 Chris Trombly, Ward 7. Jeff Comstock, Ward 7's steering committee member. Jeff Clark, Ward 7's steering committee. James Fitzgerald, Ward 7. Matt Croft, Ward 4. Frannie Stegwin, Ward 4. Sylvia Knight, Ward 7. Eric Corbman, Ward 4. Eric Corbman, Ward 4. Bob Hoover, Ward 4. Steve VanLen, Ward 7. Cameron Siegel, Ward 7. Kena Christensen, Ward 7. Martha Malpas, Ward 7. Amy Lenickson, Ward 4. Beth Diocco-Casey, Ward 7. Travis Bragg, Ward 7. Phyllis Bristow-Johnson, Ward 4. Jeff O'Donnell, Ward 4. Hi, Jenna O'Donnell, Ward 4. New steering committee member. Gerald Hinson, Ward 4. We're now, Ward 4. Martha Friedman, Ward 4. Eric Heretic, Ward 4. And New steering committee member. Anna Carpino, Sita. Oh, all Sita's involved. All right. Devin Bates, Ward 2, local 22, local 44. Sydney, I don't know what ward I'm in. Well, well. And I'm Ryan Prink from Ward 7. First off, because it's a public meeting, someone left their keys in the bathroom. If you're missing a pair of keys, you might not be able to get home. All right. So, next up, we have a few minutes for brief announcements. Try to keep your announcements to under 30 seconds. You may be up to a minute if it's really good. Now is not the time for conversations and debates. Just if you have an announcement. Let your free library summer paperback book sale is coming up on June 7th and 9th. I think that's a Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of great summer reading books. I think most of them are just a dollar. So that's June 7th, 8th, and 9th at the library. But I just wanted to, on behalf of the group that coordinated the New North End community dinner, I just wanted to report that we had about 55 people show up. And I think that this was the first NPA, New North End NPA meeting I went where there was a lot of talking happening right at the beginning of the meeting. And I think that has to do with people coming together for dinner. And there are a lot of people in this room who help coordinate that dinner and we're hoping that lots of people will also jump on board. So if you want to get engaged in planning the community dinner, it's going to be starting up in earnest in September, once a month prior to the NPA meeting. And if you want to get involved, the best place to go is So we have a Facebook page. It's a New North End community dinner. And then we also have a couple of other online forums. You'd like to get in contact. You can contact the three of us, Karina, Amy, or myself. We will get you connected or any one of the other volunteers that are here. Thanks to the NPA for hosting us in the space and being part of making sure this happens. And Nancy Ellis donated flowers this evening. If you would like to take them home, just please leave the jars, but feel free to pull those flowers out and bring them home for a bouquet on your own table. Erica, Redick, I am the new legislative liaison for Vermont for the Convention of States. If you haven't heard about it, I would love to talk to you after, but it's basically a move. It's a convention, a constitutional convention. Actually that's technically something different. But it's basically a convention of states where the states will be calling on the United States government to balance its budget and impose term limits on legislators. So some really interesting potential constitutional amendments if you want to learn more, talk to me after. At the end of July, the ramble is happening in the Old North End. I'm part of a group that's potentially trying to organize a basically homebrew potluck. So if any of you homebrew and would like to contribute homebrewed booze to the party, find me afterwards and I'd love to talk. In the room, anyone else? Alright. We're going to move into presentations. So tonight we are starting off with CCRPC. That's the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission. Alright, I didn't think I was going to get that one. And our second speaker was not able to make it tonight, so CCRPC is going to get a little bit of extra time if they want it. That can be used for discussion and conversation if the presentation wraps up a little early. So I think you have it until about 8 o'clock. And that's kids bedtime. Hi everyone, my name is Brian Davis. I'm a transportation planner at the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission. I was here last month, but the city, as they should, talked about their upcoming work projects for North Avenue of the New North End. So I wanted to come back. Thank you for the invitation to come back. And spend a little bit more time on the transportation study that we're doing right now at Wynuski Avenue. And when I say Wynuski Avenue, I mean the whole thing. North Wynuski Avenue and South Wynuski Avenue. So from the health center in the north all the way down to Shy Guy Gelato, not five corner intersection down there. Alright, let's dive right in. So the city reached out and asked the RPC to help with the study. They wanted to look at how they could make this a more connected corridor, a more safe corridor. And at the end of this they wanted to plan with some recommendations that council could adopt and then find funding for. So let me emphasize that this is still just a planning study. There's no dollars attached to this. There's no construction projects happening right now as part of this. So we're trying to figure out what the city wants and what the people want. That's why I'm up here. The vision for the corridor is that it's safe, it's inviting, it's comfortable, it's convenient, it's accessible for no matter how old you are, what abilities you have, what mode of travel you choose it should suit that purpose for you. That's the ultimate goal along that. There are lots of businesses north and south along the corridor that want those businesses to flourish. We want to find ways to improve mobility for people getting north and south throughout the corridor. So those are the things we're looking at. There are a number of high crash locations along the corridor. So safety is a very key issue that we're looking at along this. So ways to make that safer for everyone no matter how they choose to travel. We are sort of in the middle of the project right now. We did some outreach in the fall as a part of the existing conditions analysis. We can do our desktop surveys, we can do traffic counts, we can do things on the planning and engineering side and also as residents. We kind of have a feel of what's happening along the corridor, but we also went out and asked the public, what are we missing? What don't we know? What can you share on your daily experiences about that? So based on that outreach in the fall, we came up with the draft alternative concepts. I did hand some out. There are more on the back table if you weren't able to grab some. And so currently this is the first draft of the concepts. So this is a wide range. This is A to Z of some different alternatives that could happen. So we're coming back out to the public. I've been going to the NPAs, all the NPAs in April and May. Public announcements when I can. A presentation when possible. So I appreciate this. We do have a public open house scheduled for June 4th. That's now confirmed and that's at the old North End event hall. St. Joseph's center right there at the core of Erlington's core. Which is a great facility. We're also doing some specific outreach to the old North End businesses. Which is great to have their input. We met with the downtown businesses and their representatives recently. Again, appreciate that input and their critical eye on these things. We're going to have some materials available at the Dewey's, Dewey Park farmers market that's in the old North End by IAE. We're going to put up a display at Fletcher Free Library and leave that up for a whole week. We know that not everyone can come to meetings on Tuesdays or Wednesdays or Thursdays at X time. So we want to make those materials available for an entire week. Myself or public work staff will make ourselves available for a block of time during that week for people who come in. Worth it if it's their schedule. I'm trying to make myself available at some of the other businesses and just chat over coffee or over cocktails or whatever it is. You can drop in before work or after work and just have a casual conversation with me about these concepts and concerns or feedback of what they'd like to see. And then we're developing an online survey which may be live as of tomorrow but I don't have the link for that yet. I'm just providing comments tonight. So stay tuned. We do have a constant contact email list. If you're on it, great. If you're not sure, let me know. My contact information is on the bottom of the material. I'm one of the project managers as well as Nicole Loesch from Public Works. So if you reach out to me, I do want y'all to be involved in this project. Some of the feedback we've heard today. Safety is an issue. The downtown section, the four lanes section between Main Street and Pearl Street. People feel like that's aggressive. There's a lot of traffic. People are traveling fast. It's hard to get across to the businesses that we want to visit. So we knew that that was a key area that we wanted to spend some time looking at. We also heard that the street trees and the green belts serve an important purpose. We want to not touch those as much as possible if we can. There's a lot of parking concerns. We did parking studies on multiple days of the week, weekdays, weekends, early morning, midday, late afternoon, nighttime. We wanted to understand how parking is being utilized and what that demand is. It turns out in the old end, there's a lot of demand. If you're a local business owner, you could probably tell me that. But we need to know what the balance is between people who are coming in and parking during the day and people who live there and are parking there at night. We wanted to understand what that balance was. And if possible, start to identify some other parking opportunities that may be off the corridor. Are there any side streets that might be available? Are there any surface parking lots that are off the corridor that might be opportunities for shared parking there? So we're including that as part of the next phase of the outreach. And finally, we did hear that continuous dedicated bike lanes are some sort of bike facility. To get all the way from the north to south is critical. If you traveled it by bike, you know that there's sharrows on part of it. There's a giant bike lane on part of it in one direction. And it goes away. And there's another bike lane and a controversial lane. So there's a lot of stuff happening, but it's not continuous. This is what the corridor looks like today. I'll briefly go over the color scheme. There are sidewalks on both sides, the entire corridor, which is great. I just talked about the bike facilities. They vary. They're inconsistent for different types. Those are noted in green. The sharrows are noted up on the top there. Sharrows for those of you who don't know are shared lane markings. So if you're a cyclist, they sort of tell you where you need to ride. It's out of the parked car door zone. The vehicle lets you know to expect people biking on the road right there. The travel lanes are noted in red. It's one lane for part. One-way traffic in the Old North Inn for a couple blocks. It's two-way. The other blocks downtown. There's four lanes of traffic. It goes back to one way down in the southern end. So again, there's a lack of continuity and consistency from a traveler's point of view. So this is our starting point. And the blue represents on-street parking. At Old North Inn, there's parking on both sides for most of it. None downtown. A little bit between Maine, King and Maple. And then one side from Maple down to Howard Street. Some of the key considerations that the city wanted the consultant team to look at, they don't want to acquire any more right-of-way. They're not interested in buying land outside of what they currently own. They're also interested in minimizing moving any curbs. Very expensive once you start to dig up curbs and add that extra roadway width. So first step is what can we do with what we have next step? Okay, if we need to, what does that look like as well? And again, that continuous north-south bike facility of some sort. I mentioned these key areas of focus that we talked about. We heard that from the public, the downtown section, the Old North Inn section. And that section just south of Main Street where two-way traffic, one-way traffic, a little bit of parking, not a whole lot. And that will jump into the corridor schematics. And I assume this is where most of the questions may come from. When we do our public opening at the library, I'll say. These will be board sites. These will be big. Test, test. Alright, that might last 10 minutes. You guys want to hear me for 45 more minutes? Alright, so I'll quickly go over what these represent, what's on here. There's three main alternatives, and those are represented, actually. There's four main alternatives. The one that's not on the sheet is the do-nothing alternative. It can just stay exactly as it is. That's an option. It doesn't necessarily mean the purpose and need of the project, but it is an option. Alternatives one, two, and three have some key points along there, and then there are different options with each of those alternatives. I won't dive specifically into those, but I'll sort of give you the higher level picture of what these means. Alternative one creates conventional bike lanes, just a stripe on the road for bikers traveling northbound and southbound. It removes some parking to make that happen without moving any curves. If you start moving curves around, and you can start keeping some of that additional parking in the north end. That's on the option 1A on the top left there. Option B down on the bottom. That's also keeping the parking south of Maine on the westbound side. There's a block of east side parking, and that removes that to get that continuous facility. In the middle section, and this is the same for all three alternatives, the four lane section in front of City Market, all three alternatives are reducing that down to one lane traffic in both directions with the center turn lane, and bike lanes on both sides. Option 1D on the top there. That is a share-o situation, so it just continues to share-os all the way down so people riding bikes would share the lanes with people driving cars. They would keep all that parking up there without having to touch the curves. And then 1E was something that was added about a month ago. That creates a separated shared path using part of the green belt and the existing sidewalk on the eastbound side of the corridor. Again, it keeps those share-os there, it keeps that parking up there as another option. And then 1C looks at two-way traffic north of Pearl, so opening that up instead of just one-way southbound, it would make that north and southbound for cars, people driving cars. It still retains a bike lane, but that would require some curb widening. Alright, that's a quick highlight of alternative 1. Did we ask questions now or after? I think if there's a comment that's specific to the alternative here, happy to answer it. There's two more alternatives after this, and we'll dive right in. I don't want to just stand here and give you a presentation on that. I do want to hear feedback. I'm curious, my first thought when you said the center turn lane was accidents waiting to happen. When the cities are that close together and people are trying to buy for the turn like the first thing I thought was city market. Somebody wants to turn left into city market and somebody wants to turn right onto, what was that? Big Street, right? Whatever. I guess that's it. That just sounds like a terrible idea. So I'm trying to figure out, I'm assuming you guys thought about that? Yep, and we were hearing from the downtown businesses that the access to the garage off of Bank Street is very challenging and that will back up onto Winooski Avenue. So we'll work with the city and downtown to figure out is that the best access point for the garage where can they go on a different street? That is something we're considering. We do want to think about that. We know that there's a lot of people doing a lot of stuff in front of the city market and that entrance is so close to Bank Street. They are doing their own study of their parking lot because the demand on their parking is so full that we're coordinating this project with them too. So if there's another way we can help people access city market, that would benefit everyone. I mean the parking garage, there's a few sides that are accessible from the street. So it doesn't sound like there's another entrance on another street. Well we haven't solved it yet. Is Cherry Street a better access point? I don't have an answer, but we are looking at what that could look like. There is an access point. Right, but if we can get instead of people who are coming into downtown using the Bank Street entrance, if we can use way finding to get them to use the Cherry Street entrance, it may alleviate some of that pressure on that Bank Street intersection. I'm downtown a lot and I volunteer at the Ronald McDonald House all the time and of course we'll rank in the middle of all this. And I completely agree with her that the whole thing around city market is just, I mean it's ridiculous now. There is a SSTA van that parks in front of Howard there for hours. So you'd have one lane completely taken up all the time. And I am very upset with all the parking we've lost downtown. I love downtown. Don't go there much anymore unless I have to. I did go up and down the street and ask the people that own the stores how things are. And everybody will tell you the biggest complaint is there's no parks. Okay, moving on to alternative two. Again this retains that same downtown configuration. This is looking to create a buffered or in some cases protected bike lane along the corridor. Enough familiar with that means it adds a little bit extra separation between people riding bikes and people driving cars. In order to keep the parking it would require widening the curves. And that's noted in some of the extra options 2A and 2B the red line on the outside that indicates widening of the curves. And again that's possible to, if we ride the curves we can add a continuous bike facility and retain more of the parking. And that's the difference with alternative two. It's a different type of bike facility. The buffer varies between 2 feet and 3 feet depending on the section. Yes. Yes, several of your schematics have those white blank spaces on there. Could you describe a little better what that what purpose those serve and what those blank spaces would actually look like on the ground please? Yep, those actually wouldn't look like anything. So if you saw the older version of these schematics there was a lot of white space and it actually looked like white lanes. And so the consultant team this is their refined version which helps a lot. So the white spaces I'm not going to say that it's pavement or asphalt but this is the best we could do with a two dimensional thing. The consultant team is working on a 3D model which will be part of the forum and it will send out a link to that. So you can use your own browser and look it up and you'll be able to see sort of what the buildings look like what the bike facility looks like what cars park looks like. So it won't just be like white space on the ground or anything like that. It's been a challenging that's been a key part for me to try to describe what that is but again the it's not a median it's not a barrier it's not stripes it's the best we could do with this type of a diagram. So we're working on other ways to present FOV as well. The three looks to create a two way protected bike lane on the eastbound side. So that is where bicyclists traveling northbound and southbound would share a 10 to 12 foot lane on one side of the street. The parking on street parking would be retained on the west side again that downtown section has reduced travel lanes for safety improvements. One of the options 3B again has that separated shared use path that uses some of the sidewalk and some of the green belt as a different alternative to using the shadows that are on the ground and option 3A with the curbs are widened again more of that old north end parking on street can be retained with that two way bike facility on the east side. These include a center turn lane. Correct. Except for the do nothing alternative. But again we're here for feedback. None of this is happening. All this is on paper. And I'll take a few questions I think I only have a handful of slides on where we are in the process and then we can flip the lights back on and really dig in. So I see alternative 3 and I think alternative 2 also have people trying to enter city market by crossing bike lanes. In fact an alternative 3 by crossing two bike lanes. Correct. So again just a planning document. We understand the same concerns it's helpful for us to hear that you're seeing what we're seeing. So we haven't solved it but there are ways out there other cities have done similar things and we're looking to them as examples of what we could do. So we don't have specific treatments identified as part of these plans. It's really just looking at what might be possible rather than what's the specific design element for it to be safe for people on bikes and for people turning into the businesses. So related to the turn lane and the city market thing I think from my perspective I like the idea of having kind of something predictable versus like trying to second guess whether the person in front of me is going to take a left or not on a four lane. But is there anything about usually those or like you could go either direction but having possibly because that's such a busy intersection or busy turn area having it be designated just one way rather than having or is there not enough space to do something. For people driving cars? Yeah for people driving cars. Sort of turn left into the city market parking lot. Right. So I want to make sure I'm hearing the question correctly is it did we look at Wendewski Avenue just being one direction or did city market interest being one way in one way out? Well more my question was for the turn lane itself kind of in that place rather than having the possibility of what she was describing of people wanting to turn coming from both directions having it just so it could only be used to turn that way. Right. So one of the alternatives and I don't think it's reflected here but one of the options it might be 3C is to have some sort of low medium that would sort of create those turning pockets both for bank street or city market or not allow those turns it would be right at the city market right out or you could go Union and go left in the back but yes that's helpful to hear sort of how we can tweak these and make them better. I have another thought on that same topic which is that instead of it being a center turn lane where sort of anything goes you have one lane go off or bank street and then that begins the other lane to turn into city market. There's not really enough room for that but if something has worked out with Howard Center with their parking potentially being the entrance and I know that's expensive but if city market's pulling in 30 million a year it seems like it might be feasible to have that conversation with Howard not to put Howard on the spot when you're not on the road. Right. And we met with Howard Center in the fall because we do recognize that city needs for some clients needs to be as close to the front door as possible so we know that's a challenge not only with the current configuration but with any of these alternatives they're either going to block a travel lane or a bike lane so you know we're also looking at especially with the city market parking lot study you know what else can be done with the Howard Center parking and city market parking and potentially changes with the new ski app. Right so potentially having Howard Center be the entrance and city market's current entrance but just the exit only that would allow you to split up that turn lane so that one end of it is to turn on bank and the other is to turn into the parking lot. And then I also just wanted to weigh in that I'm very uncomfortable with bike lanes that go two ways adjacent to a road with roads cars coming in and out because as drivers are trained to look left before they go and if they don't look right they're crossing bike lane traffic and I would be worried as a biker doing that but I do appreciate the intent of trying to add as much bike lane as possible that's continuous and safe. I just don't think alternative three achieves that. Thank you. I personally am I don't think any of these alternatives are good at least for the section of town around city market. It is a main corridor and a main thoroughfare for vehicles to get around downtown Burlington and if you make it less accessible they're going to people are going to start driving through the neighborhoods. You already if you go up college or any of the other streets you have to deal with crossing church street and all of the you know whatever so it's basically you have battery street and then not until you get to the top of the hill where you can really get through town and this is going to make it even more of a headache and I can't tell you how many friends that I have that won't come visit me because I live in Burlington. I mean seriously and so I understand and appreciate like the mayor's desire to add more bike lanes and things like that but if it makes Burlington even less desirable to visit then I'm not sure that the goal has been achieved. Thank you. And then we have one right here up in the front. Do any of these bike access lanes anywhere along this the road include those I'm sorry I can't remember what they're called those white posts yeah and is there any traffic calming either speed humps or those things that you have to go around anywhere up and down the road and is the city starting with a budget like we can spend up to 10 bucks or is the budget to be determined by what the plan ends up being. Right so there's no budget yet for any of the construction projects because we don't have an alternative to put a number to that's something that will come later in the process you know we've got 13 or 18 different options right now and so rather than spend the project dollars on coming up with what each one would cost we're going to refine those down based on your comments and the rest of the public and have a handful of those and we can sort of give a price spectrum of what that would cost and then it would be up to the city once adopted to then identify capital funds for those so there's no dollars for any of these construction projects yet to address your other questions about the bollards or other barriers those are design elements and so we're not being prescriptive in these planning efforts about what those could look like sort of that downtown medium you know we don't know if there would be a medium or what that could look like the bike facility itself is protected it could have something vertical that separates a person on a bike from a person in the car it could be a horizontal change so maybe the bike lane or bike facility is raised up and not the same level as car traffic so there's different ways that the different treatments for those but we're not getting into those details as a part of this that would be part of the design process later. I like the spirit of this so obviously I realize you're far off from anything inclusive but I like the idea of fixing this roadway because it's a major artery downtown and the currently the waste design is very hodgepodge and I think it's kind of ineffective. Around the market is there any decision in terms of making the entrance into the market like one direction only so for example cars could only enter from Winniski Avenue and then exit through the back street. Yeah it's an idea that's been talked about it's not a decision that we could make and you know the traffic modeling is a part of this didn't model that specifically there was a phase one sort of desktop modeling exercise that did consider well what if union was one way northbound and Winniski was one way southbound or vice versa Winniski was one way northbound union was southbound what would that work and there were a lot of challenges with that making it work as you know unions pretty narrow and so anything any changes would affect that roadway but it is we are thinking about that right now especially in regards to city market in their study right now what are they thinking about in terms of access through the front off of union so it's an idea that hasn't come out as an option at this point. So I'm someone who works downtown and I walk to city market pretty much every day during the lunchtime so I would want to just make sure that there is appropriate signage around that turn lane so that people aren't turning into pedestrian right of way I do like the idea of having a turn lane though but what I actually wanted to talk about was the northern end of my river side I know that a lot of people who work at community health center they don't get to park in their garage every month it's every I don't know what specifically it is but they have to do a lot of on street parking so I want to make sure that you speak with them to get their needs and also I support parking up there because I know that there's a lot of new businesses popping up and if people from our neighborhood for instance are going to go there we need places to park. Thank you. The core of my thought can be summed up as city-wide consistency so given that this is like sort of the third major bike planning effort the city is undertaking where the major patch work of logistics and configuration and as you go forward with this planning I would like the city to try to bring the driving lane, bike lane configurations into some form of consistency throughout the city because even as a resident driver where I traveled at different parts of the city the rules vary from street to street and for me that's you get used to it but it's aggravating and I can only imagine that with visitors and tourists it's absolutely confusing and potentially dangerous to both drivers and cyclists so rather than formulating another project with another completely center rules I'd like the city to try to begin to approach some consistency both for convenience and safety purposes. Thank you for that. As a very specific example I was waiting to turn right off the end of Pearl Street at Battery Park and there was an out of state driver in the center lane attempting to turn right with me because of the parking and the bike lanes in that area and I perfectly understand why they were thoroughly confused with that intersection. Thank you. Thank you. One question on all three with bi-directional lanes on the east side is it a driveway count issue in terms of the choice between the east side and the west side? It was. Just one comment on the city market driveway I guess for folks who live out here and go to the shopping center there's a really good example of a right turn in, right turn out like if you're at Schmitty's Corner I think that would alleviate a ton of issues if people need to access if they're southbound on Winooski they would have to take a left on the college and then come in the back through Union but regardless of any of these alternatives, even alternative four that would alleviate a lot of the challenges at that intersection currently if you put in just that little block right like we have at Schmitty's right now at the shopping center. Great thank you. We're going to take one more question and then let the presentation wrap up and then come back around to finish questions. You guys are doing great I appreciate all this. Hi James. I was just wondering if these plans have taken into consideration any current development going on and any future development that might happen. For instance City Place and the new proposed hotel. Right so the traffic counts we used this was the downtown business owners brought this up about whether the traffic counts were occurring during the St. Paul construction. The answer is no the traffic counts were sort of business as usual before these major project happens as a baseline. Given the current budget constraints of this project I don't think we'll be able to run new models with new proposals or anything pending like that but we are aware that St. Paul and Pine Street will reopen up in the northern part of downtown which would be great I think from a grid street network perspective. But we are keeping an eye on those developments. Alright these are great questions I appreciate all this thank you very much. How many slides left to wrap this up and then we can jump back in if there's any thoughts you might have. One of the things that will come out of this in the middle of this right now is looking at all the considerations that we need to take into account. People have asked about street trees we know how many street trees are out there and with each of these alternatives we'll be able to identify how many street trees might be lost. Same thing with on street parking spaces utility impacts, impacts to green strips and which ones are providing different types of facilities so it's a different way to present the information in a grid format with some specific numbers on it. You'll see on the bottom maybe you can see sort of the relative magnitude of cost right now it's like at a restaurant you know it's $1 sign to $4 signs. We haven't put into paper on what this construction costs are because we don't know where we're headed quite yet that's why we're doing this process so as we get those alternatives narrowed down we'll be able to put a finer tip on what this cost might be. We haven't talked about intersections that much except for Bank Street. We did look at what happens to the intersections you know based on the volume of traffic and the bike facility considerations would it need to be signalized? Could it be around about and the answer is it could be either at this point. For the most part we have some sort of preliminary design schematics for a few locations to see what that would look like whether or not they would fit what size they might need to what size they could be to handle that traffic and whether they would fit. So once as we move further into this process and pick sort of the route that we want to go then we'll be able to hone in on what specific intersection designs could look like and that's basically what I just said. I showed that matrix there with the street trees and utility impacts and these are the whole list of considerations that will be a part of that. So you know there's a lot of stuff to think about in addition to some of the specific things we've talked about here but there's a lot of things happening. Loading zones we've all seen the trucks downtown parking and unloading food for superstructure so we need to figure out where they can go as well. Transit we haven't talked about transit. There is part of the on our project advisory committee so they're aware of what's happening. We're aware of their next gen transit plan. One of the reasons we wanted to look at up the old north end north of Pearl to two-way traffic with that improved transit service would approve access to the old north end. It wasn't a hard yes. It was a yeah maybe. So it's in there as an option but it's not something that you know it's really a shining light on as a potential significant option. Again a snapshot of where we are in the process. Earlier today a drug that red rectangle out because we are in the June already we wanted to spend some time in April and May and now into June just really getting some of these back into the public's hands and ask are we reflecting what you told us back in the fall and over the winter. What do you like about this? What have we missed? What don't you like about this? And that's where we are now. Again I mentioned June 4th we'll have that open house. We'll do a short presentation similar to this about six o'clock but anytime from five thirty to eight you're welcome to just drop on by. We'll have the big board set up. We'll have other people than just myself to chat with. People from the city and the consultant team. What happens after we go through all this process is take all this feedback back. Figure out which ones of these options makes the most sense to advance. We can mix and match some of these. It's not just one or the other or the other. And then we'll come back to the public again late summer or early fall with a more refined concept and fewer options. Again to ask is this what we heard you say? Are we getting this right? And you'll see that ultimately it will go to city council at some point early winter, late fall for their consideration. That's the end and there's all the context. But I'm here now. You may not be in a position to answer this question but I'm very curious about why there's such a big push for more and more bike lanes and less and less parking. Given that Burlington is already the most bikeable city in the country and we already have huge issues with parking and that by and large affects more people and you can really only ride your bike for like three months out of the year and that's when it's not raining. And so I just don't get it. I just don't. And can you explain why bike lanes are so much more important than any other consideration? And that's general in the city. My response would be that the city through their plan BTB walk bike plan through their transportation plan through their complete streets initiative has identified the direction and the vision that they would like to go towards. I don't want to put it as a parking versus bike conflict. To me that's not what it is. Is everyone who wants to use the corridor able to and if not how can we improve that for people who want to get around regardless of age, ability, mobility, transport, mode. Also I mentioned that they offset safety. There's a lot of safety issues on this corridor at some specific intersections and some segments and so some of the changes are to address the safety issues for people because there are some unsafe parts there. So that's my brief response to that. This particular planning study is born out of those other adopted studies about okay well if we know what the vision looks like how can we improve these roadways. Can I ask too, are there serious consideration being given to roundabouts on the North Midusky corridor? As I mentioned at this point we're not seriously considering intersections. We just wanted to make sure with signals work, roundabouts work generally yes. So it would depend on the specific design that came out. A roundabout wouldn't work necessarily for a two way protected bike lane. It would require too much extra space that doesn't exist at some of those locations. But many roundabouts would work downtown. They would fit. So from a vehicle volume and for some of these bike facilities, yes they would work. Yeah so I guess as a member of the public I guess my input would be that I would like to see some serious consideration given to a roundabout on this project if that is determined feasible and I wouldn't want to be I wouldn't want it to be determined not feasible without a lot of thought. Currently feasible. I'm not sure I'm reading this right but there's been a lot of talk. I'm sure you know in the Black Walk conversations online about bike lanes or bicycles that have to ride, they have to ride their bicycles next to parked cars, a lane of parked cars. And I've seen a couple of bad accidents where somebody's opened the car door and the bicycle is slammed into it. So I'm wondering in alternative one, why do you even consider the bike lanes next to the parked cars? I would think that would be a criterion that you try to avoid that situation no matter what. For safety reasons. Right. It's a good point and again at this point in the project we wanted to offer a range of alternatives from do nothing, keep it as it is, to conventional bike lanes with no protection to alternative two that is protected and buffered to alternative three which is a two way protected lane. So I hear what you're saying and again we wanted to present that range of alternatives for people to respond to. There's so many accidents that it would be really important to note that as a criterion of number one. The one I really appreciate that you're taking such good notes. I also just said a lot of people made. I do really appreciate the effort on this being put into this. So I think I'm probably repeating what others have said I do really appreciate that continuous bike lanes is the focus a lot of us have brought up safety concerns and a lot of that currently could be confusion both by drivers and bikers if you don't know where to go. So having some form of continuous lanes where it's a little bit more clear especially for tours I do really appreciate that so thank you. And to that point about tourists coming who may be confused we are considering wayfinding as a part of this. I think the city really has been considering a wayfinding system for several years and so that would help not only people who live here but for people who are new to town figure out where is the parking garage how do I get there what's the best way to get there which direction is this road headed at some of those key destinations. Thank you. I guess one other metric I'm curious curious to see if it's possible to do is you mentioned that there are certain hot spots in here that are kind of very accident prone. At this level of study are you able to kind of give estimates for the different sort of alternative approaches to sort of what would be the likely impact on a number of accidents comparing say like the redesign of North Ave and the accidents before and after and things like that will that sort of like those sorts of projections be part of the process so this kind of safety questions can be part of the deliberation. That's a great question and I believe the consultant team has a way to measure that sort of safety impact I'm not aware of it right now but it is a part of you know does this improve safety which is a key component of why we're doing this so there needs to be a way to measure that. Let me just see this whole process and some of the questions I think that the city is trying to move in a direction of maybe limiting car access into the middle of the city or are we just or are we focusing on Manuski Avenue is the main north-south corner where most of the traffic is maybe moving through maybe I'm not being specific enough I think that we do need to move to discourage a lot of car traffic within town where we can to be creative about that especially in relation to the city center city development I'm also concerned about pedestrians I'm a pedestrian most of the time in town so I'm hoping that that pedestrian safety will be a major concern as we look at these plans looking at our total environmental impact as we're designing our city for the future means that I think we need to limit our trips into town whenever we can sort of a general thing I did thank you thank you for telling us again if folks seem really interested in being engaged in this process what's everyone's next steps to become more involved that's great again on the bottom of these handouts my name my phone number my email address is on there we do have a constant contact email database I send things out as needed when something is coming up I'm going to send one out this week about the June 4th public open house I will be sending that out the website is on there the product website all this information is up there the presentations are up there all the documents are up there meeting minutes and agendas I'll post all the outreach opportunities up there for people to just have a snapshot and hopefully we'll have something that works for you so that you don't just have to come to a specific meeting but that you're able to participate in a number of ways again I appreciate you inviting me back tonight this is great this is what I came here for I appreciate all that feedback you saw me take notes I'll take it back and type it out so other people can read it thank you all very much yeah thank you very much alright next up did we have Ethan Allen residents ready to come up yeah alright excellent you're on we have 20 minutes so feel free to split that up as however you want between questions and talking hi my name is Mary I'm the administrator of Ethan Allen residents I've worked there for six years and been administrator for about four years and I'm Cameron Segal I'm director of external affairs at living well group and we're the nonprofit that operates Ethan Allen residents and Heaton Woods residents in Mopiliar and living well residents in the first all how many of you are familiar with Ethan Allen residents so we're located at 1200 North Avenue and the corner four-year place and North Avenue with the yellow building across from the old DMV so we're a nonprofit residential care home that is licensed for 40 residents we have a residents who range in age from 56 to we have two world war two veterans there who are 100 years old our average age is probably 80 to 80 so most of our residents have some form of dementia we provide nursing care meals housekeeping all the services that they need again we're a nonprofit one of our missions was to create more Medicaid beds in town because there's a great need for Medicaid beds if you have private assets and have money of many options for care if you don't you have very few options in Burlington one thing that really differentiates us from the for-profit places is that if you have private assets you come in and you run out of money you're not asked to leave you transition to Medicaid and you can stay our goal is to keep people in Ethan Allen through end of life and not to have to move them up we currently probably have about eight residents on hospice right now if you were to live in Corey Hill or to Shelburne Bay or any of the for-profit places once the money is gone you have to leave you're asked to leave so that's a real mission of ours was to create more Medicaid beds in town I like to think of us as thinking outside of the box we're very creative in our programming and our ideas and Cameron will speak to that more so what we have to talk about is a lot less contentious than the South Winooski Street issue but we figure could use this as an opportunity just so people know that we're here because we are small and we are competing with big time for-profit residential elder care facilities in town one of the things that we do is we don't want to just entertain our residents we want to engage them and so that's from music therapy that we have to yoga to Tai Chi to our big time volunteer programs with members of the community which range from coming in and listening to music with them storytelling walking with them throughout the neighborhood and this fall we will have Vermont's first cycling without age try shot I don't know if anybody knows what that is should have had a presentation but you should google it it's very interesting it's a Dutch company it's a try shot so you have somebody riding a bike and then you have space in the front for two people to sit and there's an assistant e-motor so we'll be able to take our residents around the neighborhood up the bike path around the new north end to places like this and it's a great opportunity for people in the community to come and volunteer if they're not super comfortable working with people who have dementia it's a really passive way you can kind of get people out experiencing nature that would not have had an opportunity to do so without that one of the things that makes us separates us from our competitors is our farm to care food program so that prioritizes buying local from local farms and local producers and that not only provides nutritious healthy meals for our residents but also supports the local Vermont food system which I think probably everybody here thinks is very important and that is not the norm it's becoming the norm Wake Robin does something somewhat similar but for the most part especially across the country it's not like that in September at the Heineberg senior center I reached out and asked Beth Hammond who is the director there and I recognized somebody from there they were unhappy with their congregate meal program the quality wasn't good and it was very inconsistent in terms of service so we started providing meals once a week out of Ethan Island Residences Kitchen to the Heineberg center the program has grown the number of people that are there per meal has gone up significantly and starting in June we'll now be doing two meals a week and we just, she's clapping that's awesome, that's awesome we are already providing prepackaged to-go meals for participants at the senior center and the people who live at the Heineberg housing next door, if you're interested in coming the congregate meals are great, it's a great opportunity to talk to people in the neighborhood regardless of age really, it's a donation based system so if you go to the Heineberg website they have our menu up there and they have a list of to-go meals that we have one thing that we're launching next week at the Old North End Farmers Market which was brought out at the earlier presentations, we will have Vermont's first intergenerational farm stand with the Boys and Girls Club they're going to come to Ethan Island Residence harvesting vegetables and baking with our residents and we'll be going to the Old North End Farmers Market to sell those products we were talking about it doesn't matter if we make any money doing that it's not about that but it's the opportunity to get people who grew up in the Old North End who grew up in that neighborhood in the Old North End and New North End to get back out there because prior to this and the tri-show on some of the programs that we're launching they would be stuck inside and that's not good, we don't really have much to say beyond we're here and we rely on the community a lot right now we're trying to renovate our kitchen and convert our dry storage into a walk-in cooler so that we can expand our community meal program and just be significantly more efficient about how we prepare food so we can bump up our meals at the Heineberg and then expand to the other senior centers in the area so if you're interested livingwellgroup.org is where you can find more information and Ethan Island Residence of the Facebook and we have an Instagram that's all I really want to say is we're here we rely on the people here to keep doing what we're doing and what we are doing is really important and I definitely don't need to say more about that what we believe is we all know it takes a village to raise a child but it takes no less to uphold an elder and you know we don't view aging as a disease we're not a medical model it's just another chapter in life where these elders have a purpose they still experience joy and they're still a very big important part of the society current to create a council on aging I wonder if both of you would comment on that this will be not like commissions where there will be more citizens that people are directly dealing with senior issues and it seems like it would be great to have somebody from the Ethan Island Residence I agree with that so context to that is there is a Senior Center Study Committee that has people from ARP, Homeshare United Way and I am on that committee which is surrounding what to do about the Heineberg Senior Center in terms of being consolidated as part of the city I would love for us to have a representative from Ethan Island I would like it to be someone who lives at Ethan Island it would be easy enough to have just one of us be a part of that but I think a resident who lives there who is from the area and who is cognitively able to be a part of that I would love to have that and so what we do at Ethan Island is we have resident circles so they're completely autonomous in what happens in Ethan Island so if we did have a resident or it doesn't have to be but I would prefer a resident it would give that voice to somebody who is actually living as an elder in Burlington but I've been a big supporter of the aging commission I think. Were you speaking on something different? The same thing would probably be called a council on aging because the commission has a charter change, council can just be appointed and made up of seniors rather than a lot of different people. It's being proposed as a council so it's a really different thing but same thing basically. I appreciate it. Yes, we need to have that. Yes, I think you should have. I think something about the city taking over the Heineberg senior center There's a, yeah the aging committee or commission has come up as a result of the senior center study committee that appointed people too that was discussing what to do with the Heineberg center which is experiencing financial hardships because it's a donation based program All the minutes are on Burlington's website I would encourage you to read that and I do think soon there may be another opportunity to have a public forum talking about it but it's a big deal it's very important to the new north end that people are aware that it's happening but please go to Burlington.com and check it out because it is up there. I just want to fill you in on one more thing that we're working on and this is Cameron's working hard on this we're a program called Modern Age it's not a program it's actually a gallery exhibit we're going to be photographing a professional photographer will be photographing a number of our residents in all three locations and the show will be called Modern Age because to bring the aging population out to the public it's a catalyst for conversation we're all aging and we need to talk about it and so we're going to photograph our residents we've got interesting galleries I'm talking to the hospital now getting the show there and bringing our elders out to the community I was interested to see an article about these residents in the neighborhood newspaper up here in the new north end and about some occasional use of alternative medicines to replace multiple drugs that people are sometimes taking and how that can be successful that was very encouraging to me can you expand a bit on that so we don't currently have a naturopathic position but we've worked with one in the past and we're in the conversation with one currently but you know we believe that good food is medicine we believe exercise is medicine we believe in people having a purpose as medicine and living in community so it's just not about passing out pharmaceuticals so we try to look at people and see what natural alternatives there are to some of the pharmaceuticals we don't automatically prescribe if someone is agitated we don't automatically throw a pill at them we have a music program we have personalized song list playlists so we'll try alternatives before we have to introduce the pharmaceuticals and we love volunteers or just come over for a tour thank you I believe we have an officer from the Burlington Police Department here to give a quick talk for 10 minutes if that's... Hi my name is John Muirad I'm the Deputy Chief of Operations for the Burlington Police Department and I'm a resident here in this ward I actually just closed on a house with my wife in Appletree Point and we'll be moving in I have been living in Underhill which is where I grew up with my parents which has been interesting but moving in by the time the school year ends out in Underhill and we'll be full-fledged residents by the end of June I came really just to see the meeting and to be here I fully intend to attend in the future in softer clothing not in uniform necessarily as a resident I know that my wife will as well but as long as I am here if there are any things that people want to mention or issues people want to raise I'm happy to take some questions I am as I said a Vermonter I grew up in Underhill my parents were both professors at the university for a very long time I went away to college after graduating MMU in 1991 and ended up living for a while in California I was a police officer in New York City I went to the private sector briefly disliked it intensely and wanted to be back in public service and when Chief Phil Pozo advertised for a deputy chief job here I left the chance to A return to policing and B return to Vermont perhaps A return to Vermont and B return to policing I don't know which one actually was more important but I love the state and this community I'm very very happy to be a part of it so anyway I wasn't on the agenda so I don't know that anybody has questions or anything but here otherwise I'll go stand in the back of the room and continue to learn about the neighborhood yeah Alex sure well so obviously you know see something say something has become an ethos of policing and while it was designed actually originally by the New York City Transit Authority about subway systems it has become something associated with sort of large scale crime and terrorism it's not it's really anything and so yes if you have incidents if you hear noises if you have a pattern of behavior that you are observing in your neighborhood whether it's knocked over items we had a couple of signs on the bike path that had been sawn down why I do not know but those kinds of things are things that certainly we'd want to know about and even if they're not necessarily in our purview we can help you sort of put them where they ought to go whether that's parks or whether that's DPW or other city agencies we have you know obviously a very clear call line and sometimes our first call for folks but we can help divert those as necessary and if they are in our purview we'll respond insofar as the summer you know I think there are you'll see obviously we'll see a lot more people we'll see people on the bike path we'll see people on the beaches in the area it's a wonderful time of year it's one of the best times to be in Burlington when the weather changes like this but sometimes you'll also get new folks coming in and coming out and if that brings new issues with it whether it's disorder on the bike path or whether it is any kind of activity that you see in for example in Letty Park or not we've had some issues with urban camping and we are working as a city to address that in ways that are lawful and make sure that we correctly balance both those people's needs and also the city's rights to have all of us feel that the neighborhood is what we hope it to be so those kinds of things can be brought to people's attention too many times we're aware of them but it's also something that we want to know about so that we can document citizen sentiment. Citizen sentiment can oftentimes be helpful if we know how our neighbors feel about these kinds of issues. I have a question for you so what is the open container because I live here and I walk from my house to Hanifers through Letty Park through the soccer field where kids are playing and there are often people sitting with drinking alcohol. Yes, so you are not allowed to drink open containers of alcohol in Burlington No, it is not. It is currently a violation of a civil ordinance which has limited effect but the city council passed a law after a certain number of offenses a criminal summits as well which is a ticket that can actually result in bringing somebody to court if necessary otherwise there's no court it's just a matter of a fine. For some people who routinely violate it, fines are simply not effective. The individuals don't have the money to answer those fines and there was no recourse if fines piled up. That was why the council changed that law which happened before I came back and I'm certain you could speak to that better. We are going to be launching this summer an effort to say for people who are recidivists obviously some of our more common areas where we experience it are in City Hall Park or in Battery Park but I know that it's true in Letty as well and Ethan Allen for that matter too. The goal is always to find ways that do not involve enforcement. Enforcement should be it's not a last resort that might be an extreme phrase it should not by any means be the first one and so to the extent that you can dissuade behavior whether it's by mere police presence or whether it's by requests to dump alcohol out or whether it is by first civil summits and tickets and then leading to these criminal tickets as we determine how they're going to be issued and how they're going to be prosecuted this is new ground for us those are all paths for officers to take in addressing these but the fact is that we find that alcohol consumption can be a straight line to more problematic behavior including violence we just had an incident in Battery last night that we'll be releasing a press release about in which case that kind of public disorder led to a very violent assault than the arrest of two individuals their release went out and assaulted somebody they thought had been a witness against them and were arrested again for that that stems from certain amounts of alcohol consumption. In so far as seeing it in Letty Park there are places where sometimes there are it's either a lack of officer resource or a sense that where this place is quiet and people are noticing it again when neighbors tell us they're noticing it then that becomes a place that we can no longer act as if it's a spot where that behavior can be I don't mean tolerated but can be not prioritized. If neighbors request response they'll get it. We actually have to cut this off for real we were able to sneak you in right at the tail end of that other one and we are working to bring the Burlington Police Department back here I think pretty soon for many more questions and answers and a much longer block. We're moving into the last segment here for you folks to engage with elected officials so let's see how many elected officials we have tonight alright we have a few so I am going to ask each of you to give a quick two or three minute intro on what you're doing and then we'll open it up for questions and if we run out of questions turn it back over to you folks to say a little bit more and let's start down here. Hi my name is Monica Ivancic and I'm Ward 7 school board commissioner and I apologize for being late to this meeting I was helping organize the science fair at my daughter's school which is the integrated arts academy. I'm not sure there's a lot to report to in the district except that we're wrapping up the school year. We're changing our meeting format to be officially twice a month so it used to be always Tuesdays a month and now it's going to be second and third and unfortunately both the second and third meeting this month was at least five hours about or maybe a little bit more. We finally the BSD released the school calendar for next year we had some lively discussion about whether or not to keep Martin Luther King a holiday, a non-school day for students and teachers and also there was discussion about adding young people as a holiday. We used to have certain faith holidays in October that were observed on alternating years and seems like that went off the agenda. But the superintendent on Martin Luther King day wants to implement sort of a day of service where they would have a half day of school and this was supposed to happen this school year except a lot of us weren't aware of it until January. So hopefully the planning for this coming school year will happen a lot earlier and things will go according to plan and the schools will be open for half day and students will be learning about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. There's been a bit of a flurry with the magnet schools. Both magnet schools are switching principals for this coming school year and they're also switching the magnet coaches which is very unfortunate because we had very capable people in those magnet coach positions however a year ago the district started implementing the instructional coach model at all schools so every elementary school and the two middle schools get an instructional coach full time and the magnet schools the way they did that was they took half of the magnet coach and made them instructional coach even though they don't have the expertise background to actually do that and so that drove both current coaches out of their roles at this point and so the board wanted to kind of fix that and we voted to reinstate them full time so we will see, we'll hear back from the district of how this is going to be implemented and I think my time's up so I'll be happy to answer any questions that you folks may have. Franca Paulino, North District City Councilor so currently we're engaging in budget meetings we're at four essentially evening long meetings where each city department does a presentation for the upcoming budget so I think it's important for folks to know that that's coming up. There'll be board of finance meetings for the final budget as well as city council meetings so opportunity for input if you feel any line item should be increased reduced any specific agency or specific item if you feel strongly about they're all open to the public one item is the high university senior center asking for $58,000 for a continuous contribution for the city to keep it up and running so I guess a while back they were looking to potentially closing their doors three years ago and the city stepped in and helped them out and after a commission doing a study they're looking to make that relationship permanent for this $58,000 contribution there's more information Martha this is on the board I'm sure she'd love to fill you in on that but I think it's important for people to speak up because they write the counselors for people who aren't aware of the high university center because there were some questions on the council when they did the presentation that indicated that it wouldn't have full support or that people were skeptical for a center that only serves the new north end but if you go to their events actually people come from Old Chester they come from all over to use their services but I'll let Kurt talk about more about the budget since he's much more involved but obviously there's a big meeting coming after June 3rd I think everybody's aware that the mayor, the chief and the council's looking to start a joint commission to go on a fact-finding mission and see what if any reforms need to be made regarding police as to other items that I think are important is tomorrow there's a two transportation energy utility commission meeting at 7.30 the reason I throw that out is because on that main item is e-scooters and electric bikes and I have yet personally had anybody come to me speak in favor of e-scooters and I think that I've always said that I rather double the amount of e-bikes available so far I think it's 200 that they're looking to propose it's just not enough to serve us out here and I would think I think we're going to get short change and I haven't seen the stations but currently we don't have a station here in the new north end so people don't want e-scooters I haven't been to a city that has them but I have heard a lot of input from people have about safety and what will happen but I don't want to kill the idea I don't want to not allow the full council to have this debate to have the public engagement but obviously I want to free vote to the committee so that's all I have. Thank you Councillor Polino. City Councilor Kerr-Rae I'm trying to touch on a bunch of issues here the senior center study committee I'm proud to have had a little part in that councilors Hartnett and Nodell served on the councilor Nodell shared it and a lot of other people served on the committee did great work including Cameron so thank you for all you did and I will be fighting vigorously if the administration which there is talk of potentially opposes the funding for this money to continue to support Hydebrook senior center make sure it stays open if we don't do that we have to continue to draw down from their small savings account and that is just not sustainable and they will not be able to stay open and they deliver really incredibly important services to hundreds of seniors in the new north and across the city just a note our amazing Ramona City marathon as everybody knows and just so you know they are still looking for volunteers they have 1200 volunteers probably more than that now but they need 1400 so if anybody can volunteer they would love to hear from you and in relation to that I just want to mention how proud I am of the fact that the bike path from downtown all the way through the new north end to the bridge has been redone it is fabulous it's been repaved and widened there's pause places it's something for us to be really proud of now it's a world class bike path except that we need to do the other part of it now and that starts this spring and summer when the south ended to the rest of the bike path so I'm really proud that we can feel good about that now it was neglected for far too long. Permit reform is another issue that I am really glad to see we're finally moving forward on that we are going to homeowners and developers but particularly homeowners have had two developers know how to navigate the system. Homeowners sometimes have to go one place to another place get different answers I'm going to combine building code and zoning into one department one stop shop that is going to be a great change and in relation to that they're going to be starting to streamline the system so there will not be so many redundant things and costs for homeowners to try to improve their own property. City place the whole in the ground in downtown we could spend the whole night on this so just briefly say that we are still hopeful but certainly concern is growing in that our last report from Brookfield after hearing from Don Cinex that the foundation would be poured definitely starting in May or June Brookfield the 51% partner and the $280 billion partner has said they are not committing to when that will start. They are saying they're still fully supportive of the project but they're trying to be more careful than Don Cinex. Don is sort of likes to promise more and sometimes delivers less they're trying to be a little more cautious with that. On the letting park issue it is absolutely not acceptable and I know that I've talked to the police department and they agree we cannot no matter how bad we may feel for homeless people and we do and we do a lot to help homeless people in Burlington but we cannot we have to enforce the ordinances that people cannot be camping in an area where there's a neighborhood in a park where there's kids and drinking I was there the other day Mary and I saw what you're talking about going on and somebody was urinating and had their pants pulled down which hopefully you're doing anyway. But it was a bad scene and I did call the police actually and they came and that is just not acceptable and we can't tolerate that. I know the police department is on that now and hopefully we can see some changes there. Again my time is up but there's a whole other issue about the police that we could spend time on. We know there's been a video that was great concern. My concern about that is not overreacting as a city to what we think was an overreaction by a couple of police officers in an incident because I do not want to see the men and women of the Burlington police department immortalized and feel like they don't want to serve the Burlington police department as we attack the entire park department over a couple of really bad looking incidents. Thank you. Thank you Kurt. So Montoya, I fully believe that we'll be out tomorrow which probably means we won't be out tomorrow. But everybody thinks by the end of the week we'll be back here doing what we normally do. I'll run over a list of things that I know that we've gotten through on the House side. A lot of stuff is held up in the Senate. Some of the stuff has gone to the Governor. A lot of, in my particular committee government operations we spend almost half our time on the plot bill. It went to ways and means and basically died. Nobody has a good reason as to why. Jump in with any questions you might have. The minimum wage bill there are two versions, a House bill and a Senate version. The Senate version gets to 12 to 50 faster than the House version does. House version gets to 15 bucks. It takes an ungodly amount of time. I view this as an economic incentive bill. People have more money in their pocket. They spend it which is good all around. I prefer to get there faster than later. Clean Water bill has been funded. It's a weird way of funding things but I think that's going to be implemented and we should see money flowing into cleaning up the lake pretty soon. Family leave bill is also held up in the Senate. Funding mechanism for that too. There was a difference between the House side and the Senate side. One of the things we've got done is herbicide, pesticide application to protect the pollinators that give us about half of what we eat tonight. Workforce needs, issues are being addressed. There's continued talk about a new jail to replace the women's facility in South Arlington. That's wrapped up in whether there will be a huge campus probably in Franklin County to take everybody one minute really. School water testing has gone through between the Senate's bill and the House bill. They've sort of agreed on four parts per billion. Either one is bad. There's going to be money put into budget for an internet consultant so that local communities can take last mile formulation into their own hands and try to put systems together like we successfully did here and then sold it. Change the net metering for solar for schools, changes to the workforce. Tobacco went from 18 to 21 A lot more money went into child care and I have no idea what the last thing is. Oh, statute of limitations on certain crimes. Mostly dealing with child sexual abuse radically changed so that really there is no statute of limitations anymore. A lot of kids 35 years of doing this don't want to talk about it until way after the statute of limitations has expired and that's often too late for results. Take any questions that you have. We're going to open up the questions. If you have any questions short please let us know who the question is intended for. So this is the question for I guess our city councillors and perhaps the police officer in the room. You know in 2016 the color of justice, racial and ethnic disparity in state prisons was issued and what it found was that we have the highest rate of incarceration of black and brown people in this state despite having a population of about 2% as far as our black and brown neighbors go. We saw a couple weeks ago a pretty outrageous video issued involving a white officer slamming a black resident's face into a wall and that resident going unconscious and then that officer instructing that person not to resist when that person was clearly unconscious. I have a lot of concerns about our use of force policy. I have a lot of concerns about what we are doing as a community to ensure that our black and brown neighbors feel safe and feel welcome in our community and I want to encourage our councillors to operate from a perspective that our black and brown neighbors deserve to be present in public spaces and they deserve to be so free of suspicion and free of surveillance either from the police or from our community at large and so I want to know what we are doing to ensure that we don't have another incident like this. I watched the video, it is outrageous. Do you want to hear from the officer for a minute? There are certain things that I can't comment on. I want to do the fact that there is ongoing litigation about those but in so far as the use of force, it has been promised by the mayor in the city council session that we are revisiting the policies. The chief's position is that we have been training the use of force in a way that has outpaced our policy. To be frank, the policy has written which predates chief del Ozo's time here is a model policy. It comports with all of the things that the International Association of Chiefs of Police or IACP requires of a policy. It talks about de-escalation. It talks about training. It talks about levels of force. It talks about responsibilities and duties of care. It is not as cutting edge as some of the newer policies that have come out since the time of Ferguson in the summer of 2014 where we saw a lot of scrutiny placed on police operations and how that was done across the country. Policies that have come since then are a little bit more explicit about de-escalation and what it entails. They are more explicit about the sanctity of life and the necessity of that to guide police operations. Insofar as getting our policy to echo those newer types of policies, that's all to the good. The fact, however, is that the operations of the police department are already in component with those kinds of policies in the newer ones. These acts that I can't directly comment on both resulted in internal discipline. They were alarming enough to the police department when we found them on our own that we dealt with them. We dealt with them with discipline and we dealt with them with external investigations where we hired independent investigators. That is not usual. We have 30,000 incidents a year that our officers respond to and we respond to them incredibly well. There are stressful situations, party situations. Officers go to them and, you know, they perform very, very well in the vast majority of them. The force is used in about 190 of those 30,000 incidents. And the force is a wide range of different kinds of force. Pointing a weapon is tallied as a use of force in the rooms in this department. Anything beyond non-compliant handcuff. So, if an individual is going to be apprehended and the officer says turn around, you are under arrest and the individual turns around and puts his or her hands behind the back and the officer cuffs. That's not a use of force. The individual pulls an arm away because halfway through decides actually I don't think I want to be arrested today and the officer yanks that arm back. That is a use of force. Now, the ones that we saw are far beyond that and they're so far beyond that that they were troubling to us and resulted in investigations and in discipline. I know that that's not necessarily you know as much as you want to hear, but those are two out of 190 out of 30,000. And I believe that context is necessary to understand a little bit of what the officers do and how they do in fact comport themselves. My question was slightly different. My question was how do we reduce, again, only 1% of the population in Vermont is African American, but 11% of its prison population is black. My question is what are we doing to ensure that the gross disparity between our prison population of black and brown folks is kept in line with it seems to me that there seems to be potentially some sort of racial profiling going on. So those population percentages, I'm sorry, are different in Burlington than they are for the state and furthermore the census population disparity is different than the offender population. There are, if you look at both and offenders as identified by victims and as identified by people who are saying that a crime has occurred, that disparity grows as well so that in the city and I don't have the data right in front of me, but it was presented by the chief police at the city council, those differences shrink drastically. There is still a slight difference. I believe that minority prisons and offenders is something in the order of 20% versus 12% of population versus in the city versus probably 26% for use of force. So that difference does cause us concern and we're looking at that. Part of that problem however is that when you're dealing with such a small number of instances that very small differences can cause outsized percentage differences. But these are things that we're looking at that we're thinking about and however I'd like to say that we were thinking about them before these lawsuits. They were not what engendered our need to examine this. These are things that we dealt with but personnel rules and law prevent us from talking about certain things when we make personnel disciplinary decisions and that's because people who are employed and especially union members have rights. So from the city council perspective, I mean I personally just strongly believe in what Martin Luther King said which is treat everybody as not on the content of their character and not the color of their skin. And if everybody falls by that simple rule for Martin Luther King, we are much better off. Now as far as the city council goes, we have put more members diversity on the police commission. We expanded the police commission and the parks commission and have made sure that there is more diversity on both of those commissions. I think that there is no room for racism in the city of Bruins or anywhere else and we should have zero tolerance for any kind of it. In regard to the police again 30,000 incidents. We are focusing on two or three high profile cases that are very disturbing. But at the same time what I'm not going to stand for is the comments that I heard from some citizens outside of city hall Monday evening before the city council and inside city hall where members of the police, hard working men and women of the Bruins and police department who do a great job and are trying to do great stuff in our neighborhood community. We're being called predators violent thugs, people who are violent want to serve on the police department. That is not acceptable. I'm not going to stand for our police department, the hard working men and women of our police department because of a number of incidents that we do need to review and we do need to take a close look at and see if any policies need to be changed and we're going to do that. There's going to be a resolution at the council. That will be thoroughly looked at and investigated. But we do not need to go overboard and start castigating all of these men and women to moralize them when we have to put ourselves in their shoes once in a while and what they face in those 30,000 incidents that they have to face. Many, many times the vast majority of times they use incredible judicious restraint. I can give you incident after incident after incident that could have been far, far worse except the police used incredible restraint. So does that mean they're perfect? No. They're like everyone at last in this room tonight. They're human beings that make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes are very bad mistakes and result in someone getting hurt and then we need to take a close look at it and we are. So one of the things I proposed was a subcommittee of the police commission to address racial profiling as well as strictly looking at the numbers, the statistics. I think the most important one are people being stopped and no crime committed type of thing. That's what I think is one of the best ways that many departments have that is separate and apart from the police commission. The purpose is just to look at the numbers and see what's going on in the community. I agree that what happened is unacceptable and unreasonable and it's broken the public's trust and we need to rebuild that trust and that's why we need to look at what reforms can be made alongside the fact that we have some of the hardest working dedicated people in our police department who are trying. I've personally seen use stream restraints but you know there's one incident that's one too many so we need to do something and this is a very difficult issue and I think the best way to resolve it is to have everybody at the table thinking about just this issue for as long as it takes there's talk about hiring a consultant in order to help us with this problem so from other cities who've had this problem we need to have reforms. You have a question? So it's a great question and it's not only a city based question. There were two bills that floated through legislature this year neither of which got picked up and did anything with fair and impartial policing and level of training and quite frankly I thought I saw it implemented when we discussed the transportation bill moving from mandatory seat belt enforcement to elective seat belt enforcement you don't have to wear a seat belt now you can't get stopped for doing a seat belt anything else that you do and you don't happen to be wearing your seat belt if you get nailed for it but there's a move to make it a primary stop and a lot of the discussion focused on will that be a mechanism for basically pulling people over who look different than us and it did not go through and I think that's one of the reasons people are becoming more aware of this. I don't know if they're just rolling out into the prison population as much but on the street level on the individual citizen level it's an issue. This one off to the next question. Wow this is really loud. I guess this would be for any of the legislator people types and I would first just like to say that thank God our judicial system is not based on the court of public opinion because if it were everyone would be in jail or executed somehow so thank you for the legal system and the judiciary who investigates and puts people away when necessary. The third is the minimum wage issue. I find the idea of raising the minimum wage to be incredibly irresponsible. Statistically it's shown over and over again that every community, city, state, wherever they implement it that it does way more harm than it does good to the community. We know that businesses have to lay off employees because they can't afford it. I mean I could go on and on and on about why it's a terrible idea. Yes people will have in theory more money in their pocket if they have a job but it's shown across the board that unemployment skyrockets when you implement minimum wage laws like that. So I'm curious why the focus isn't on deregulation and cutting taxes that would make Vermont more palatable for businesses and for people to stay so that there's actually a greater tax base and then that would then bring down cost of living. There would be more job opportunities. I think three top jobs available in Vermont right now are server, janitor and retail. So why wouldn't the focus instead be getting people to come here rather than increasing the ever growing burden on the people who already live here? Well I think anytime you look at statistics you can find whatever Vermont your characterization that universally raising the minimum wage particularly in regard to the 15 a negative inducement is not what happens all over the place particularly here in Burlington. I mean you can walk from this building out to McDonald's where they're paying 1350 for high school kids to start. It's not that big a difference for servers and people who work in the public. I don't believe that it is as bad a thing as you have portrayed it. That being said it is always an experiment about what happens. You mix a bunch of things into your question. It seems to be very difficult to get industry to come here. Part of it is because of the quality of life that we enjoy. We basically frame this society in Vermont so that it's not the cheapest place to live in but it's one of the best places to live in. You pay for that one way or the other. We don't walk out the door and worry that we're going to step into the love canal because we have regulations that prevent that. Those are costly. Businesses don't want to deal with those. Businesses would rather put money in their pocket. That's the fine mind of dance. I would have expected actually the come to Vermont telecommute to have produced more people. It hasn't. I would have actually hoped that Governor Scott's economic development people would have been more successful. Former Chief of Police I had great faith in him doing a good job. I know that he's trying but it just doesn't seem to be happening the way it should. Quite frankly, economic development over the entire country is not that robust so I don't think we're any significantly different than a lot of other places. You can get a job other places but you're also not working very good today. Minimal wage varies all over the country. Industries have a tendency to go where it's the cheapest to get here later. I think we can fit two more questions in. This is a separate question from what we've been talking about although it was brought up briefly. The YMCA downtown as most people know is getting rebuilt two blocks east of where it's currently located and people are starting to come to an understanding that the building is slated to be turned into a hotel and I don't know how everyone else in the room feels about that but we are facing an enormous housing crisis in Burlington and I think it's a slap in the face to the citizens here that a hotel is going in the place of the YMCA when affordable housing or even reasonably priced housing is not going into this location and it's quite a large space. So I wonder if maybe the councillors could comment on this. Who approved the hotel? I understand it's been privately purchased but what can be done to turn this hotel into housing which is what this city so desperately needs? Thanks for the question. I'm not sure we can take a look at that but the reality is the city government can't necessarily step in on private deals as I probably know and Kyle Dodd is coming on this in the paper from the YMCA saying that we would love to have turned this into housing but we looked extensively around and there was no developer with the cost of what it would have taken to change this building around so yes we do need housing but there is housing I'm not saying it wouldn't have been good to have housing there but certainly we have housing being built in different places in Burlington so in fact there's been more units built of housing in the last several years and we have been built in many years before that and that continues to grow so that is an issue that is actually we are doing something on we need to do more but that's a private deal Kyle Dodson from the YMCA actually said they tried very hard to find a way to make housing work there and it just didn't work and they couldn't make it work from the YMCA angle. In terms of the deal itself while we would like to have more housing in other places but the one good thing about it the YMCA is a very valuable commodity and it will still be up the street this will now go back on the tax rolls and will and because this is important because taxpayers in the new north end nothing that I hear more about from taxpayers in the north end is the cost of living in Burlington cost of property taxes and you know if there's only so many answers to that and one of them is to grow the tax base and so while we need more housing this is going to grow the tax base it's going to add to the property tax it's going to add to the rooms and meals tax and that part of it is a good thing I mean I share some of your concerns I think that my biggest point or problem with that project is that you know we need housing and would be to have affordable hotels you know it's outrageous the price of a hotel what another hotel downtown will do in terms of competition I'm guessing the prices is not much but it was a very reasonable under $200 you know hotel that would be something I could easily buy into I was a member of the Y while they were trying to raise the money to buy the space and it was a very complicated process they did a lot of community outreach and I think what Kurt says is exactly right that they tried as hard to sell it to other people I remember hearing a lot of buzz about that and you know it just became how much is that historic part worth versus the rest I think so my knowledge is not coming before the council I think maybe when I read the newspaper article talked about going before the DRV I don't expect it to go from the council I wanted to ask about the status of planning for the pedestrian crosswalks and you know the lighting signals for crosswalks on North Avenue where is that process those are coming very soon actually the commitment that we got from DPW director Chapin Spencers they will be they should be coming very very soon yeah well that is very very soon actually yeah no they are and so I appreciate that question before we close I do want to just respond to Franny's question before which was about the senior center and it is not going to be a takeover by the city but it is going to be developing a partnership with the city to ensure that the senior center can remain open and deliver those really vital services to our seniors one more really quick question did you mention that the state is heading towards final passage can you tell us what the final tell me what the final late coming up number is and if you could try to summarize the funding mechanism the way it came out of the senate is that there is a division in rooms and meals tax 75% goes to 25% goes to education 75% goes to general fund they are taking a percentage out of the general fund in fiscal year 27 million and 21 11 million there is a belief in the money committees that the tax changes and some other stuff that has changed into complexity of the economic system of the state that income will be greater God bless them but the proposal that they have put together apparently is satisfying EPA that is a reliable funding stream so that's going to meet their requirements thank you everyone for joining us tonight everyone who is able if you can help pick up chairs and there is a lot of food left people please take it with you