bits of tech that you might need, bicycle pumps. We've had some kids, a particular kid from up the street in the apartments there who he and his friends are all out on their bicycles. And so they can't check them out themselves, but they come into the library and we get out the bike repair kit and the bike pumps so that they can take care of those things here in the library because at this stage we're asking that adults be the people who are checking out materials from that collection. So that's going to be an ever-growing collection. You'll be seeing that in future budget requests, but I don't think it made it onto this particular one. So it's just something to be aware of. Yeah, next. Do you have a VCR? You know, it's funny that was just on front porch forum and one of the things that I look for on front porch forum is when people need things that we might have. In that case, we don't have one, but I reached out to the woman and said, when you find one and you're finished with it, if you wouldn't mind donating it to us, that would be really useful. Yeah. I know I've got about 10 myself. So the library, we have 22 staff now, nine of them are full-time. There are, I'm an administration and I, there are three other staff who are supervisors. The four of us make up the library's leadership team and that's the supervisor of the children's services, adult services and the circulation department. So that's who makes us up. We just had our staff picture taken, but not in time to get it into the library. So the changes, the items in the budget that seem to be notable is that one is that we have this increase in revenue from meeting room use. And I mentioned that first because it directly relates to the next item, which is that we are requesting a 19-hour position. And in part, in large part, it's because of our success in reserving the meeting room. So we've had, in 2023, the rooms were reserved 922 times and that doesn't include for City Hall or any other departments, any library or city use. So this is just the public. And we continue to look for online solutions and other solutions to make this a more streamlined process. We compare to how Andrea does it too because we want to make sure we're being effective and efficient. But the process of accepting all those applications and then responding and then answering questions and then taking money ends up taking a lot more time than we have. So that is a big part of the reason why we're asking for that additional position. The other piece to that as far as the floater is that we have substitutes. And what we're finding is that the supervisors need some time every week where they can really focus on their administrative duties. And if we can have a floater who is there on a regular basis too, who really knows how things works, the subs come in and they fill in when they can, but they're not there regularly enough to maintain a high level of knowledge of each of the desks and what they do. So that person would also be that floater role that can go on a regular basis to the desks to cover for administrators to be able to handle their work as well. Within their part-time hours. And then finally it is just that online and print resources are going to continue to go up. They're going to continue to be popular. The chart there, oh no the chart there is about room reservations. If you use ebooks or e-audio books through Libby, those are, they're growing exponentially. We've recently added some additional movies, Tim, to the canopy, to the canopy line. So that are, we're now buying a package so that as many people that want to watch them can without having to use their own tickets. So there's a, it's not a brilliant system, but the use of it keeps going up. So that's the line that just, we really need to be increasing. And I think over time we'll also be looking at, well I think even in this budget we're already looking at decreasing some of the video and books on CD budget with the, with the plan that we will be moving away from those technologies into online resources pretty much 100% but I don't know the time frame for that. So what I was just talking about as far as looking at collections and figuring out which way to go and are we going to use online resources that's number two there. That is also the place where we would think about how important is it to our community that we have some household items that they, that individuals living in apartments might not have room for. And so it's important that we have crutches and that we have loppers because you really only need them a few times a year and you don't have any place to put them and, or you can't afford them. So all of that is on the second one. I think it's an ongoing process for the, for all of us that our, our community is more and more diverse and that it is important for the library to be welcoming and inclusive and that we are not just, not just imagining what people need but that we are also reaching out to the community to talk to people to find out what it is that they want from their library. For example, coming up soon we are going to be starting a Mandarin conversation class, group, not a class but a place for people who want to practice their Mandarin to come to library and speak to each other. And that's something we've been, you know, slowly but surely we think we've got someone who wants to lead French and then not so much or Spanish, not so much but I think that we are developing relationships in the community so that people really get it that that's what we're here for. It kind of relates to affinity groups that Alana's been working on too. So we're kind of doing this in a parallel way with other departments. A lot more people going to be living in city center in walking distance to the library and I want to just be aware that it's going to change things for the library as far as when are we there, how many of us need to be there to help people and how does it influence story time. So if we have two toddler times now and we have between 45 and 60 people at each one and then we suddenly have families who are nearby and are bringing their kids to toddler time. Okay, can't do anymore. 60 really is the max because otherwise you're not having a positive experience and we're not modeling anything for parents. So it's one of those things to be aware of. And then the final the final line there it kind of ties into what Steve and Sean were talking about and that is that the library as well as the building overall is a place that we are seeing a lot of people who are underserved or have service needs, unmet social needs is what Sean said. And we're seeing them at the library a lot of people on a daily basis. I think we have between eight and 10 people right now who are at the library almost every day all day. Different situations and some people we have no idea what their situations are but there are many of them who actively require attention. And the thing to remember when we're looking at emerging issues is exactly as they were saying even if we can help them and refer them to somebody else that somebody else can't necessarily help them because they're just aren't enough resources. So how does that all work? And that's much bigger than just the library. But for us right now we've had the privilege of having a social work intern at the library which has been a wonderful experience and it's really helped us kind of imagine what that might look like to have a social work professional perhaps working with the library and having those collaborations is a national movement. There's more and more of that going on. Certainly we've talked to Fletcher Free and they're certainly doing that kind of work as well. Evelyn's downstairs right now. Is she good? Do you matter? Excellent. Excellent. That's that. I have one question. Do you want to continue with your slides? I was just curious we used to have the Blanchard Fund to buy books and so forth and I believe that went to building the structure. So I'm just curious as the library board is working on developing a new endowment for books to help with you know some of your emerging issues in terms of the format of things. So the the founding there is a library foundation and they are they do annual appeal and sometimes help us with writing grants and things like that. Generally speaking the foundation funds I consider more capital. So because we we've never had a line for repairs or furnishings or anything like that and that's what it was originally designed for. So that's generally what I think of. However I have some discretionary funds and if I need to use it that way I can in small amounts but there's no there's no plan for like a standard we're going to augment the collection piece. Okay. I'm just curious. Yeah seems like I don't know. It's up and going and it's being used so much that there might be a receptiveness in the community to fund something like that. Yeah. So I think when they do their appeal letter they try to highlight certain things and so that could be something that could be done in an in an appeal letter and then when the appeal letter does talk about x, y, or z then they try to make sure that money is available for x, y, or z. Thank you. I was also curious how much of the library's budget does come from the community outside of taxpayer dollars. I was also curious how much of a budget is funded from revenue that you collect from to use the services and whether those services you think are right size appropriately sized, how do you compare it to other library facilities? So the revenue budget is 12,000, 0.16 million. So we collect 12,000 for fees, whatever a copy or whatever that is and how much comes from the community. You know I don't mean from the general fund. I mean there's idea appeals from you know library foundations. Yeah. I don't think that is budgeted in the annual budget. We keep those funds separately and when they do their appeal like Jennifer said they are curious how much like what's the size of the item and they are spent within that special fund. So they never actually touch the general fund. We don't understand. I'm just curious what the size of that community support is. What is the foundation fund? What's the dollar figure that they're collective I guess? Is that what you're asking? So the foundation keeps keeps their own bank and then when I find need something in particular, so yesterday I realized that the sun was coming into the Cirque desk so that everybody at the Cirque desk was doing this and so I might need to buy new shades because I didn't put shades on those windows. So then I would approach the foundation and say I need shades for $25,000. Can you do it? And we go from there. So generally that's how that works. The money from the the campaign the annual appeal I think comes to a wrap between it varies from year to year so let's say an average of maybe $15,000 and I usually get that to spend as as the $1,000 fees again. Is that it? Do we think that's kind of right-sized? You know we're and I have no idea and I don't I don't I asked you the question don't mean to buy it's not it's just a question you know in terms of what we charge people for rooms or for copying or all the things that we provide. $4,000 increase from last year. So Ed I I haven't ever looked at it as far as how other libraries what they bring in if that's something that you want me to look into I'm happy to do that and and send you all that information today later today. I just I think you know it's it's interesting there are different pieces of it so when you think about um copiers you mentioned copiers and um so one of the one of the trends about copiers is the same as it was a few years ago about fees for late books and that and there's a piece of well we want to be equitable and we want people to be able do the business they have to do and so do we stop charging for copies do we reduce the amount that we charge for copies because we are trying because the library is a place where people are sometimes need to make copies and they can't afford them so you know there's always that conversation and I think that's nationally that that conversation is happening um and the rooms um we certainly talk within the city as you know like third floor rooms versus second floor rooms we have a slightly different fee system because as a public library the board of trustees recommended that we have two free hours for individuals and not profits because we want the library to be accessible and equal you know equitable for everybody um so always we're always balancing out those issues that doesn't answer your question as far as dollars and cents but it's kind of a it's um interesting information I think but I'm happy to find out the others yep any other questions okay thank you final we have our final slide final slide whoops you guys really should click your own slides uh yeah so the the final issues kind of they hit off of what Sean said earlier when it comes to any of the the service industries obviously is the developments around peer or high density and housing continues to grow the rate of neighborhood developments of the past whether it's through our physical resources so uh expanding the programs that we have uh both of our staff will have to play to that as well okay and wrapping it up general government so as I pull up this one I am I am um I'm going to try and do this one a little because I would like to give you at least 45 minutes for your own conversation I will bribe you by saying that before we go to lunch andy is going to have a holiday presents for you so I'm going to start this but may ask other people all in a lot of you ready to jump in so general government you've seen this before so we have 33 employees who provide kind of backbone support to the city this is your you know core legal it all pretty much everybody on this side of the room and Greg falls into this budget very plus their staff so about 33 other folks we have had some pretty significant I would argue successes in the last year one we have had a fair amount of staff turnover FY 23 marks my second year here in the city and often during those kind of leadership transitions you see a lot of staff turnover we definitely saw that in FY 23 and continue to see that in FY 24 but have been able to bring in amazing new talent to our city our general government focus is also really around modernizing our systems and improving updating policies putting implementing office 365 in exchange and several other efforts that you have all heard me talk about in FY 23 we are really pleased thanks to Martha and her team to receive another clean audit and receive strong support from the community for all three of our town meeting day votes last year I copied this little chart image from Tom so thank you Tom for that to give you some just quick quantitative data on quantity of support we provide Paul can you want to put the next you sure so on the left side of the screen a couple of a handful of the highlight projects that our development review team was looking at this year this past year everything that you're seeing out the window from this building O'Brien Eastview neighborhood the O'Brien outpatient sorry the UVMMC outpatient facility that has not broken ground yet but we're you know we're working towards the next projects that has been approved on Tilly Drive the Beta aircraft next building which is their hangar and of course the on-logic headquarters that are wrapping up their construction now you see on the right hand side a lot of residential units received permits this past year so this is construction permits now on the right hand side a big chunk of those almost all of the administrative ones in terms of new units are in the city center area that's where it's administrative approval so that's a big chunk that are under construction right now what is the bottom one is it new new blocks so uh so parcel was divided a big chunk of those are in O'Brien Eastview and then on the next slide you've heard from multiple folks here about how our community is transitioning so on the right hand side you see those two charts the red is the proportion of single family homes as a total of all of our housing units in the city and the blue is multifamily which is sort of three or more homes in a structure and so we are about to see the point where these two cross one another and we become a majority multifamily home community and that's a substantial departure that chart starts in the year 2000 when we were about two-thirds single family homes so in one generation we've gone from two-thirds to less than half and then on the left hand side is each year the construction permits issued the blue again is multifamily so you can see why it is that that is taking over the last couple three years have been a big you know city center is a big chunk of that not all of it but it's a big chunk of it and it's a portion of that is a little bit of residual uh that didn't happen in the two years before that from the pandemic so there's a little bit of pent-up demand you see the chart tends to go up and down so those are my couple of highlights do you have a broken out owned versus condo or condo versus rental no it's not something that we track so uh that's what i've got on that slide and then uh just a couple of data points quickly on the uh climate action plan you will have in your monday packet um on your agenda the um annual sustainability report so i won't spend a ton of time on this today but a couple of just quick data points uh the council adopted two ordinances in the last year one on carbon free heating and the other carbon free or renewable heating and the other being on solar pv these take a little bit of time for new projects to be affected by these based on the effective dates and when projects are due but in terms of construction permits we've seen uh 15 dwelling units so far uh being required to meet the carbon free heating slash renewable heating ordinance uh and um nine multi families and then on the solar pv uh we have that only applies to multi family and we've had 196 dwelling units and 32 000 square feet of space that is subject to that so far so i'm just curious but so the form is so added in 23 because that ordinance came into effect at beginning this year are you speaking about the solar or the carbon free carbon free yeah so it took effect on february 15th for any application submitted to uh the fire prevention team on or after that date took effect so the projects that you're seeing under construction immediately next to us and then uh across the street were both submitted complete applications before that date so that's why those don't show up in there one of them though the 196 unit units um the effective the date of the effectiveness was a different one so that south side buildings those will have the solar pv because that was the zoning permit was the trigger point not the um uh food for fire prevention uh permit so that's why it's shaped that way just to see the o'brien development that's all electric was they volunteered to do right so i didn't include that because they weren't required to they chose to so we could um reach out to them and learn a little bit more about what their numbers are as to what has been accomplished because that is an important data point about who's done what but we wanted to stick for this to what was required um so fy 23 was a pretty amazing year in terms of the district um we received a clean 10-year audit which is something we have been not not probably but in terms of something visible to the public in a big way but something that we have been very concerned about for a long time so we're very um all of the hard work towards that didn't pay off um the tip district grand list grew by 7.67 percent um and one of the things to remember with the tip district um is that the grand list uh is for the prior year so um there's a bit of a lag and so a lot of that um growth uh was actually occurring uh earlier um in the so later so different from the permits the growth the grand list actually grows you know a year and a half to two years after the permit is issued so um we're still seeing the effect um of COVID um in the grand list um and we expect to see it grow further obviously next year um but we do have concerns about it growing in future years um and so that will be an emerging issue um the walk right bridge concept was approved um with a lot of public outreach uh and the design team went right to work on that concept um and by the end of FY 23 the 60 percent preliminary plans were completed we're now well beyond that um and into final design and then Illuminate Vermont I think was a huge joint department effort but I do have to give a big hand to back I don't think they had a small part and a really big part in it so along with many others um and just had a you know great attendance for our first time event and what can be a very scary event because it happened in the later time and I know many of you volunteered and and I think one of the things that made the event feel like a real community event was having all of you and other members of the community welcome um people to the event and that made it feel very homey even though it was a huge event so thank you uh so this is just a chart showing the grand list and as well as the increment that is being received and you can see it's sort of flattening off a little excited to get steep again um but we'll need to keep on the pressuring over to keep to keep that um growing in the right direction growing at the right angle we know it'll grow wanted to be at a nice angle moving forward so um some of our successes in facilities this year is the up we worked and acted as the gc for the dorset park veterans bathrooms um we also took one of our spaces that was vacated over at 19 Gregory and renovated and leased it to solid chitin and solid waste district and then also uh we had an incident with the 375 pump station which a car took it out took out the generator um and uh we acted as the gc there also overseeing uh the implementation of the redesign well not redesigned per se but the rebuild of it and we added a much larger generator um fun fact there 70 percent of the sewage in the city flows through that one pump station wow 70 wow yeah we're very close to that building so it smells really good yeah beautiful design it is i'm glad that we came here uh so just a few highlights in our um variance budget needs you've heard me talk about a lot of these already um investing again continuous modernization trend investing in the finance systems making sure we have a little funding set aside for the city plan implementation gmt is seeing a 10 and a half percent increase in their um allocation or um request to municipalities so that's included we anticipate that that may increase in future years as services increase to south burlington as well um and then funding for city center vibrancies for through the mate vermont stirring a downtown association um and the city center reserve fund and then of course there is the climate action investment so i've included these slides here mostly as a reference to you all and you've heard us talk about these a number of times now um the point we really wanted to make here is with the 600 000 that we're proposing for the climate action budget this year that is a very small percent compared to what we will need in future fiscal years to fully realize the climate action plan um goals so that's separate that's um separated across transportation and government operations um government operations will need that 600 000 annually through that point 30 i'm sure we'll talk more about this and then finally on our emerging issues again you heard me talk about this at the overall um budget presentation we're tracking standing up a parking fund we are actually uh alana and i in the process of bringing on a consultant to help us model that out over time uh stay up a rental registry um finding funding if we as we figure out other staffing for climate action for the building in the thermal section um understanding what the transition of ownership at dorset street will look like and then obviously our collective bargaining uh contracts that was speed virgin questions about general government and if not i would love to have staff great job you all thank you very very much um thank you to the five of you for staying so engaged and asking great questions um it's really our honor to be able to share with you kind of the overall operations of the city and with that i would turn it over to you all for some questions i think we're again happy to answer any operational questions or content questions um but this is really the time for you all to have your conversation about how you would like to move forward to make this budget your own um and to request any additional information scoping scenario building you need from us okay the first one follow-up questions from the presentations probably aren't any when you ask a lot if you want okay suggest i i i know that this year's budget is about 600 000 for climate action items they look to me like i guess um maybe more one-time things like uh charging windows names and said that um that would be recurring i was like because you you you view these items kind of like climate action maintenance like how do you think about the 600 000 requiring the evolution to the items that are on the page so how i think about it back here for a second so how i so i fully um to fully achieve the climate action goals we need much more than just the one time we're going to need one time things for the next seven years right so right now we are just making one time requests to modernize a very sort of either by ev or electric versions of a very small portion of our fleet for example to replace windows in a very small portion of our facilities so to do that to me our climate change goals as a government for example just our organization we're going to have to do that annually for several years to fully electrify our fleet to fully weatherize our buildings or things like that so while there they are one time costs they're one time costs that we need to continue for a significant period of time Erica or Tom or Paul anything else you want to say about that right so if you think about our whole fleet our whole fleet is right 60 vehicles friendly vehicles that's we're not going to electrify those all in one year right we're going every as we come to a replacement schedule electrifying all the period right well that's for you all to decide that whatever you do that just might not be an actual cost right if there's a vehicle has to be replaced with a credits and with the price of EVs we'll be covering the power particularly when you request for maintenance and refueling the treatment there's not true there's cheap that gets it might not be a cost we'll know much more once we start doing it yeah we're going hybrid this is yeah and i replacing those vehicles based on this is an outgoing vehicle so we need to replace it it's not we're not replacing so the way the government operations plan has been built is to try and get as you as you remember from loose presentation we actually with what we know to be possible right now will not meet our 30 goals if fully funded because of the technology coming online for like electric fire trucks for example just doesn't exist yet um what we have tried to do is get very close to that model with replacing in the regular replacement cycle and in a few places speeding that up to try and get closer to our goal but year to year through 20 through fy 30 or whenever we're able to achieve that goal that's a policy budget conversation that you all have to have i mean here you could say you know we're going to spend 20 million dollars one year in electrified full fleet that's a terrible idea because of the kind of radio quick conversation we had earlier they'll all be come up for renewal in the future but right now we're more or less sticking to the replacement cycle we can't fully do that because our replacement cycle is longer than the 2030 goal cycle other questions how can we get biodiesel into a lot i hear that there really isn't any and is that something that the state is going to work on because that gives us a path to reduce greenhouse gases from old diesel trucks and large equipment and you don't have an answer for that so we don't talk about it but just okay other questions all right boys oh go ahead yeah i mean i don't know we're going to be this is the end of our conversation we see no no we're going to talk about what's missing what are emerging issues okay these are just questions from the presentation sorry so we have somebody going along okay so let's go to the second one what are we missing okay i i think that to ask for a double digit increase is going to be really tough without going to the voters and asking about maybe specific pieces just like we have the penny for pass that we had the voters overwhelmingly approved and then we can celebrate that the owners own i mean that the voters own it right and i think that asking for 11 percent increase and a half with 3.2 3.6 for climb up it brings you to 8.2 all right yeah versus 5.1 without 4.8 4.4 okay so 4.58 this chart yeah okay well close yeah all right all right so we're we're really going to be asking them for just over 8 percent is that what's going to be going to happen okay i mean that's your decision right yeah we've tried to be responsive to put together a budget that was could meet operational needs and fund your policy by rocks it's your decision what of that you keep what you that you reallocate somewhere all right and i i still i still come to the you know thinking about it in longer years where you said this is a smaller increase as opposed to next year's increase and i just i want us to be really really mindful about making sure that this is not just our budget but it's actually the voters budget and so that's just something that kind of creeps in my mind i i don't want us to be in for you know unwelcome surprises um and and really making sure that people can come along with us so that's just the one thing that's kind of tugging at me yeah and so really that conversation with the voters which goes through the ballot box quite regularly is something that we might consider going forward you know looking at the fleet for instance getting through the 60s 70 vehicles just as an example can we go to the voters and say you know we're looking at some major expenses going forward to meet our climate action goals and we want to make sure that you're on board with this would you be willing to you know perhaps as a council or something something like that right where we would yes exactly the climate fleet won't actually be a commodity force but there's certain others and i'm just pulling it out of the air yeah yeah i mean i look at the parking lot and some of the other transportation issues are things that probably you know are facing the street and the voters could be asked to you yeah makes sense for the city yeah i really encourage us to think about that yeah does the school board have a preliminary budget yet with their own increased figures they does anybody see the preliminary no we're going to see that in january and our steering it was another paper yesterday it was yesterday there was a good article on the paper about yesterday and a half percent increase that's the that's the december first letter sorry with 14 percent 14 percent okay we're going to be cheap by that's right just 30 40 percent 40 percent of the total yeah 25 25 percent but yeah so that's my fear is that we are unless the state comes up with some magic we're in the first part of a deprived education budget cycle right with the state yeah i think they were spent over there's like ssr or yes yes or yes i think the other part of our discussion is some of the surplus funds and they help them whether any of those can be directed to the by two i don't know how to proceed on that but i think i think i'm getting some thought to that in terms of successfully reducing our total 8.2 i think it's i think it's really is 400 000 is that right i think it's really a great idea to present to the voters uh the list of um climate action items that are in the budget and what they and what they cost i agree that somehow the somehow the message has to get out that it's not this budget or this budget but this budget includes this these i'm going they're not amenities they're requirements to to combat climate change from the cities off from the city side well just to you mean to better inform the public that the operating expenses for the city include some operational costs for climate change and then there's other climate change costs that we potentially use well i haven't i mean or is that does that mean to we probably need a company for the environment or more well i don't i you know i know you don't like it it's just it's like there's a lot of costs up there so how do you i don't know how you need your you want to convey that information to the public so that actually there's two thoughts so the surplus monies we should look at and decide on how much should be used in the next year's budget and then and then the message for supporting the climate action budget it's two there's two different thoughts yeah not not seeing them combined okay so you use all that surplus and our foot you could reduce the total but we need to explain that a certain amount of it you'll see next year it's a free bridge we've been bridging a lot of things with our money yes i mean we're in the third year of the bridge or the second year we have one more to go so this is the year to actually apply that surplus to items in the budget would you unless the next year is when it really you know doubles that increase i mean that's where i mean that's what i was seeing in those numbers isn't it yeah go ahead unless you identify one time sources you're going to put the money too you're just kicking the can down to a large increase next year right double it next year right right so we have to think carefully about how to use those funds yeah yeah you're going to want to show the voters that these are the allocations that are dedicated to climate action you're going to have to prove to them that they're going to have returns on their investment right if you can't show that right if you you know if you're going to get 70 of the cars you know to be electric or high pluggable by 23 by 23 whatever this which is unattainable anyway right you're going to have to explain them why that's a goal that you can't reach but you want this money for it anyway as one of the items so you know i mean so you're going to you've got some lofty goals you're never going to hit get there we have to make progress the question is what's the ROI on the incremental money to be put in each year for that and are they willing to stomach that right they really have to find a way to make sure that they're on board with it so do we have that data i mean can you make the case that um we've done these things so far and this has been the reduction and whatever um and then this new investment will reduce a little bit more so this is what we're both investing in or buying i don't know if we have that that data bluehead sounds yeah i mean is that enough to convince them do you think or can i go this is slightly different way this year um just before i just wanted to thank everyone i thought this was an incredibly comprehensive thoughtful detail i think we're really well served by this group as jessia said um i was going to suggest for this year that these climate action items um other than the staffing which i think should be built into the budget this right these things which are really well suited for the opera dollars and i think we've taken and hopefully some things out of opera already some i think some of the rec and past stuff that we maybe would go in i think is already paid for by the general fund and i thought we also talked about putting a climate action person in opera from opera but i agree general budget is probably the right place for it so i was going to suggest at least this year that um it's about four hundred thousand or so of items other than um the staffing yeah the staffing is one nine geography and that that will take pressure at least off of the having to explain the numbers are not huge i remember to figure out the area after when we really might want to figure out how we fund it with this year having the opera and looking at these items they seem really well positioned to be funded by opera to me and i was going to suggest that can i put my thumb on sure sorry oh so for me just to react to that a little i i kind of like that approach building the staff into the budget and then using opera for other one time because where i get nervous answering some of these questions is right now we have one 20 hour a week person who we've reassigned to work on this i think there is a lot more data we could bring to the community i think they're you know take a first year learn some lessons know better next year what the asks are going to be into those you know six years following so i think talking about it to the public as this is the first implementation year of the climate action plan and to do that we're making small investments and using one time dollars with the attention of bringing back bigger asks in future years might be a really good way to bring i like that idea the other two just geography things um the stream like we need to be like the mark of heim's virtue like we should do it that one strikes me as something that's not really are that appropriate for opera dollars it's kind of like you know b a u the city needs to invest in this transportation infrastructure and as we talked earlier my own perspective she would say you know that it probably should be funded from traffic impact fees or other fees that we collect it's you know it's to facilitate all that development just it just doesn't strike me as something that's appropriate to be funded by opera i'd love to see that back in the regular budget honestly i know that would correct me both both directions would you use um surplus funds well i would for now just say put it in the budget right and then my own perspective on surplus is as follows um i did some analysis and thank you guys for so much for this five year of data that was all more okay mom thank you it was it was awesome and i'm sorry my computer's blank so i may not be doing exactly right but if i if i did this right i think what it showed is that over this five year period arrogant function on a calendar basis was like 18 percent and i think it also showed and again i know it may be a little wrong but true growth in the grant list when you subtract out the revaluation was about 10 percent maybe it's not exactly so if i get that if our budget was flat we would have grown our property tax real-life we would have grown our property tax revenue by about 28 percent and we're a bit above that actually we're about 750 thousand dollars above that and the way i calculated that could be wrong i would love to use the surplus to fill that hole so we can say the voters at least in municipal side over the last five years in real dollars take account inflation and take account growth in grant lists we were flat we've we've you know we've been very conservative as possible that's that's that's what i'm sorry so I think some of the figure out the difference is between what our property tax revenue would have been had we increased at inflation over five years and we you know taking account growth in grant lists what would have been used and with these adjustments we just talked about the sort of geography used the surplus to kind of fill that gap I think it would be about five hundred thousand dollars a gap to be able to state of voters over five years in real terms your municipal tax dollars have been flat but this one that negates the the huge increase in health care cost I mean it means that we're running a really tight good government right okay I mean do we'll help here I mean you see because healthcare went up faster than pleasure not well sure you have so so then in fiscal year 26 you're going to start with a deficit of 750,000 is that is that what you mean use the surplus to so are you saying basically use $750,000 to buy down the tax rate yeah yeah so the next so just for your awareness that means that that that that buy down exists into FY26 tax rate you know you're you're at some point you'd have to build out of that or cut services to build out of that it's a question of what you do with the surplus though right I mean you know what's I mean this is an exceptional question that we all should have why it leads me to say we should buy down this year's tax rate because the existence of the surplus in my mind means that in the past we collected more tax revenue than we total voters would expect and so what should we do in that excess revenue at least a piece that I think should go back to voters and just keep in mind that most of that surplus came from God property I understand but it just means that the it just means the other one I mean but in total right we collected more than we thought we needed what I was saying Larry is most of that surplus is accounted for through revenues surpluses and local options tax impermanence right not property and sales Andrew how does that your analysis what does that have to do with the plainsburg road the service so just to summarize my thoughts I'd like to move some of the climate action stuff to offer I'd like to move the street like it's just geography back to the general fund it just strikes me that's the right geography for those items and then redetermine the budget right based upon those movements and then independently I would like to use some of the surplus to buy down the tax rate because I think we owe that to the voters because we've collected too much of it as and I just think that would be a good message never say I would counter that we have collected more external taxes I mean we never sort of separate and say oh we're using rooms and meals to pay for this but that's where the excess receipts came in and to then say we'll make people whole by reducing their property taxes because more people bought meals and drinks in South Burlington and you know bought goods um let me have pandemic you know I I the two are different to me now the reason we have a surplus was not necessarily because we overestimated what we needed in property tax we underestimated the growth in those two tax areas which who would have thought that more people would be going out to dinner I mean I certainly didn't think that sales and stuff was going to go up I mean the way I'm thinking about that I hear you saying to account for it is that if and I'm saying that we did anything wrong but in perfect hindsight if we had known what the actual revenue would have been provided we would have set the tax rate low well but then there are the years where we overestimate rooms and meals like during COVID it was like now we've got to rely more on the property tax I I go along with the reoccur sort of the reoccurring costs to government for the climate action both in operations and transportation it can be paid for by ARPA because they are one time and they're going to be reoccurring but we don't know what those numbers are going to be exactly if they're pieces of things but and I agree that the staffing absolutely need to put that in the general fund ongoing operation budgets because that is people to do the work we want to get done and to come be able to come back and say you know this is what I recommend for I don't know the Wheeler house to make it more energy efficient or whatever the issue is another truck or cars but I don't agree with using the operating funds to try to figure out how to return that to the public I mean I certainly support us using some of that to make sure we have a big enough reserve I don't think we should get the reserve necessarily of 16 percent but there may be some other things that are one time expenditures that are not climate action or services and and you know I think you can differentiate in with the public so they kind of understand okay these are climate action things and then these are whatever it is the bus for the library so I mean I just I'm not you know we have a little post of other things that people have identified as needs so I guess I would go along with part of your recommendations but I using it to replace general funds or that's my view can I also have that have the firm policy so the surplus goes into the we are now below the 16 percent 16 percent is recommended eight percent is very quiet but I would also say that it was not recommend using firm balance to subsidize the budget or the or the tax haven't before we actually reached the recommended to set the recommended we are currently right now at 13 percent but the recommended is 16 percent I thought we thought 16 percent was too much not 25 percent is too much 25 percent is what we could go to oh yeah I guess I meant on your I thought and not 16 was like whoa that's you don't need to go that I'd be great but you don't need to oh well then if that's that that changes I didn't realize 25 was okay well what are what are other people thinking it's too high what's too high well it's lower than 11 I came here thinking off the average voter I think from the visible side wants government to be right-sized to not be overfunded to provide relevant services to make sure the streets are drivable right right wants responsiveness to questions to the government right so people have to answer the phones answer the questions people want to feel like they're heard and and that you know that their presence in the city is honored in some way and you know in general I think we fulfill all that and just by virtue of everybody that's here right and that's a good thing and so it's great when we have a right-sized budget so that we don't have these like you know pot holes of deficits and then mountains of surpluses right you want to be right in between that and so we want to have that available and we've gone through some bad times right we've gone through 2008 9 10 11 right we bought the eight million dollar bond for the pension fund right we didn't have any revenue from from the LSOP for a couple years right you know when the pandemic happened and now it's been spounced back so my point is is that what you don't have what you want to have to sell to the voters right you just want to present it that we come up with what we think is a really manageable property tax bill so 8.2 is unmanageable 14 plus because we haven't seen the final budget from the schools that I'm just not feel good about the so tell me where you want to cut them or tell them so what what is it we don't want to do well yeah we got to look at a spreadsheet and say which ones which ones would would be able to to get us back down to the sixth range now so we're deferred till another year so if you look at the ARPA money which is 485 plus the transportation that reduces I mean if there's it's $400 a thousand dollars per penny there's a penny right there that we're looking at or maybe even a penny and a half is that wherever I mean you know there's lots of suggestions so when I recall from the presentation it's one of the largest dollar increases in terms of dollars with the the ccta request the amount of transport right yeah maybe we could take a few of those big items that could be used for surplus say the surplus dollars to be absolutely certain amounts of the values for certain specific items I think and that seems to be that seems to be different than just using no well it is it would be it would be it would be you know it would be a specific kind of analysis of I mean if you're looking for another penny yeah it would be $400 to my mind that's going to be an annual cost so I would be very wary using our surplus on ongoing costs I mean just thinking about my own personal budget and my household we are doing improvements based on savings not based on you know I'm not moving money around it's I have you know we have savings and we've been looking to electrify so we're going to use those savings to electrify and I think that's how I envision our climate action plan that we have to look we have surplus and this is something that we've identified as a council as as a goal and so that would be a use for those you know not savings but our our additional revenues that we have not we're seeing that that seems to me to be an argument with the voters but if we're looking out in the years where it's really going to be going up more and more I think we have to have the voters chime in and say we're on board with this somehow and you know it goes through the ballot box that's that's kind of the thinking jessie did you have a little response or oh rather sorry before not related to your comment just as a reminder the poll that's the operations budget and the policy budget the policy budget in terms of one of ads the policy budget includes the 600,000 for climate includes 100,000 addition for housing trust fund includes the 13th island for trinity and it includes the 30,000 for the crossing guards so those are the kind of big new things what's trinity again that's absolutely the center thing oh so the so going back to larry's infant okay into this yeah trinity well she calls it trinity but oh it's her right it's her yeah so just going back to larry's questions about those addition can we um fund the housing trust fund from the surplus with the message back to the foreign housing can be that we can fund it in this year that we request we are guaranteed that we're going to continue funding that we're going to hope to but we're going to evaluate future budgets it's possible to get in the surplus next to uh well i i mean you could do that the original conversation around the housing trust fund was 100,000 dollars right and we cut it back to 50 because we had a tight budget 2016 like we do this year and then even through covid we said well we can't make it less we'll just i mean not only have they asked for an additional 100 they want 500,000 dollars for their revolving fund um you know on top of the million that we've already dedicated to um for it's being built that was our that was all ours yeah yeah um i mean i if we are looking for money to reduce that rate then i would not increase the affordable housing much as i am don't like to do that that's um um i mean we did respond in a big way and i and i don't think this community can continue to spend you know two thousand twice pardon me did we get twice like the million plus it was another what was it a 600,000 plus 400,000 is that what right right it was two but you might it was three projects funded with the million dollars and it's the balance of the housing trust fund that existed yeah the ARPA and the ARPA yeah yeah yeah it was 150,000 i would think of the housing trust fund and the million of ARPA right because we hadn't done anything it's a lot yeah that is another way by just giving saying it's not not going to build it into the budget i i i agree with if we're going to build that route i i want to increase the base amount because that was in 2016 which was a compromise already it was a long time the base amount makes much makes much more sense from the city projects because because whether it's 50 or 100 you know these projects are 20 million dollar projects so 75,000 a year is a much better for the city's point of view because it leverages so much more um in there in that financing of a non-profit housing so i i'd agree with that reduction to 75 but i'd like it to be a budget a budget item at 75 right and it's a budget item that you always can come back to because we won't have the budget anytime with you know as we go through this process because we did several years ago i would just give a little um perspective and one of my first or second years on the council um that the council said one percent increase it's a bad year one percent increase so everyone cut their budgets and the next year because of the demands and what we underfunded we had to go up to eight percent i mean they were ragging about four percent i think or four point five we went up to eight to make up the difference so i think you have to be careful with um wanting to appear good stewards of tax dollars and not have this boy babe do we make a mistake on cutting and you're not suggesting that we cut that much but that's what happens but that's why i went into the five year i just tried to level it out and see where we would be had we just increased that inflation to to to make sure we're not you know we're selecting a year i mean if you want to get careful i just my experience so i didn't want to go down that road again as much as you know two percent sounds really sexy and attractive and like you're really good on that unrealistic it's just kind of unrealistic yeah but you know maybe 8.2 is unrealistic so number six and my number are pretty similar my my number would have us down about three quarters of a million which i think roughly would actually get us to six so your number was the six what i computed was that to to be able to say you've accomplished a lot of that by moving some of the talk already so you want to move another 400 is that right but here you're suggesting the climate policy budget get reduced not reduced taken out of general fund and paid for by ARPA or whatever it is um surplus and that saves um $400,000 approximately of generally and then in my numbers i want to do another 350 i so the total climate policy budget is $850,000 that includes the housing trust fund as housing guards that's what that's the number she's quoting no she's quoting i don't see it i see the dpw fleet dpw facility and fire ambulance yeah this is staffing is 190 so take out the staffing right so in the consulting so take out right the 190 yeah from 607 what are you saying put the 243 into ARPA 2 i didn't know what that was 243 you guys have a little bit of a misunderstanding with us okay okay so this is the slide you're looking at yeah you're right doing two notes so Martha can you explain the three homes yes so the first column with the 200 and 4500 dollars at the bottom that's the amount that's already embedded into the operating budget with the 4.85 percent increase the middle column with 605 is the additional money that is included in the 8.2 percent increase yes the 200.3 does that relate to climate or that's just so it's part of the climate that the city has already considered even without an overall 600 or 800 number so this was our attempt to capture that difference so for example when the when Corbin mentioned the buying the so i'm just using this one example Corbin mentioned buying the administrative vehicle we have 30 000 dollars in the in the general fund cip that we've been carrying for years to replace that vehicle you get a hybrid one we need it costs 45 000 so 15 000 is in the climate budget and 30 000 is in the regular operations so the 243 is not really climate no it's it's what we buy an ICU and the climate piece is just the hundred or so in the middle column yeah it was our attempt not to inflate the climate number yeah because we already had some of those and that's in the current budget that's in the operations budget the left column yeah so there's the 242 000 plus the 175 it's about 400 well public transit is that GMT that's a different that's a different that's different that's one of the above and beyond not what GMT is asking for their rate increase that would be for us to make further investments to increase transit as called by the climate action plan like what so that would be going through more studies with GMT to start looking at different options for expansion of routes or increased services that's on that active one the other day no that's the public transit line underneath it okay so that's an FTE or a close one FTE that would be to go towards an expansion study that was the first item in the implementation plan for this action and that would lead into I can probably recommendations cut that what GMT do that's their job if they will do that yeah well I mean we're given the most $3,000 for the year I know but you know some of that is static I mean like I don't know if it's embedded in it or GMT this needs percentages to the community transportation authority is supposed to be the authority you know it's like so what works so we have significantly stepped up our work with GMT Michael Scanlon it's doing an amazing job as our rep so we know how quarterly meetings with staff and the GMT staff I think the reality what I've heard is the reality from them and I know Clayton there GM wants to come in and talk to you is that one they're going they're eliminating fair free this spring so it's going to have this could have a significant something to their budget to as they eliminate as they step down from their ARPA funding they have a $3.3 million budget gap in their operating budget so I think out of I think baseline they're just trying to make maintain current level of service and pass that $3.3 million on to the municipalities in the assessments I think if we want to achieve our climate action goals and increase service from GMT we're going to have to put some dollars to do it I think that's yeah and GMT is going to be doing the more like the regional things to make sure like that the one and the 11 are stopping in the correct places but if we wanted to do some sort of neighborhood loops it would be a combined effort and we wouldn't bear the full cost of the study likely it would be a joint venture for that after we heard that the molecular experiment didn't go well it didn't go well I thought it was supposed to have gone really well no oh it did not go well so that's not necessarily what we are talking about we removed the micro transit from FY 25 actually because GMT is doing their shit in county micro transit study right now and so instead of being an FY 25 which is the initial implementation plan that is not presented in this budget for right now because there's far more to work out before it's viable so that could be a valid item we want to expand public transit in our neighborhoods and let the people speak that could be not this year though we're not we're not ready for that well it's in it's in the climate policy budget well this is just yeah but this is but we wouldn't necessarily put the funding in there now but it'd be something that we could do next year but I think we're still studying right yeah we wouldn't this is what would build the recommendations of where the service gaps are based on public outreach and different data I think you've had some data he said to the public this is what we proposed for you know enhance bus service so we have to spend $75,000 first well possibly I mean I don't know yeah just don't have a good feeling that it's kind of having a return on the best one at all I mean look at the buses happen just right that's true with free payers I mean with free payers so whether you implement the payers I don't know what's been happening after that a lot of public public transit I just don't want to throw more dollars out of bad dollars and not get any right or should work you know end up spending a million dollars and get nothing can I ask a question about the climate plan is it for sort of we're reducing emissions in the city is that from city owned assets or is it city in general it's the city in general so for this piece right it's the goal is to reduce vehicle miles travel two and a half percent a year citywide yeah so there's the transportation sector which is what we're talking about right now there's the government office sector which is us and then there's building a thermal center so coming from the public I'm he's a resident as the Burlington South Burlington resident so like we have the potential to electrify 70 city vehicles and some percentage of those like fire trucks and plows maybe never I live on Dorset street and there are at least 80 cars in my neighborhood town square none of them are electric and it's not viable for any of us to even own an electric car because there's no way to charge there yeah and there's another neighborhood next door and all the Kennedy Drive neighborhoods that don't have a way to to charge an electric car so I bought a brand new car just a couple years ago and I didn't buy an electric car you know I wanted to because it's not viable if we need some sort of effort to make neighborhoods like that able to charge their cars like everyone in my neighborhood had an electric car that would make a bigger impact than all the city vehicles I don't know what the cost or you know I don't know what we can do as a city to push that but something think about yeah it's not it's not in the operating budget yet but it's part of our CCRPC application to figure out where they need to be but that is the question of broadly speaking funding resourcing that subject area or not I think FTE would go towards finding funding to support that can I go back to this point because I mean I think part of the study should be not just where might we increase bus service but if we did that what would the impact be on our greenhouse gas emissions right so we actually know like estimate how many vehicle trips we think that would reduce and what would be the impact I kind of said this when the plan was introduced to kind of have a metric of you know see you see a dollar spent per seo to reduce and we kind of have like a effective an effectivity metric right and we can like know how effective are public transit dollars and reduce CO2 to me that's gotta be part of the study a question I have though and I'm assuming that you live with a housing a homeowners association right how come homeowners associations do not invest in those charging stations yeah so um I was on my HOA board and sidebar just to talk about taxes and stuff are going up I live there for five years and the HOA fees have increased by 100 percent so in addition to taxes going up and other things that is going up a lot and our services haven't really changed I looked into that and I talked to Green Mountain Power and they basically said so we have carports and there isn't power there's power in there for lighting but there isn't like associated power with each thing so you can't even do like a 110 slow charge and Green Mountain Power and this was in 2019 said we don't have a way to connect that carport outlet with your house which to me as an IT person seems absurd that seems really basic to connect two circuits to the same bill but they said they didn't have that ability so we kind of were like what can we do and that's where we're petered out new construction yeah well yes new construction is really important unfortunately so how can the city fix that so martha's done there's a lot of federal dollars so I think martha may have some numbers that will help us yeah potentially so I took Andrew's recommendation of taking that 607 number minus these tapping that you recommend be general fund leave 417 and say that 417 which fund you are for so I put that in as new revenues to the budget and I also reduce the house into 75 which is 150 and that brings the percent increase down to 5.8 2 well this was just to say let us do I mean I think we have a path forward let us do some scenarios for you for Monday night good when we'll bring you some scenarios about the other things are there any other thoughts we just go back to the bike pet thing sense we're bringing to the request you're not yet that's nice to I think we've been pretty generous to them I know there's always more that they want in these well we have a list of dollars for repaving that is that what you were thinking giving you more dollars for paving repay for me it's yeah they asked for 10 for maintenance time they said to hard to take it from the paving budget or it's an or okay but you can't have tax dollars that's a suggestion we're stuck with the increases for the paving this year to paper doors of spring yeah you'd have every business on that is there anything else okay so in terms of response from the public we have so this is all been posted our meeting's been public and we should be hearing I assume from the public at some point some of these ideas well maybe Monday when we see what the result is so we um I also wrote an article in this week's city news about the budget and I said they can reach out to me or directly to you all okay so hopefully that will burn her a little more interest and then you'll have your official public hearing on the 16th as well okay great all right well can I wrap up yes you may um yeah so again it's a team excellent job putting together information I think that councilor summary useful council thank you for being so engaged I think we got to a really great place lunch is ready in the kitchen if folks would like to hang out and have lunch or grab something at go feel free to help yourself just a reminder 430 at barnyard if you want to stop by and visit some more this evening that is so far it is barnyard because it says location awaiting confirmation on wilson road and andy what do you have for us I have some gifts you can show yourself brawlington colors which are blue the little euro stickers um and a couple different sizes for your car your water bottle or your uh laptop of course or sticker they are vinyl stickers what uh what if for vinyl stickers so feel free to thank you thank you all very much okay so I would entertain a motion to adjourn all in favor