 It is seven o'clock, so we are going to get started. Welcome, everyone. So the first thing is to review and approve the agenda. And just to note that the original plan for the tax increment financing application vote and resolution, we may talk about that, but it's really going to be setting a date for a future vote. So the bulk of that conversation will probably be later. And then, did we want to add anything to the executive session? So we did have the addendum sent out, just to be clear, we're adding a resolution and a possible executive session about real estate. And I would just like to add to that also an update on the MOAT real estate. So another executive session about real estate. Two different parts on top. Does that sound right, Timmy? OK, so without objection, I'll consider that a prrrrr. Yeah, what's up? That's fine, but I wanted to pull an item from the consent. We'll do that in a hot second here. I'm too informal. OK, so here we go. OK, so without objection, we'll consider the agenda approved. So general business and appearances. So this is a time for the public to make comments on any item that is not on our agenda and I think, do you want to introduce? Or if there's comments from the public, that was a good time. Try to keep it to two minutes or less. And if you'd say your name and what street you are on, or where you're from. Good evening, I'm Sam Borkin. I live in Ward 3 on Cherry Avenue. I came and I recognize I was not at the last meeting, but I came because I was upset to learn that the farmer's market would be going back to the lot and not be out. I loved it when it was there during the experiment last time. I thought it was a fantastic thing. And I know that there's a lot of details that I may not have gotten to several here last week, but I was just really, really disappointed to see that that had failed. And so I don't know if there's any prospects that are changing for this year, but going forward, I would really, really encourage the council to do what they can to make it happen. Because when it was on State Street, I thought it was fantastic. It brought a ton of people to the community. I went and I wound up buying some sort of kitchen nonsense at the kitchen store because I happened to be there anyway buying bread. And I think it's better for the city and the community to have it more public and on State Street. I guess I'll just comment that I think we agree that we would like to find a solution for that. And so there's still things to be worked out with that, and it's still certainly on the table, at least as far as I think we're concerned. So hopefully those details get worked out. Yes. Steven Winnick, I wanted to report on last night's meeting very briefly, but more so speak to some tentative action that was taken in a prior meeting that I was unaware of. Last night was the first meeting of the Central Vermont Communications Union District. They're still wrestling with the name. They formed a couple of subcommittees of which I'm serving on one. There's a policy committee that's gonna work on bylaws, et cetera. There's a development committee which is gonna work on training the members and finding out what infrastructure and opportunities there are. That's, there'll be further report forthcoming. I want to more speak to the issue of whether we maintain our membership in EC fiber. And I have said some of this before, but as a lot of new council members since then that I've been going to EC fiber meetings for a long time, not as a Montpelier delegate, but as a telecommunications and community planner. There's extreme value in Montpelier serving as the nexus between the accomplished, experienced and successful EC fiber model and the new infant CV fiber model. We would be forfeiting a significant intellectual and collaborative and resource if we withdraw from, there's nothing in statute that prevents us from being in both. Montpelier being the capital city would be uniquely positioned to leverage that success. Okay, go for the next. Forward. So I would encourage that especially to hear from more people who are working on both, maybe have this on the agenda at the next CV fiber meeting before we take action. I believe there is a clock ticking by statute of when an appointment needs to be made because John has resigned, I believe. But I would encourage you to appoint someone even provisionally and fully consider whether it's too the city's benefit and both districts benefit to maintain a position at both. Thank you. Thank you. One possibility is that if any councilor thinks we ought to put that on an agenda for an appointment, that's, I'm gonna leave that to you all to make that suggestion. Sound all right? Okay, so. Sorry, do we know the deadline by which we would need to make the appointment? I'd have to find that out, I think in the past, but we could possibly, we could talk to them. Maricopa, I think it was the last meeting, we raised that issue and we opted not to appoint anybody and I was gonna take steps to withdraw us from the district and I'd notify them on that, but we could certainly consider that decision and I could ask if we still could add someone to the district to find that out first. And I did get an email from somebody who was interested in applying as well, just to say enough. Okay, anyone else? So my name is Laura Gephardt and I just came on board as the new executive director for the Montpelier Development Corporation. So I wanted to come and introduce myself to all of you. I look forward to meeting all of you individually at some point and I just wanted to step out and say that I'll be repopulating the office along the street so the doors will be open and we're looking forward to stepping out, being an active role in economic development, strategies and actions in Montpelier. So thank you. Thank you, glad to have you. Welcome. Okay, so onto the consent agenda. Yes. So I would like to pull item D for further discussion the Down Home Kitchen Parklet application. I'll second. I think we need a motion to move to pass it first without absent that item. So I would move to pass the consent agenda less item D. I'll second that. Any other things people want to pull? Okay, all in favor of please say aye. Aye. Opposed? I think we should probably just take up D right now. So I'll turn it over to you, Rosie. Oh, great. So we have received an application for a parklet taking up three spaces for the purposes of Down Home Kitchen. My understanding based on emails today is that the parklet will be reserved for the patrons of Down Home Kitchen during their business hours but as per the parklet ordinance open to the public for the rest of the time. We have received some comments from business owners and residents on the street who are unhappy with the parklet application. We've also received some comments from the owner of Down Home Kitchen kind of not particularly happy with how the process is played out. So I think there's a couple of different things going on here. One is why I think we should probably recognize that there's some well deserved feedback on how that parklet ordinance is working and maybe we need to do some more fine tuning there. And the second piece is I think the way we wrote the ordinance it was really up to the council to decide when and where these were appropriate. The three spaces here would basically use up the last of the spaces that we had allocated. We had said six spaces in total would be allocated to parklets and they have three already in the city. So this would be the last three. I would like to give the business owner an opportunity to speak and any residents an opportunity to speak on this and I've got some more comments after that. I think I saw Mary Alice here. Would you like to comment on it? Would you like to sit down or do I sit over here? Either way and introduce yourself. Can you hear me okay? Thanks for letting me be here. I'm Mary Alice Profit. I'm the owner of Down Home Kitchen. I'm very happy to have had the opportunity to apply. I did hear about this at the Montpelier Business Association meeting which I attend every month and which I believe I'm the only restaurant owner in Montpelier that always attends those. And so in every way possible, I'm trying to show support for not only our restaurant community and our community but also our retail community. And so I did talk to a lot of people including Carlo and Ben Draper who have had a parklet here in the city and they've been doing that. So I did discuss it, they're both friends of mine and I spent some good amount of time talking with them. The point of the parklet is just to provide more outdoor space for the community to be able to be outside. It's a very, very short period of time in terms of a weather window living in Vermont. We have major problems with opiates. We have major problems with depression and having a vibrant young smallest capital in America with lots of outdoor spaces where people can sit, cafe style and enjoy a beer with their friends and enjoy a glass of wine. And in our case, enjoy a maple creamy because we're gonna be putting in a creamy machine and a lot of the kids in Montpelier have been involved in this process including my kids. And they love the creamies that are out there but many of them are on the sidewalks while their parents are working all day. So they can't drive to Morse Farm or Bragg and some of them don't live in the neighborhood with the current creamy machine. So that's gonna be another draw and attraction to the parklet. I am, in terms of design, we try to do something that's very simple that's not gonna detract from the historic nature of that corner and from Landon Street because there's beautiful buildings there and we don't feel like we need to make any statement in terms of architecture. So this structure is just meant to, we're growing some sweet peas which we feel like will compliment the tomatoes that we've been growing in the planters in the past in which everybody from Senator Leahy's wife on down to local school kids have come and enjoyed picking the tomatoes, eating the tomatoes, enjoying the tomatoes. So the idea is to do another edible garden and we're basically gonna provide a space that's open to the community. Right now, we're primarily a breakfast and brunch restaurant and so we really enjoy that business but in order to be able to handle the minimum wage law that's going to be going into effect soon and a lot of the other high costs of food from doing actual reel from scratch food. We're not doing Cisco food out of boxes. We make all of our sausage from scratch. We make all of our biscuits by hand from scratch. We bread everything using organic and Vermont materials. That's a really expensive kind of food to be doing and not every restaurant at Montpelier currently is working with such high quality ingredients. So it's very important for us that we have to move into more evening hours because we can't afford to do that kind of high quality food and keep the price down so that it's affordable for people in Montpelier. So we're not living in Vail, Colorado or Martha's Vineyard. We're living in a small town with people on a fixed income so we have to be able to grow and do more business hours and we think that the seasonal parklet will be both fun for the community and it'll provide just another attraction and a way for people to wanna come and sit outside. The idea behind the three spots was around safety and I went through this with design review committee and I did pass out, Jamie was nice enough to copy so that's a little bit, excuse me, a little bit clearer but those two river birch trees are intended to go in concrete structures that are planters and they're going to be outside of the actual parklet and that's gonna provide space basically if there were a car or delivery truck to turn that corner, just the same way Benchini's trees were right there on the corner. I don't know if you guys remember that just to have something visual there that says very clearly to that driver, slow down. And I also wanna add that there's space between it and the parklet in order to provide just a little bit of a barrier in case something were moving but it's very heavy concrete so that's unlikely to move. In terms of other business owners on the street, I have tried time and time again and I'm gonna start crying to work with the men who own restaurants on the street consistently inviting them to our functions, consistently reaching out and trying to be neighborly to them and they have consistently worked against me in every way possible. And I'm honestly sick of it. I'm sick of seeing their faces trying to come up against something when I've invited them in on the process and I've asked for their input on things like our street party in which it was a neighborhood block activity. And you know, I'm fine to close down down home kitchen and move on with my life but what I don't like is to see a perfectly good idea that would be great for our neighborhood kids, old people, derailed by people who aren't even willing to step 50 feet over in a parking lot and ever do me the courtesy of speaking to me. And that's been my experience for three years with the people that are in this room right now that have a problem with this parklet and I just coming from the South, I'm not used to gentlemen behaving in such a way and I'm gonna be very honest with you about that. So that's my take on the feedback that I've gotten from a certain group of people on the block. And I will say we've constantly been vandalized, constantly have people that are over served and throwing up, vomiting, urinating and defecating on the side of my building. And do you know who picks that up in the morning at 5 a.m.? Chucho, Mark, Maggie, Jacqueline and myself we're the ones cleaning that up every morning. So to come and have a big problem with the parklet after we're having to deal with this is in my mind way over the top. I'm gonna stop there. I can answer any specific questions because Eleanor Bacon's daughter Tolia Stoner off the architect took this project pro bono and did all the architectural design, stepped away from Norwich University where she works and designed this because she and Otto felt as parents of Union Elementary School kids that it would be so beneficial to the kids at Union Elementary School. So I'm happy to answer any questions that you guys might have. Do you wanna go ahead? I guess my, so for the counselors who weren't here for our parklet-oriented discussion I voted against the original ordinance not because I'm against parklets but specifically because I am concerned about the idea of taking this public space and making it private and only usable by patrons of a certain business. So I would be very supportive of this if it was just a general public parklet where people could get stuff from your takeout window and go sit but folks from other restaurants or people just hanging out downtown could go sit as well. I'm a little bit concerned especially given the feedback, not from other restaurants but from some other businesses that they're concerned about parking and I'm concerned about parking given that specifically with this summer and I am concerned about the size, the three spaces. So I was definitely in the minority last time. I think I was the only one who voted against the ordinance to begin with so I may be completely in the minority here. Well, I think it's absolutely worth considering those things. I moved up here from Asheville, North Carolina and when I was a little girl growing up that was a ghost town and it was the creative entrepreneur who invested private capital. You'll notice I don't have a loan for this. I'm investing our money in this, okay? I'm not asking anybody to give me money. They were the ones that lifted Asheville from a ghost town to being a vibrant downtown. So sometimes I feel like you have to sacrifice a few parking spots to do something creative and exciting that draws people into your downtown to spend money and not just to go to a chain restaurant in Williston or not just to keep going to Waterbury, drinking at Waterbury, you know what I mean? So I just feel like it's cost-benefit analysis and in my mind, the editor of Yankee Magazine just wrote me a handwritten note and published us as a centerfold in their six-month travel guide and said your breakfast is my favorite breakfast in New England. So that's the kind of draw I wanna see into Montpelier because I want Montpelier to not just be a place that people want to live. I want it to be a place people wanna come and visit and spend their dollars too in order to sustain the lifestyle of the people that wanna have shops here because we can't do it with the money from 8,000 people, you know what I mean? It's just mathematically impossible. So you kinda have to sacrifice sometimes, you know? So I guess my only question is, would you be willing to consider making it open to the public generally? That's not what the ordinance asked me to do. Carlo and Ben said that's not what they were asked to do. If you guys wanna go back to the beginning for this season and rewrite your ordinance and all that, I think that not only Carlo and Ben, I don't know who the third person is that you referred to, but everyone's gonna, they're all gonna reconsider staffing these parkings. We have to clean them. We have to have people that are making sure no one is, they're not drinking too much. We have to monitor them. That's labor dollars every hour. Do you see what I mean? So I think the matter is it's expensive to do that. If the city of Montpelier wants to write us a check, we can calculate the labor dollars that would be involved in us, taking care during a busy day of the amount of people coming through, kids spilling things, but you don't wanna have a space that no one's monitoring because then it becomes full of garbage. I mean, look at the spot over by Charlie O's. I mean, it's often very dirty. That's the third park that we have is the one that's right out there. Okay, it's often very dirty and it's become a spot for, there's nothing wrong with our homeless community using it. They sit at our outdoor tables after we're done over hours. I often give them a free cup of coffee, but is that the point of a parklet? I mean, that's just my question basically from a business perspective. But if that's what the city council decides, that's up to you guys and what your intention is. Any other questions, Rosie? Nope. Any other questions? Go ahead, Donna. I have, reading this, it says that you can't have it open to the public dealing with alcohol. And so as long as you're serving alcohol in there, your tables, you can serve alcohol there as long as it's private. But as soon as we open during your business hours, those tables to be serving alcohol, then there's a conflict with the ordinance and our licensing process. So that's something we have to look at when we're gonna do it. It isn't that we couldn't, Rosie, just that we'd have to change that. And you're gonna have to deal with the fact that in a tiny town, none of your restaurants here are gonna be able to survive without alcohol. Right now, all we sell is Bloody Marys and Mimosas and it's so tiny. But these guys who do real nighttime business, like the Langdon Street Tavern and Three Penny, I mean, and so it's not fair then. Do you see what I'm saying? So it's very tricky. I wouldn't wanna be on city council. I think we have a very hard job. Rosie, so I have a little bit of confusion around that because when I looked at the review by the city departments that I think that the police chief was under the impression that there wouldn't be alcohol served there. We corrected that. He did email us to ask us that. Okay. And we did correct that because we already have an outdoor consumption license for our outdoor seating and a variance that allows us to walk a beer across the sidewalk just the same way Carlo and Ben do it, positive pie, it's exactly the same. So I didn't see that. So can I just confirm with Bill that the police chief saw that and was still good with the application? Donna, do you have other questions? It's just a couple. One, I have a bias. I like to see Langdon considered as one of the streets that we do a lot of street closures on and give more restaurants a chance to be outside. So looking at how small Langdon Street, three spots for one seems like, well, we were only thinking of two or three parklets and we may definitely will need to look at this and revive it. I'm just a little confused of the drawing. If this is your border between the traffic and the tables, and are there just seats on one side? Have you been to the positive pie parklet? It's almost exactly the same. They have like a bench, yeah. So you can slide in on the street side. Yeah, because it's very narrow. I mean, it's very, very narrow space. Right. Yeah, and in terms of street closures, the more the merrier. I think that this is a wonderful street and I support all of our neighbors and I know that it's important to all of them. But I don't think they're mutually exclusive when you're being smart about business because the more I's on the street, the more people on the street, the more someone wants to go there. You know what I mean? So it just draws people in when there's activity in terms of business. And my understanding when we approve this, what we have now for parklets, it's a three year minimum of three years, is that correct? We grant it for three years. Three years is what I read. Unless there's major problems. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Connor. Yeah, I think first of all, I'm kind of with Donna on the all or nothing approach there. You know, if we're chipping away parking spaces on Langdon Street, I would almost favor like looking at closing the thing down for the summer at least. But that aside, did you look at Main Street as an alternative location? Maybe too much carbon monoxide? I wouldn't want my kids sitting out there. I think it's very unsafe. I watch out our windows. You have to understand, I punched in all the windows to the side of that building with the help of design review committee. And I have a very good, visible shot all day long of everything happening in Deontail Montpelier in that corner. And the way people speed and they're texting on their cell phones, I don't think it's safe. And I wouldn't want to put money or people that I love jutting out onto Main Street. And it's a very elderly community, honestly. And a lot of people driving shouldn't even be driving. So I just think it's dangerous. I'm just going to say now, I'm fine to do whatever you guys want. You see what I'm saying? But I just want to express that like, I don't want to be bullied. That's the only thing I'm saying, okay. Well, I'm really excited to support this. So if there's other folks from the community who'd like to comment, please. Yeah, so there's a couple of you here. So you would say your name and my name is Yvonne Bob. I own Global Gifts on Langdon Street. A number of the merchants on Langdon Street have concerns about there being a park or picking up three spaces. And we brought our concerns together, which most of you know about. These are things that I specifically want to say to the council. I'm not great at public speaking, so. It's okay. So I just want to make a few points. One is that I believe previously the parklet proposal required the business to inform neighbors at some point before it was approved. Nobody on Langdon Street knew about this until the Montpelier Business Association meeting on Wednesday when it was announced there's going to be a park. So I really think that is unfair that we're not giving notice to put in our, you know, to have a say in how this is going to impact us. I think that should be part of the process. I think it was previously, from what I've heard, from other businesses. I dislike the idea of a parklet as a commercial together, which I think is what you were saying. I like it as a community space. The other parklet that used to be on State Street was open to everybody. It felt like a community space. Anybody could use it. I think there was an issue with getting it picked up periodically. I think that could be dealt with, but we all as businesses have our rental space in which we make our money. Some of us have some sidewalk space we can use. The idea of increasing a business is basically their business area by taking up public space that is needed, in this case for parking, I'm just opposed to. I don't like the positive pie parklet for that very reason. And Mary Alice made it clear that she needs to make more money to serve the kind of food she wants. She wants to be open at dinner time. So I think you made it very clear that increasing your revenue is part of your concern. And she can increase her hours to do that at dinner time. I'm not sure she needs to increase her square footage to do that. Langdon Street has 10 businesses. Eight on the ground floor, two upstairs. We have 20 parking spaces. And I don't think it's a secret to anybody, or surprise anybody, that we have a issue with a shortage of parking in town. This winter, there was a lot of construction where the workers bagged meters for weeks on end. And people come in saying, oh, I've been wanting to stop here, but there's no, there was no way to park. And people, studies have shown people will not, will often will not park unless they can see your business where they're parking from, you know, line of sight. And I guess the last point I wanna make is, I'm very much in favor of the takeout window. I'm sure that will bring more pedestrians down the street. I think that is a great idea, but he's also gonna create a parking issue when people wanna stop for a minute to pick up their dinner or their meal on the way home, and they're gonna wanna stop and park somewhere where we already always have people parking in unmetered spaces on the street, parking in CAX's lot, or a new river outdoors lot, we're blocking those folks in. So to take away three parking spaces right there when you're gonna have people who are gonna wanna stop quickly, pick up their food and go, I think makes no sense to give up those parking spaces when they're gonna be needed more with the takeout window. So those are my personal issues. I know a number of the businesses feel similarly and have additional concerns, and one resident on the street who just found out about the park today is not happy about it, and I think she may have contacted some of the councilor. So that's all I have to say. Thank you. I didn't expect I would be speaking, and frankly, my name is Susan Vanfield Abdo, and I don't frequent Mary Alice's restaurant that often, but as I look around this room, I basically see adults, and I am so in favor as a community member of Mary Alice's proposal because she is a gem in our community. So I have a young, younger son who is 40. He has kids. The kids had a great time walking to Mary Alice's restaurant. I didn't go because I had a slight injury, but it was just so wonderful, and we're trying to promote a walking community, and to squelch this is really sad. You know, when my son who grew up in this community was able to go and play pool, when he was a young kid, there was a pool building near the police station. It was great because the police could monitor the pool place, and you know, and it was freedom, and we have a whole group of high school kids that would love to come and get a creamy in this town, and be able to sit and be with their friends. We don't think of our kids. So really, I just hope Montillier doesn't become so stuffy that we don't think of our kids, okay? That's all I want to say. You know, here we're trying to bring young families into our community, but oh, we're not gonna do a parklet. You know, that is ridiculous, you know? So, that's all I ask. Anyone else? Any girl wants? I'd like to speak on this because Steven would agree again. I have had the opportunity to have to navigate that street when a semi coming around got stuck in that very corner and could not back out into Main Street. In 30, 40 minutes, I had to run to every business and try to find somebody who owned one of the cars to get that car moved, to get that semi to be able to move forward. I'd like to support kids. I like to support creamies. I think a more appropriate place for expansion of downhomes. Beautiful food menu would be in the back lot, similar adjacent to where the Onion River Parklet was. The private side lot at the rear door of downhomes. But the sidewalk on that side of Langdon is not the same sidewalk. It's half the width of the sidewalk in front of Positive Pie. So there's a very, basically you'd be privatizing the sidewalk because nobody's gonna wanna run the gauntlet between the servers and the tables on that side of Langdon. So you're gonna force everybody from the crosswalk side over to the bank side in order to go up Langdon. I am all for supporting more frequent closing on Langdon Street. Planned and noticed and on those occasions, it would be perfectly fine for down home to expand out into the street parking, farmer's market idea, but not on a regular basis for the season to close a public sidewalk. I'm Morgan and Cherry Avenue. I choose to live in Montpelier because I wanna be able to walk and go to things. I went and had appetizers with my great aunt and my parents at J. Morgan's before coming here. I walked down. I walked back over here. I'll walk home when we're done. And I think there should be sampling more of that. I like the parklets we have had. I think there should be sampling more. I may be undercutting my argument on this one. Frankly, I think you should close Langdon Street, period. I realize it would cause significant change for some businesses, but I think that the benefit to the city would be huge. So I think there's lots of, for all of those reasons, it's very good to have a parklet. I haven't looked at the architectural studies as to why it's three, not two, or any of that. That's trust the DRC or DRB and you folks. But so I think that for all those reasons, it would be great to have the parklet. I also am concerned from what I hear from some of the council, which it sounds like at the penchord, the desire to treat this application differently from the existing parklets. And I don't know exactly why, which is why I don't have a stronger comment, but that feeling is one that is worrisome to me, that that's the sense I get from the council, that this will be treated that other parklets in the valley. Anyone else? Okay, Peter. And then I'd love to move on. Peter Kalman. I just want to make a general comment, not specifically to this particular parklet because I think other people have pointed out that it should be treated the same way the other parklets were treated. I just came from a five week trip around the country and I saw a lot of really vibrant communities. What made them vibrant was people on the street, not parking on the street. And I think we need more of that. We'd love to see restaurants along the river. We have parking lots along the river, crazy. The more people, the fewer cars downtown, the better, I think. Thank you. Oh, yes, go ahead. I just want to say, I talked to the Indian River guys, they're going to put that parklet back up this year too, so it'd be 20 feet away. Would you mind introducing yourself? Brad from Langstreet Tavern. Thank you. But Indian River's going to be putting that parklet out that you already have for free for every individual to use already. They're going to be doing really soon, so I don't see the purpose of it. Two parklets right next to each other. And taking them three spaces on that small street is not good for all the other businesses. Thank you. My name is Scott and I also work at Langstreet Tavern. I have a unique perspective on the streets. I've worked on that same street for 19 years. And I've seen the way the street has been treated with street parties, closures, et cetera. And I worry actually about the future of street closures with a parklet not only closing off one entire sidewalk for foot traffic, but also being immediately before any event and with any event happening, how the interaction might occur. I'm not sure if that's something that would be an immediate no for the parklet, but it seems to be the kind of thought that it might need to be put into this without a simple yes, let's clear it, no let's not, maybe we floor this for a little bit. Think about all that's been said here today and come back and maybe at a further point in the future when we've all looked at every issue, not just theirs, ours, and everyone in between, but just the idea that there are a lot of nuances to this and when it all is considered, maybe a lot more thought needs to be put into it before those actually cast. All right, thank you. All right, what's your desired team? Jack. I'm clear of what you're asking. Well, would you like to make a motion? Would anybody like to make a motion? I would move that we adopt Down Home Kitchen's Parklet application as drafted. Is there a second? A second, so we can have some discussion. Okay, further discussion. I'm concerned about this. I've been reviewing the ordinance and it's hard for me to understand based on what the ordinance says, how we're supposed to make a decision. It doesn't seem to me to give any standard for saying yes or saying no. And that's kind of troubling to me. And I wasn't here when the ordinance was passed. I wonder if there's anyone who might have some thoughts about that. So I think I can say, I mean, when we allowed this to happen, I mean, one of the thoughts for keeping it with the council was that, I mean, this was experimental. We wanted to see if it worked. And I think the feedback from our pilot time with this was that it was very successful. Most people really did like the Parklets. I mean, I think it's conceivable that we could rewrite the ordinance so that the power for approving or not approving them stays with the DRC or the VFDRB. But for now, that's with us. So I mean, we need to look at, does it meet the requirements to have all of the staff reviewed it and approved it? You know, is it safe? Is it going to work with other events, et cetera? That's, so if they approve it, then beyond that, it's our discretion. You know, do we think this is a good thing for the city? And there, you know, there is a provision for strictly public Parklets that are non-commercial, but there is also a provision for commercial Parklets. Yes, Rosie. And when we had that discussion, I think that we did also discuss whether or not to limit it to, you know, to in a row as the positive pie one is. And the discussion was sort of that we wanted to leave it up to the council to decide if that was, you know, if more in a row was appropriate in that particular spot or not. So I think we specifically didn't limit it to two or one or whatever in order to give ourselves the opportunity to evaluate and make a decision, not out of a sense of we were gonna approve, you know, anything if somebody met these requirements. But I don't, I agree with Jack. I don't think that we've made it particularly apparent to businesses what our standards are and I don't think that's fair. So I think that this ordinance definitely, as we've been presented with a real scenario, could use some work. Well, and I think we're learning through it too. I mean, in the meanwhile, I think this is gonna be a great thing for downtown. I'm excited to sit there myself. So, I mean, I hope that we wouldn't change the rules on the fly, but I mean, if in the future we decide, and we don't want three in a row, then, you know, we can change it for next time. I guess that's what I would hope. Yes, Donna? I didn't wanna interrupt you, I just wanted to be next. You're great, nice. I wasn't trying to apply the ordinance difference. I was trying to really be cautious because it is as a bad corner. But then as I'm sitting here, cars are there. And if the truck can't get by the car, then it would be in the same spot. And in that particular location, it makes more sense to use all three than to have a car parked beside of it right there. So, I feel we have, in the past said, we would leave it up to design review to look at it and make the standards versus trying to dictate from our perspective, use the expertise we have for looking at the design, the fire department looked at the police for safety. So, as it's presented, I feel, yes, we need to do more work, but I feel this merits being accepted and giving them a three-year trial and see what happens. And if we, meanwhile, we should be working on the policy before we take any more applications in. But this was submitted with what sits there today. So, I feel we should support it on what sits there today. So, I would second your motion. Oh, you already had second. I support your motion. Glenn? Just to clarify, was there a period when part of the application was review or consent by neighboring businesses or other people on the street? This is the first application since we've had an ordinance. The others were done as trial periods. And there was the public one in the street. And we got some feedback about that. And that was moved. And then positive pie did theirs. And there was, I don't know exactly about the reach out. There was definitely a trial period that came into the council when discussed it. I'm not sure about notice. We actually were talking and staffed today that we noticed that the ordinance doesn't have a notice provision. And I think for future, we're going to look at it. Certainly should. But I don't know if there was a requirement or just an urging. But there was no regulation before it was a trial period. This is application one under. We have our first edit for the next one. And have there been applications for parklets that the city has turned down so far? Or ideas for them? No, this is the first one under the ordinance. First application or consideration as a, no, the only other two were the two that the public wanted to positive pie. There was the one that became the pocket park. Correct. But that was not necessarily at the city's direction. Okay. Right. That was a student project. Okay. Connor. If this were approved, would anything preclude Langdon Street Tavern or Sweet Millices from opening up parklets as well if they apply? As far as the proximity? The number. Yeah. The current ordinance limits six total parking spaces in downtown. So currently positive pie would take two. This would be three. And right now there's one with the bike parking parklet. So that's the six. So unless the council changed the number, let's do ordinance change with a total number of parking spaces. But absent that requirement, there would be nothing to prevent other people from. Ashley. I guess I'm a little confused and it could just be my own general malaise. But it's, what I heard was Mary Alice's application was the only one we've received. So does positive pie not have to do an application for this grant here? That was part of their pilot. And they did still have to get their flood permit but they had already been reviewed for all the years. And so conceivably then though, so next year, so if this is granted tonight, this would be for three years. And then so next year, there would be an additional three spots that would open up or? conceivably. I'm trying to think if there should be two or three years. Okay. I don't think. Okay. Depending on what year. Or we could decide right. Okay. Are we a reset team? All right. No more discussion. All right. All in favor of please say aye. Aye. Aye. I'd love for. Oppose? No. No. Okay. I think we'll support it too. So, Gary's, thank you. Thank you all for your thoughts on this and I'm looking forward to seeing it. Great. All right. So moving on. Tax stabilization. Fred, do you want to come up? Fred's sitting. This is the second required hearing on the same application that you heard last time. There's a substance change. I would report that Fred and I met on Monday with a prospective tenant. So I can tell you that he is actively seeking and has good prospects, but there is not a commitment. Yeah. It's a type of tenant. It would certainly be. No promises. There are comments or questions. Yes. Go ahead, Fred. One clarification from the Times-Argus article that was in, which is that it was suggesting that we're asking for half of the taxes and it's half of the municipal portion of the taxes. And also the address is one home farm way. I think our office address was used. And I just wanted to make a general comment having had a chance to reflect on the last meeting, which is that we've been in the redevelopment business in Montpelier for 20 years. This is our fifth project. Three of those have benefited from your tax stabilization program. The folks that we deal with are varied. We serve to create space for non-profit healthcare professionals, education administrators, land conservation professionals on the non-profit end and also, and this is just limited to Montpelier, also dairy farm co-op managers, environmental consultants and aerospace firms. And we take notice when the city has these incentives and when we choose to make investments either on speculation or in hopes of securing a tenant sooner after, we're pleased to hear that the personal property has also been added to the tax stabilization incentives. We follow, being a project junkie, I follow some of your work and certainly nice to see that an economic development strategic plan was done. Glad to see that you've worked to set up the Montpelier Development Corporation and just wanted to say we have a passion for this work and we consider when the council grants approval these types of incentives that you're basically declaring the city open for business and I think with all the projects in the pipeline the next few years looks very promising to me, so thank you. So really we need to have a public hearing on this so I'm gonna open the public hearing. Penny, one from the public has comments on this tax stabilization possibility. If no one does, I'm going to, I guess we could close it. And so it doesn't say anything in here about voting to approve it, but I assume that we do see that. Yes, you do. I believe under the recommendation at the end was to, maybe under the cover sheet it says the recommendation is to approve it with the conditions as per the memo, which would be at this point it would be the level three approval and with the deferral provide them the option to come back if they meet the job and demonstrate that they meet the job criteria and option the apply for, which is we've done with at least one other project in years. So I'm gonna close the public hearing if no one has anything to say. Comments from the council. I saw Donna first and Ashley. I was just gonna make the motion and then we can discuss it. But to approve the Montpeyre it's called Auditorium, LALC, Tax Stabilization Application with Conditions as per the city manager's memo would be a levels three. With an option. With an option. One year option to come back. With a one year option. There's a second. Check. For the discussion. Ashley, there was it. So one of the things that I have struggled with consistently with the request for tax stabilization is that we ask our residents to pay their fair share and I appreciate your comments about the kinds of businesses that you do this work for. Because I think those are the kind of businesses that we here in Montpeyre want to attract. What I struggle with though is that Montpeyre is not an affordable place for us to live. It is incredibly expensive. Rents are high here. It is a beautiful place to live. It's the best place I've lived. And I love it here. And I struggle with knowing that the money that I'm paying in rent which translates into taxes paid to our city subsidizes private ventures which do add to our local economy. And I love that. It just, to me, there are other ways that the city can encourage these. And I intend to vote against this, but I want you to know that I do support you in other ways. And I think that there are other ways as a city that we can support these partnerships. To me, tax stabilization and tax benefits like that are not the smartest best way to encourage that kind of development. But I appreciate all of the work that you have done on behalf of the city over the years. And I realize that probably sounds a little hollow knowing that I don't support this. But I understand how much work goes into these projects and how much it takes out of you and your family's business to do this. But I wanna be cognizant of the fact that we are, in essence, having taxpayers sort of cover that in a way. Or at least we have to continue paying our share and some businesses don't. So for me, I'm not persuaded by any of these. And I did vote against the last one as well, which was, I believe, the Caledonia spirits request. But I do think that there are other ways that I would be more than willing as a city to support your development ventures because they think they're important. But this is not the way for me. If I could just respond. What we find is that while the capital city is attractive on many fronts, utilities, schools, et cetera, restaurants, that for the businesses that we serve, that they're operating in a county, kind of a county setting. And I read your TIF report and Waterbury and Barrie score higher. And I think as a city resident for 20 years, we're playing a little bit of a catch up on both growing the grand list and growing jobs. And this is really one of the only incentives that are available. And the businesses do take notice of that incentive. Payroll, dwarfs, lease payments, and by bringing in jobs, it's probably not gonna necessarily solve housing because it's creating additional housing demand. But I don't know whether it's the chicken or the egg, but you have some people who relocate here and then look for work and then you have other people that come to a certain business that's just located here and then find housing, but it's all interrelated. And I will pretend to tell you which comes first, but commercial housing projects are out of this world. Yes. Right. Nope, I know. And I do appreciate that. And I do, I think that these are the kinds of complex questions about how we move forward as a city that I am most interested in. And for me, there are other incentives that the city could create. And I appreciate that it is. I work in Barrie myself. So I understand sort of what the Barrie market looks like versus what it looks like here. And it is a challenge. And it's hard to sort of bridge the two very different communities who are quite the same, in fact. But I do and I appreciate your comments. And it's certainly something that I think as a council and as a city, we need to start addressing more proactively. If I can add, I've spoken to other business owners and downtown merchants and they certainly, as much as they like to see more people living in downtown, they also like to see purchasing power. So if you're bringing in on an annual basis on a couple of hundred, 25, 50, couple of hundred jobs, that has an impact on the downtown and it's very positive. So I am going to support this. And a really important key for me in supporting this is your commitment that you would not be poaching jobs from downtown Montpelier, that you would be bringing, you would be looking to bring in a business from outside of Montpelier. And so you gave that commitment at the last meeting. And so I'm therefore willing to support this with my conditions. Comments. All right, so we have a motion, I think, right? And it's been seconded. Any further discussion? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Nay. Nay. So motion carries. And, great, thank you. Did the motion carry? The motion did carry. Yeah, yeah, the motion did carry. I'll just stick around for that. Thank you all very much for your time. We're gonna have a couple of closings. Okay, thank you. All right, so the tax increment financing application was what we would be going into more now, but that particular vote needs to be warned in especially a long time. And so we just need to pick the, or set the dates. You wanna explain that? So we are right. We had to, in doing the due diligence on this, we required the final hearing and vote needed a 15 day properly warned period. So we actually did warrant it on Monday. So it will be warranted in time for the 23rd, our next meeting. And we'll have to require second informational hearing but we're, the first one counted just as we have to have the second one with a proper notice. The warning is included, the link to the video from last meeting. We'll be taking public comment during the whole 30 day period in between the last meeting and this meeting. So this, it won't be as long as the presentation won't be as long, but there'll be a brief public informational meeting at the next meeting and then we'll end up with a vote and we'll go ahead with the TIF application. And so we don't even need to vote on this. It's already been warranted. It's already been warranted for that. Okay, I guess it's just a footnote then. Somebody doesn't wanna do it. Rosie, can I just ask, I've seen a couple letters from the business organization supporting it but we haven't received any other public comment other than that or you're collating all that comment. I don't think we've received anything other than those from the business. Okay, so I guess we're gonna move on then. All right, so the water resource recovery facility presentation is where we are at now. And this is the mediest part of our evening. I'd call your meaty too, your meaty too. Super meaty. Meaty, meaty. Are you, yeah, we do have a power point. Okay, I'm gonna move in. Start with the introductions before we get to the power point. Kurt Modica, city engineer. We've been working on an upgrade at the plant for some time now. Did you move the speaker over? Yeah, sure. I'm only gonna nag you when I can't hear you. Yeah, that's okay. Important that's what you're saying. To my right is Chris Cox, he's our chief operator. He's been with the city for about six years. He's been our chief operator for the last two. He's done a lot of great things at the plant, a lot of energy improvement projects. We'll talk a little bit about tonight. And this is Wayne Elliott. He's the city's consultant engineer. When we started looking at the upgrade, the summer of 2016, we went through a process, a state funding process, and it's called the State Revolving Loan Fund, and went through a consultant selection process. All Genelliot was our selected consultant about halfway through preliminary engineering of that upgrade. We were presented with an Organics Energy Project with ESG who's got some members here in the back if we end up having some questions at the end of the presentation. So we sort of put the preliminary engineering report on hold, but we thought it was important to retain a consultant engineer for the city as we moved through the Organics Energy Project. So we've been bouncing ideas off Wayne, having him review things for us as we work through this process, and it's been a really great asset for us. Now with that, we'll just jump into the presentation here. We set everything up and try it, Bill. What do you think? No, you think? Yes, that one. Falling asleep down here. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Ooh. All right, so that's off. Now we're off. What, now? I don't know what he's saying. The old guy has his heads up there. I ain't gonna hit you. I've got mine. I got mine. I guess you're sitting right here. I didn't go in the wrong way. Yeah. So this presentation is really just a status update. We've got some new council members that are not familiar with the project. We did have a tour with the three new members, and I think it was really good. You guys asked some great questions. And so we're not asking for any decisions or any votes tonight. It's just sort of to get everybody up to speed in what we've been working on, and where we're gonna go from here, what our next steps are, and then to answer any questions you might have. So just to give a little background on where we started, our steady-state master plan had a $3.5 million project slated for the plant. That was basically to get us by the next 10 years. But as we got into preliminary engineering with Aldrogen Elliott, we started to see that there was a greater need at the plant. There was some additional equipment that needed to be replaced that would not be covered by that $3.5 million budgeted amount. So after doing some initial analysis, we came up that we need at least 7.1 million. And this is a little more than I think we'd presented to the council about eight months ago because we did escalate construction costs. Every time you come, it goes up. Yeah, well, the longer you wait, the more things cost you. Yeah. So right now it's looking at 7.1 million, and then another 4.9 million, somewhere around year 10 or 11. So that's just sort of keeping what we have going. That's our baseline project. Our staff has done a lot of in-house projects. We've done a lot of work with efficiency Vermont, improving efficiencies, reducing operating costs at the plant, and even as much as some fairly large pump replacements, which we saw during the tour. So we have a lot of capabilities in-house, but the need right now is just more than we can accomplish without some outside contracting. So just to sort of further compliment Kristen and his team at the plant, there's been some awards given. There's been the award of efficiency Vermont for energy management and the Governor's Award for Environmental Excellence. So just a couple of things that our plant has been recognized for. And from that recognition, an article was written about the work that they've done at the plant in a trade magazine called Treatment Plan Operator, TPO. ESG, who is energy systems group, who is our design build consultant right now. They saw that reached out to the city through MEAC, and MEAC facilitated the meeting with TPW, and that's sort of how the whole organics to energy concept started out. So just a brief explanation on energy performance contracts. It's a way to set up a fixed price with financial guarantees, rather than the route that we traditionally go at is an engineer doing the design work, bidding that work out for a contractor. There is some risk and change orders or change in scope of that. So it's just a different way to go about it, and that's what we're working on now with ESG. So through the opportunity of an organics energy contract, there's a potential for an additional 22,000 gallons of liquid organic waste and the associated revenue that you can receive from that waste. There are receiving station improvements which people have been down to the plant during the day. There's quite a backup of trucks. There's a lot of demand for a facility to treat septage and leachate, and by having two receiving stations, we'll be able to double our capacity for getting those trucks out of there. And then the other opportunity is the guarantees. So by working with the design build, energy services contract, you have some financial guarantees built into the contract so that the city doesn't absorb all the risk associated with the improvements in the associated revenue. So just to summarize the options we're looking at here, the base case is that 7.1 million with another 4.9 at year 1011. There is a sort of a middle option which is we're calling it AI-OE, so it's aging infrastructure and organics to energy mix. So that does have the receiving station improvements and it has some digester improvements, just not the optimal mixing and heating. As opposed to the full energy neutral project which is really setting the facility up to use the methane, the excess methane, really for power or some other identified beneficial use. There is use of the methane under both of those AI-OE projects, primarily for heating the buildings in the wintertime, but you're really maximizing gas protection under the energy neutral project. So this is just a picture of what areas would be worked on under the different scenarios. The yellow is the AI work, that's really what we're looking at initially, and the blue is what would be incorporated into improvements under the Organics to Energy project. So, and then the back here is where the CHP would go if that's selected, which we're calling a phase two project right now, we can talk about a little bit more at the end. So I'll just look at some of the financials. This is really high level financial outlooks. We've, we're still fine tuning this a little bit, but in general, you can see the difference of the impact of the different projects, the scale of the impacts, the base case, so roughly a $300,000 budget impact annually on debt service, and then about 90 or 92,000 for the two Organic to Energy projects, which we're calling a phase one. And then if you go to, we're looking at two different potential rates if the city were to go to be a CHP project, there's two potential rates that we could get for selling that power to the utility, to the grid. On average, the last couple applications have been around 9.2 cents per kilowatt hour. We did have some discussions with VEPI, which is the organization that manages these power, sale agreements for the Public Utility Commission. And if the city were to lobby to have a set aside for biomass, which is what we're proposing under this project, then there's a likely a strong possibility that we could get a 12.5 cent per kilowatt hour rate. So those are just the two different financial, the budget impacts for those two different rates on a phase two project. And then underneath that, you can see the impacts to carbon dioxide production. So every project will reduce our emissions. Some of that has to do with trucking the solids because we're gonna be reducing the amount of solids with these upgrades. Some of it has to do with heating the plant and reducing oil use. But in all cases, we will be reducing our footprint, carbon footprint. Can you separate for me columns two and three? I'm not sure I understand. Sure. So column, they're both an organic energy project there. The difference is really what we would do for digester improvement. So that's the breaking down of the solids and the associated methane production from that. So the 16.1 million has a much more robust mixing system for the digesters and it also does include storage for the gas. So there's a different type of cover that's sort of like a balloon that would go on the biggest digester. Yes, we talked about that. Yeah, so yes. One such a larger amount of reduction of CO2. That's huge compared to. 37 to 115 is what you're looking at. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of that's the solids breakdown by so by having the improved mixing and heating, you really break down that solids and you have a lot less trekking. Well, this is a graphical of the budget impacts for the different scenarios. Same sort of thing, just put it in graph form. And just to give an update of what we've been working on, so it's been a few months since we've come to council and talked about this project. I already sort of went through those discussions we've had with VEPI about the potential set aside to get the higher power rate or the higher rate for selling power. Another big piece that we got from ESG was their basis of design document. It really went into the technical details of what they would do for chemical addition. You know, what the impacts which are really zero to what our effluent limits would be. So what we'd be discharging for phosphorus by taking in all these additional organic loadings, they ran it through a model that showed that there will be no negative impact on the quality of the effluent leaving the plant. So we did have Wayne look really carefully at that and did a full review and provided comments to ESG. They came back and answered all of our concerns. So we have a much better comfort level now with how the plant will operate following this project. And then also we've done some updates to the cash flows. Some of that in that basis of design document did have some changes to the way the plant would be operated as far as where chemicals would be injected. And so we incorporated that information. There's cost implications associated with the chemical use. And so we did then update the cash flow models which were shown in those previous slides. So I'll just touch on some of the concerns we raised with ESG about the changes at the plant. One is the effluent limits and they've shown that there will not be an impact on that. When you're talking about quality, are you talking about volume as well? It's annual pounds of phosphorus. State permitted limits. It's sort of both. I think that was a question that I had I think was hanging out there before was does this impact our permits? Right. And you're saying it doesn't. Right. The other thing is the capacity of the plant to take on really additional users. So we have, the city's talked a lot about wanting to promote housing economic development. We wanna make sure we have capacity at the plant to treat additional users that are coming on. So hydraulically the plant is only about two million out of potentially 50% right? Out of about four million. So we're roughly 50% on hydraulic capacity but what we're really concerned about is the organic capacity which is breaking down the bacteria or the- Breaking down the organics using bacteria. So it's really aeration capacity, biomass reactors. So right now we're at 51% on that. This project will bring us up to 82% but that still allows us, if you're looking at residential units where you could have, we'd have the capacity on the initial 1,000 homes. So there's still plenty of capacity. We're using a big chunk of it for this project but there is still plenty of room for growth for the city. And then just a touch base on what we're thinking for a two phase approach. There's a couple of things we wanna do before we move into, this is public works and the energy committee may wanna speak to this. There's a few members here that've been really involved with this project, really helpful, a great asset for us. But right now public works is, we're sort of thinking that we should split this into two projects if the council wants to pursue an organics energy project and a CHP project that we should do it under two separate contracts really. Other reasons for that is one is we really wanna have an opportunity to monitor how much methane we produce after we do an organics energy project. So we have a good feel on sizing the generator and just ensuring that we can get the right sort of waste stream to create the methane that we'd need to run a generator. There's a couple of different types of waste. There's dairy, there's septage which does not produce a lot of methane. Dairy would produce a lot. So we'd like to have some time to explore sort of what the market is. And really the other thing is to just make sure there's not an option that might be better than CHP. We did a high level look at some different options. Early on in this project, we looked at connecting to district heat. We looked at developing a methane fueled fleet for the city. None of those options were really economically viable but they also didn't incorporate any potential grant opportunities. So we'd like to explore that a little bit more before we move into a CHP. And just one other sort of concern that we have is that our permit, our discharge permit from the state is under appeal by CLF. It's gonna take some time to work through that. Those things usually could go on a couple of years before they're resolved. But we need an upgrade. So we don't wanna wait and not do anything. It's time. But it's just a concern we wanna make council aware of that our permit is under appeal. It's something that we're keeping an eye on. These kind of improvements have any impact on that appeal? Our discharge limits won't change from what we have now. So as far as what our quality of our water leaving, which is really what the appeal is about, that won't change. So the next steps. So we've decided that, well let's go step back for a second. A lot of the capacity that we're gonna get at the plant is by taking the septage out of the digesters where they go now, and moving them through the liquid stream process of the plant. So there's a relatively low organic load in septage as opposed to dairy waste or other high strength waste. In order to, but it is gonna change sort of how the plant's running. So what we want to do is take some time and try it. So we've actually purchased the equipment, Chris has purchased the equipment to send the septage directly into, this is the picture of the primary tank at the plant. That's where all the liquid from the pipes enters the plant. And when you see the trucks backing down to the discharge point, that goes straight to the digesters now. So we wanna take a, I think about two months, eight weeks time to really see what happens when we do this. The modeling from ESG indicates there won't be any problems, but we wanna see it in real time. So we're gonna need a little bit more time before we're ready to make any sort of recommendation, but that's one of our next steps. And then from that, we're gonna look at what do we need to do? Do we have to up our chemical use? Do we have to add a discharge point or injection point for the chemicals? And there are some recommendations in ESG's basis of design for that. So we're gonna be essentially follow their recommendations and ensure that everything operates the way the model shows it well. We also need to make sure the project can get permitted. So we need to take a, we need to have a meeting with Vermont DEC, go over the project and make sure there's not gonna be any pervading issues. We don't expect there will be, but we wanna make sure it's not a problem before we make any recommendations. And then we need to start talking to some of the haulers about what sort of rates we would be charging. There's really an anchor hauler that's called Hardigan Now. They were originally purchased by Wind River. So we're not, we're probably gonna wait maybe a month or so before we start having those talks, but it's something we just wanna explore a little bit before we move forward. And this is sort of along the same lines. We also wanna work out the contract with ESG if the council chooses to move forward with an organic energy project, work out the guarantee structure. There's what's called the measurement and verification protocol. So we have to verify that the savings they're showing in their cash flow models are actually achieved once the project's complete. We need to develop a method to measure that. We have a little bit more work to do on those cash flow models with the finance department and ESG. But for timing, we're sort of the latest, we could have a council approval of the alternative is September 26th. We'd like to have it before then, but that's really the end date to make a November bond vote. And then that would lead into an October 24th public hearing. So it's just sort of the timeline, the sort of latest timeline we could fit within to have a bond vote in November and then we'd be ready to go in the spring. We'd time that bond vote with the general election. So that's the overview and welcome any questions from folks. I have a comment, which is that I am really impressed with how much you guys have really dug into all these questions. And I had a lot of concerns. I'm sure you've heard. And as we're going through, you've answered a lot of those questions and it's clear that you really doing a lot of that legwork and backup work and I just really appreciate it. I know that's gotta have been very time consuming and I appreciate that you've done that. Thank you. So in the material that you gave us before tonight, that's available online, it's starting coming back to Glenn's question about, okay, what's the difference between column two and column three? So as I understand it, there's the agent infrastructure and organic energy that's column two and then it's called phase one and column three. So and I also appreciate in that document, I think it's 4.0 has a side-by-side comparison of what that all entails. And so I just wanted to make a comment about this. So it's just really getting into the specifics of what the difference is. I mean, it looks to me like maybe I'm just bringing my own like what I understand to this. So please, you don't help me if I'm wrong here, but it seems to me that you would probably need digester covers so that you could collect the gas and flare properly. Is that, are those two things linked? We have digester covers currently. It'd be a different style of cover. Okay, that's what I'm trying to do, so okay, great. And then, I mean, as I was reading a little later, it says, you know, the gas collection and flares are old and so they need to be upgraded and need to be more reliable. I just, I mean, on the face of it, the gas collection and flare seems like a priority to me. I would like that. I would want that to be up-to-code, reliable. But I'm curious for your thoughts on that, though. I'd have to look at the exact section. It's all up-to-code. Some of it is grandfathered in. The flare is one of the concerns. If we were to do any significant changes to the flare, we would have to move the flare and we'd have to move it towards actually where like, we're actually, Kurt had pointed out in the bunker away from, to get it away from the road and the digesters. But at the moment, we are in compliance because that flare was putting, it was grandfathered in. There, no worries. We've only done modifications to it. As far as the gas collection system, some of that's mixing. We've lost some capability to do mixing. So I think that's where that's brought up in there. And that's to do with some of the pipes, but it's not like there's methane gas leaking in the buildings or any real safety hazard. So if we were just going to go with the AI and cited not phase one, then we would be relying on the current infrastructure for a gas collection and flaring. Correct. That's correct. Yep. I mean, I'm sure we'll have more time to discuss this, right? Yep. I want to just flag this, something I was interested in. Yep. Other thoughts? Yes. This is maybe kind of a step backward, but just because I'm new to it, I want to, if it's okay, I want to lay out in very stupid language what I understand this whole thing to be. And you can check me. I was helping all of us. You can check me where I'm getting it wrong. Is that okay? Yes, please. So what I understand is we basically need to fix the water resource recovery facility. That's the aging infrastructure. It's all we need to fix it. That's expensive. To pay for it, we can build further infrastructure so that we can take in more waste from surrounding communities, charge them money, and that will pay for some amount of the fixing that we have to do anyways. That's exactly correct. Beyond that, once we start collecting all that waste, we'll be producing a lot more methane, and once we have all that methane, then we have the opportunity potentially to use it to create heat and power or some other alternative. To do that, we would have to build even more infrastructure, but we would get a lot closer to our net zero goals. Yeah, we'll call that, that's the phase two portion of it. That's the phase two of the CHP part. Yeah, build up our digesters so we can handle it and then evaluate it and look at the potentials like CHP, combined heat and power, producing electricity, that's what that comes down to. Okay, and at the moment what I'm hearing is that we might prefer to do it in two stages. We just do the aging infrastructure and start collecting waste, wait and see how much methane actually gets produced, and then move to, if we so choose, then move to hit the phase two and... Utilizing that thing? Right, and it was interesting to see the CO2 reduction, that second line. And all that is kind of an opportunity that's just come up in the course of this, that was not, you didn't go out to find ways to reduce CO2, it came out. Well, I think Kristen's team have been doing that for years, that's why they got noticed. So it was their staff, the staff's work that really got the recognition to the plant to get noticed by a company like ESG to have them reach out to the city, so. Let me act, Colin, so looking for opportunities from the city. It seems to me in some of the initial presentations, they talked about other places also going from organic to energy. If we delay further, we've already delayed and delayed this decision, is that going to put us behind, quote, our competition? Should we go to phase two? This is right away. Well, I mean, because we started this two years ago, I don't know, it seemed like a long time ago, you were educating me, Kurt. And so now I'm hearing another delay that if we don't do phase one until November, then what's your timeline for phase two, then I'm looking at, again, the haulers, where are they gonna go in the meantime? Are there going to be customers or are these other places that are thinking about or engaging in having the same sort of system, are they gonna be taking those haulers? Phase one secures the haulers, right? Okay. Phase one secures the haulers. Phase two, utilizing the gas that we're receiving by breaking down the material coming in our digester. So phase one secures the haulers. But as long as we stay in phase one, we're releasing, not capturing. A portion of it will be flared. Not released, flared too. Yes, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. A bunch of them. We're flaring it. We'll also be using a lot of it for heating. So there's beneficial use to the methane. Even without phase two. That's right. There will be beneficial use of the methane as there is currently. For both the digesters and the buildings, will we use methane for heating? So you said like you want to try out a couple months. That's a couple months after phase one is? No, that's right now. Monday. We're gonna start Monday. Monday, good. Good. So if phase one went in, town meeting means the money doesn't come until, well, it's voted in November. When would we react on it right away? If the bond was passed November, then they could begin work. They'll begin putting it out to bid to construct construction when the weather broke in the spring. Right, spring 2019. 2019. And then phase two, best scenario, what would phase two begin? Six months? Oh, I tell you this year. Full year, okay. That's my word. I want to see how the plant operates. Yeah, want to make sure we have all that gas there to. Make sure we have the, Yeah. Yeah. Call and speak to the question about the gas. Sure. Yeah. So I can speak as well. In Vermont, as far as the municipal, there's only three wastewater facilities that are going CHP currently. It's Essex Junction, Brattleboro, and South Burlington. None of those facilities really take in that additional high-strength waste or anything further. They just do the CHP on kind of a small scale because it's kind of a compliment to what they're already doing. So they're not, Montpelier would necessarily be competing in those facilities to give that high-strength waste, if you waited to go into that second phase of the CHP addition. So like one of the potential customers was Ben and Jerry's. And phase one would include them. Okay, and take care of them. Thank you. Thank you. Rosie, two comments. One is that I thought that part of the contract that we're contemplating signing put the onus on ESG to find the customers. And if they didn't, we were, they would make us whole. Is that still? Yeah. Um. That hasn't changed, right? Well, everybody wants to talk. You're gonna have Larry speak to that? Yes, sir. ESG? Yes, ESG. The answer to the question is yes, the contract ESG will help the city secure high-strength waste in stock spots, which will include septic, sludge, Ben and Jerry's, that's why we're going to use primary high-strength waste categories will be the Fawc, that's why we're going to use Fawc, Ben and Jerry's. And they'll be guaranteed, they'll be two guarantees, they'll be a savings guarantee. So we talked about reduction in landfilling, reduction in water use, reduction in energy. The other side of that is revenue, which one will come from receipt of additional high-strength waste, the second category will be revenue from the sale of power. Now, one of the questions was hanging on CHB. I think one of the things that would happen, and it would be a city decision, is from a due diligence standpoint, after you go through more of the preprocess that depurates for utility division, usually around April of each year, we put out more of a pig. So we usually look for this period now to start positioning a lot of means to try to get, I don't get into the weeds, I don't know if you can want to, but there's technology set aside, so do they have time? I don't think they've had any biomethane request for this removal of even power, most of it's been sold or they win. They've got categories for farm, which is happening in the past. So there's an interest in biomethane. So they're competitive proposals that the city would have to put in their proposal and propose the price that they might have in the long term, so 20 year term, for essentially a price per kilowatt hour for that 20 year period. So the process would be over that year is to position, try to lobby and get that set aside. And then it's still not a certain, there's still a lot of potential to somebody, but for more discussions, it's really, I think we use the term reasonable and the reasonable level of confidence that the city will be the only applicant for biomethane set aside and get that arranged. 12 and a half cents per kilowatt hour is what they call the cap. And that may change next year, but right now it's 12 and a half cents. So to get back to the question, yes, there's gonna be a revenue guarantee associated with the high strength waste that combined with the other states covers the cost associated with the potential energy. And just to be clear, lobbying is lobbying the legislature, right? Because that set aside, I believe, is in statute. 20, I'm using the term VEPI use, but essentially working, approaching PUC starting off with a letter. I think it was suggested that in our conversation from VEPI, they said you guys should start off using the letter from the mayor's office or city council for public works, send in a letter to PUC talking about what the city's intentions are on the project and really just getting on the radar, whatever activities will follow from that. So it would be, it would be with the PUC. I wanna look into that more because I'm having a hard time recalling. I had done a bunch of digging into that before and I believe at that point that the set asides were dictated by statute and so we would have had to get a legislative change but I may, that may not be correct. So I'm gonna do some followup research and hope that city staff would do that as well. Just- Set aside the capacity within the, I think they're there, but whether or not they get it. I just wanna make sure that we know who we're talking about lobbying and how successful we think we might be. So, my second question just briefly was about odor. Is there any impact on odor either way with this project? Yeah, so that's another reason for the pilot study. We do have some concerns about that. There's ways to mitigate it with the different types of chemical addition but we are gonna monitor that as well when we do this pilot study. Great, thank you. Oh, comments. Yes. Comments? Yes, please. So I'm Kate Stevenson. I'm a member of the Montpelier Energy Advisory Committee and I was here a couple weeks ago to give you all an update about the city's net zero goals and I just wanted to kind of zoom out from a lot of the details and try and give a little bit of context to this project and what the kind of impact it could have towards the city's net zero goals. So, when we presented, or a few weeks ago, we talked about there's three real buckets that we're trying to reduce in terms of energy use. Transportation, heating, and electricity. And this is a project that has the potential to have a significant impact in two of those buckets. In heating and electricity, you know, in either of these OE options, they are going to be producing more methane and basically maybe not eliminating 100% of the fuel oil use, but 90% is what you're proposing. So there's about 10,000 gallons of fuel oil every year for heating the plant. And so we'd be taking a big chunk out of that fuel oil bill and are just overall fossil fuel use for the city operations. And then, it's great to talk about the electricity and the dollar value of that electricity and you see that in all the graphs. But I just wanna give a little bit of context of how much electricity is that? Well, two years ago we did a one megawatt solar project for the city and the school district and this will produce more electricity than that. So it's more than the one megawatt of solar. And it would, those two combined, we would be net zero electric. You know, there's details about, does it count? But we would be in the city. We would know it counted. Right. We're using renewable electricity at a large scale. So I just wanna throw that out because I think we can talk about producing power, but is it like a little bit of power? Or is it a lot? It's a lot of power. So that's just my two cents. But I think there's other folks from the energy committee, other folks. Good evening. My name's Carl Johnson. I'm on the energy committee. I know some of you and some I don't. I've served on several committees for the city, including the Racial Committee and the Budget Review Committee and been involved in energy throughout my career. Worked all over the world on different kinds of energy projects that kind of consult on renewables and efficiency. But I've also been involved in a couple of dozen CHP projects, including the biogas. I just wanna say a couple of things. The city of Montville is very fortunate to have a really excellent team working on this project for the DPW, the consultants, ESG, certainly the energy committee, but also professional, respectful, moving forward. It's really impressive. I think that this project has a lot of potential. And I think that in part and totally because of the team, it's come a long way already. The development process is just that. It's a process, not an event. Going forward, I think the phased approach is spot on. We have the opportunity to address RECs and the contract and the power. We have an opportunity to look at additional capacity for use of the energy, and whether it's in the gas or whether it's in thermal energy, there's some value there that we might be able to realize. So, working on this in a phased approach is the right approach, it's the way to maximize value and to minimize risk. Projects really structured very well. The city has opportunities to walk away if something goes south, it's a well-structured project. There is some opportunity costs. There's environmental opportunity costs, wait, there's financial opportunity costs you've alluded to competition as well. So, just keep that in mind. I think the energy committee is eager to help answer any questions as we advise the council. So, I want you to consider including the costs of getting to net zero as you evaluate these options. In one option, you don't get to net zero at all, and as you progress looking at the other options, in some cases, you get closer. So, just if the city council is interested in the net zero policy, just consider the cost of getting to net zero when you consider each one of these options. I'm not criticizing the cost that isn't necessarily accounted for in all the options, but that's one way that the council can address it from a high level. Thank you. Thank you. Jeff, did you want to say anything? No. No. Okay. Okay. Okay. Go ahead. Go ahead. Talk to me a little bit. I will just say, I mean, we were, you know, responsible for the initial opportunity that came. I just still think it's a great opportunity. It's a huge undertaking. So, you guys have a lot of work to do, but the people who are working for you, I think have pretty well laid out your options. And the doing nothing option really makes very little sense when you look at the other options. So, I still say it's a great opportunity. I know you have a lot on your plate. I know you'll do the right thing. Thank you, Jeff. So, thank you all for your work on this. I'm just thinking about our next steps, like when it's the next time that we might be seeing you. I mean, I know you're going to do this pilot and you have some, you all have some more work to do. When might we see you back here? I don't want to set a date exactly. Let's run mid-summer or something like that. Yeah, mid-summer. Mid-summer. Okay, great. Perfect. Awesome. Any other comments from the council? That's good. Oh, Donna. I would like to have your slide presentation. I find the more information I get in different ways it highlights it for me. It was sent out. It's been emailed, yeah. Thank you, okay. Great. All right, well, thank you all. Thank you. Okay, so on our walking through all the departments, we are up to the Planning and Community Development department and their presentation. So, welcome, Mike. Including Planning Commission. Right, including the Planning Commission, yes. Thank you. Do you have a presentation? I do. Okay, I'm going to move it. It'll be quick. Oh, yeah. Maybe we can take five minutes to get things together and take a break. Got a new background. Yeah, sure. Okay, great. So we're going to bring it back together here and I'm going to turn it over to you. Okay. So, I am Mike Miller. I'm the Planning Director and I've got a short presentation. So, technically, I'm here representing two departments, so Planning and Community Development, as well as Building and Health, technically two separate departments. We also have members of the Planning Commission here, Housing Task Force, maybe a couple other people that snuck in on me. Our energy folks left. So the organizational chart, unlike DPW and the ones you saw two weeks ago had 36 employees. We have four, including myself. Meredith is our new Parktime Zoning Administrator. She just started last week. We also have Audra Brown, many of you know. She's the Planning and Zoning Assistant and Community Development Specialist, Kevin Casey, who is behind me. The Building and Health is a little bit different because it actually has both Chief Gallens and I are co-directors, I guess, of the Building and Health Department, which has one employee, Chris Lumbra. So usually Chief Gallens backs up Chris as the health officer and I tend to oversee more of the administrative side of the department. So what do we do? What does Planning Department do? We talk about things in four P's. Most people think of, well, you guys are Planning and Zoning, but really we kind of look at it, breaking into four different things. We've got Planning, we've got Permitting, but then we also have Programs and Projects. So Planning is the obvious things. We do public outreach and studies to find out what the public wants, what are our goals, what problems need to be solved, the master plan update, complete streets, parking strategy, housing strategy, EDSP, these are all planning things. What do we need? How do we want to try to solve our problems? The other three are really how we accomplish our goals. So we have a set of goals when we accomplish them through permitting. We regulate people, building permits, zoning permits, flood hazard regulations, E911, road numbering, junk cars, public nuisance. These are all just the ones that are in my department, but this works across the city as well. Other departments will also use these same types of things, they might not think about it this way, but this is kind of a good way to orient yourself to different things. Programs and projects differ in that they're non-regulatory. Projects are things, I'll do a little out of order, projects you do once. So we're gonna build one Taylor Street. We're gonna build one French block. These are specific projects that are going on. The National Register of Historic Places update, pretty much anything in your CIP. These are all projects, things that we do once. Programs are things that we're gonna do over and over. First time home buyer program. We're not just gonna issue one and we're done, we're gonna continue to do this over and over. Housing preservation grants, sprinkler tax credits. There are a lot of programs that go through our office and in other offices, as I said, different places have these. The other piece I'll point out is with the projects, is two weeks ago you met with DPW who they're the experts in projects. They do these all the time. Tom talked about doing projects as a five step thing and taking between three and seven years to complete. I usually talk about them in three steps just by lumping some of them together and I usually talk about three to five years at a minimum. So usually I usually do it for three because you got planning, preparing and implementing. So if you wanna do a project, you're gonna spend one year planning, one year preparing and one year implementing and that's if everything goes right and you set things out. So usually we're talking about things, breaking things into those three year periods to try to get these big projects done and obviously larger projects will take even longer. So we had five people we talked about, who's doing what? So my primary responsibility in addition to being the director is the planning side of things. I staffed the planning commission. We've got a new city plan we wanna work on. We'll talk about that a little bit more later. The Meredith spends nearly all of her time on permitting although there's some planning responsibilities to staff the Historic Preservation Commission. Audra also spends nearly all of her time on permitting although she runs the community rating system which is the flood hazard program through FEMA that gives all residents of the city a discount on their flood insurance. Very expensive and I'll touch on that again a little bit later on. The building inspector spends all his time on permitting. That's it. He does that including the public nuisance ordinance and the junk car ordinance. And Kevin, unlike the others, Kevin spends all of his time on the programs and projects. So when we start looking at who's doing planning, who's doing programs and who's doing projects, it's usually just the two of us and he runs the revolving loan funds, the first time home buyers, he does grant administration. That's his quote community development side where one Taylor Street, Taylor Street, French Block, BBB, Barry Baldwin, Complete Streets, Public Arts. So there are a couple of different projects that go through the programs and projects. So you guys are gonna be jumping into your strategic planning. So one thing I would go and say is just try to think about these four P's. It's a very helpful way of kind of organizing your thoughts. If you focus in strategic planning on what you want to see, what is your vision, what is your problem that you want to solve, that's a key piece to make sure kind of gets focused in on is the planning side because your permits programs and projects are how you're gonna get things done and that's where you can use staff to evaluate your alternatives. Whether that's the planning staff or whether it's DPW, whether it's public safety, whatever your issue is you want to address, use your staff to help come up with the these permits programs and projects and how we're gonna do it. And then of course always continue, we're gonna have a city plan update. Second time I've mentioned that, come back to that as a good place to talk about how to implement goals. And the big projects, you know, what ribbon cutting do you want to be in 2021? And I know that's always hard to go and say, we don't want to be talking about 2021. We want to talk about this year and what's coming up but for whether you're talking to Tom or whether you're talking to me, we're always looking at 2021. That's three years, that's the fastest we'll get a project done and that gives us the room to start looking for an isolating funding for grants and other ways to defray costs and to make these projects run much smoother. So things, other things for you to think about with the strategic planning is keep in mind that from the planning department we have some limited staff. Three of our staff are heavily dedicated to the permits and only two are dedicated to planning and programs. And you'll also have the manager's office. So we really have Bill, Sue, Kevin and myself who really tend to be the ones who address a lot of the goals that come up in some of the different ideas. So just keep those in mind. So if we turn the lights on, where's everybody at? We're talking about planning. It's tough, it's tough, it's late. But we're halfway done. That was my halfway done slide. So planning, I know these, wait till we get to slide 13 and I'll see where everybody's at. So with planning what are some of the recent accomplishments is especially for some of the new counselors, you missed out last year on the zoning and river hazard adoption, the master plan adoption and readoption. That was a lot of work last year. Underway this year, we still have the complete streets plan, the NEA. I actually get half credit, no, is it cut? So we've got the public arts, CLGs, some of the permit things we've got recently. We did increase the part time zoning administrator from 0.5 to 0.8 over the past three years. That's been very helpful. Permits are way up. We're currently, as of May 1st, at 177% for zoning fees and 106% for building fees and this is the busiest time. So we're gonna probably easily double the zoning fees and building fees. That's from what was budgeted. We increased the budget and then we've overshot the budget by 77% so far. So I asked to get the actual permit numbers and Audra wasn't able to get me those numbers. She was busy. Customer service. Building and health department continues to pay for itself. It's a department that actually is self-sufficient when it comes to fees. It collects as much fees as it needs to support itself. So some recent accomplishments. The community rating system, which I mentioned earlier that Audra runs that saves property owners $30,500 annually on flood insurance premiums. If we did some work and had some resources, we could reapply it and go from what's a rating of nine to a rating of eight and we could double that to $61,000. It's just a matter of trying to cut out enough time to put that paperwork and get it into FEMA. We've also received, and this is an old slide saying $500,000 for French block. I would bet it's probably more by now. The old Brown Derby that actually probably is more of a permit piece, but that was torn down due to enforcement action by the council and due to the work of the building inspector. But the building inspector also assisted in getting two other blighted properties resolved without having to go through the enforcement action. And the projects we have completed the DR2 projects and the historic update was another one that we've been working on for a number of years. What's the DR2? That was Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery 2. Yes, it's a hurricane Irene. We got funding from Hurricane Irene. And so the state was able to apply and loan out a bunch of money. They had some money left over and got a second allocation. We applied for and received some money in the second allocation. Opportunities and challenges. So we continue to build bridges to other departments. So we have over the past couple of years, we try to start to build bridges to other departments, including DPW. They're just across the hall from us. They do a lot of reviews of our zoning regulations when zoning permits come in, we give them to them. They review them for the technical pieces. And we're also trying to help them by administering their permits. So we are more of a one-stop shop. If you need a curb cut instead of coming to the planning department and we send you over to talk to DPW, we actually will just go and accept the application for the curb cut. And then we walk it across the hall and give it to them to approve. And then we can issue it. We handle more of the administrative pieces for them. We also have files on all the properties so we can file them as well. We are working on trying to do more grant writing and admin for DPW where it makes sense. It's, there's a number of grants that they just can run in-house. But in some cases, we've tried with ERP, which is Ecosystem Restoration Program and a couple others where we're trying to kind of reach out using Kevin's skills to administer some grants to, because they don't need to be using their engineering staff to be doing grant administration. While at the same time, we were good at grant administration and grant writing, we could use them to help us with project management when it comes to constructing a project. So we're trying to build some good bridges. We're also working as an opportunity to reorganize our Revolving Loan Funds. We actually hope you'll get to see something about this coming up, maybe later in the spring or summer. We have a set of Revolving Loan Funds for Housing, Economic Development and ADA. They're all currently tied up with state and federal rules and we actually can release them. We just have to go through a process and Kevin's working on that. And that will make that, those funding more flexible and we can target it to programs better. A couple of quick challenges. We are still short staffed from time to time, leaving no coverage on permits, on days. Chris spends most of his time in the field and Meredith is part time. And if Audra takes a vacation, people come in. There's a chance there's not gonna be anyone there to help them. It's something we try to minimize and it's disappointing. We like to keep people in there. That's one of our challenges. And some staff limits as it comes to tackling bigger initiatives. A number of initiatives that can be tackled. There's only a certain number of initiatives we can tackle at any one time. So the Planning Commission and City Plan Update. The Planning Commission has three priorities for this year. They're obviously just as excited as you guys are to have the zoning and the master plan done. The big items that they're gonna try to work on is the official map. This was kind of in coordination with the Conservation and Parks Commission. We had with the discussions of some of the open space protections, we needed to address an official map. So we said we would help them with that. So we are zoning fixes as a second one that we need to get in. We just adopted a new zoning and we're finding little tweaks here and there that kind of need to go through. We're gonna probably get that to the council, to you guys sometime in the summer. This shouldn't be anything to get really worried about. Most of these are gonna be little things that when we point out, you're gonna be like, oh yeah, that kind of makes sense. We didn't mean that. Planning Commission didn't mean that, but that's what it says. The big one is the Planning Commission wants to kickstart the new City Plan Update. So the goal of the City Plan Update as many of you remember there's a false start we had on this about two years ago and the goal is not necessarily to go back and redo the visioning that took place in 2009, but rather to revisit implementation. And how could we be more strategic with our planning? There is also a strong desire to make this more of a 21st century document, making it online, making it more interactive, have summaries and explanations with links so people want to understand more and read more. They can kind of drill down in if it's an online type product. We would still need to have a printed plan, but it would be shorter and much more of a summary. And unlike how the current plan is arranged, we would use a more traditional breakout of chapters that would correspond to committees and each committee would help to develop their own plan. So we would be looking at the energy committee should be helping us with the energy chapter. Transportation should be helping with transportation chapter, historic natural resources, housing. It kind of makes sense, but that's not how our current plan's organized. So by breaking them back out, we would end up with a plan that could more easily be, when we start talking about how are we gonna implement the energy chapter, it should go to the energy committee who knows how they're going to accomplish the goals. So the proposed process, what was the planning commission? They've talked about this and what ideas that kind of came out was they wanted to have an all committees kickoff sometime late in the spring, maybe early in the summer, it really kind of depends how we can get the schedules to fit and staff will be working on committees on goals and strategies and then work back to the text in a little bit of a backwards way because what we wanna do is to make sure that we're not just talking about things, just to talk about things when we have the written text, we really wanna be going and saying, we want both pieces to kind of work together and a lot of times you write the text and then separately you write the goals and policies and they don't really reflect each other and we really wanna make sure that they are working together to tell the story that we wanna tell about housing or about energy. And so the other piece of the all committees process is to invite all the committees. Everybody needs to know what, that things are being worked on. And let me try to explain that. We have different goals, let's say public transportation. Who's gonna be responsible for public transportation? The transportation committee? Is it the energy committee? Is it community services? You can kind of look at the same idea in three different ways. Energy efficiency in rental housing. Who's working on that? Is that a housing goal or is that an energy goal? So bringing all the committees together gives us the opportunity to start to go and say, we see everybody's goals, we now have to start having this conversation about how we're gonna do it and what your goals are because in some cases, goals are gonna conflict. Perhaps economic development and protection of open space or housing and open space may end up being a conflict. And we're gonna have committees. One committee is gonna be pushing hard for one that may be conflicting with another committee that's pushing hard. It's the planning commission that's gonna be coming in and kind of being the initial arbiter and you guys would be the final arbiter at the end. But we wanna have this initial kickoff meeting because we want people to understand the committee's chairs to understand we're gonna work on this and we're going to have to resolve these conflicts. We're gonna have to decide who's tackling which issues and ultimately what's gonna happen when the two different goals conflict with each other. And as long as we all understand at the front that's how we're gonna do it then we hope it becomes much more of a collaborative process. So the other piece is obviously connecting actions to goals, being deliberate. We wanna try to really have hard discussions about goals and how we implement those goals. We don't wanna encourage accessory apartments. Encouraging accessory apartments will create zero accessory apartments. What we wanna do is to actually create accessory apartments and how are we gonna do that? What is the actual program? What's the actual action step that's gonna help us get there? Or whatever that goal is we wanna try to get away from encouraging economic development. I don't wanna encourage economic development. Tell us what's the goal specifically? We wanna create more jobs or do we wanna grow the grand list? And once we know specifically what our target is what's our benchmark? Then we can start coming up with a program that says maybe tax stabilization is good maybe tax stabilization isn't good. Maybe some other programs would be more appropriate. So that's kind of the idea is we wanna be very deliberate about our programs. So because I do find looking at a lot of the programs that we have today some of them aren't being effective because they were just kind of a program created in isolation. A historic or housing preservation grant that you're only eligible for if you're not eligible to get money from a bank. So we're loaning money to people who don't have any chance of paying us back. Is that the best use of this set of funds? Maybe it's yes maybe that program needs to be tweaked to better facilitate the goal with the outcome that we want. So before you leave this slide I just felt being delivered was a very clear direction to the council. I don't know if other council members related to that but it's a good one but I thought oh, he nailed it. Okay. Yeah, it's a word I like when talking about this. It's just we don't wanna be when you have limited staff you have limited resources be very direct with exactly how we're gonna spend our time because we want ultimately to be looking back two years now of three years from now to say here's where we started we've gotten this far. So the final takeaways. So we're your planning department we are here to help plan and implement those plans identify alternatives and make recommendations to you. We count on you to establish goals and identify problems. You know, we need to find out from you what the issues are so we can help solve them. We need you guys to provide us the resources we need and to prioritize the goals when there aren't sufficient resources. And many times that's a difficult one when we have a number of great ideas and just the staff, you know, five great ideas and enough staff to do three of them. We can do a little bit on all five and not get any of them done or we can prioritize a couple of them to try to make sure we can get progress on a few. You guys have the hard job. You guys got to make the decisions. I'm only here to give you recommendations and advice. You guys have the hard job to make the decisions. And then the last thing is to stay committed to projects. As we pointed out, they take three to five years. If we're on again off again, it takes the momentum out of a project. So those were the things that we would count on you guys to kind of help with and we would ask you to support the city plan proposal which is we're looking for you to kind of give us the green light that says you're interested in having the planning commission and the planning staff work on the city plan update. We don't have to. It's valid for another eight years. We think it's a good use of staff time. We don't have a grant. We're just working on it with staff time but I used to be a consultant. I can do this. And I think it would be a good use of the city's time for us to really start working on the city plan and putting that effort in. And I'll take your questions. That's my ruby. You're determined to put us to sleep, aren't you? Yes. There's no room to sleep there. No. No, he didn't give it to us and he wanted to surprise us. Hey, questions? Sort of an asking question. I'm curious about that increase in zoning and building permits and wondering if you've got any sense of is that just due to the zoning changes we made or is that a different building climate or is it just happens? I think it's going to probably be, because a lot of these actually started before, I would probably be more likely to say it's a little bit more of a climate. But it certainly has made a difference in some of the permits we're getting now. A handful of permits we received because the zoning was coming and they wanted to get in because they wouldn't be allowed to do it after. A couple of people like Timberholm's intentionally had been waiting to kind of get that to go. So I think it's a little bit of both. And then we had this kind of ongoing discussion about staffing and that there may be a need, especially if we see an uptick in building for additional staff. And I'm just curious what the status of that is right now. And the hope being of course that the fees could fund that additional staff. It is, he has the busiest, even though you'll look and see that it's, the zoning fees are actually higher and farther along than the building fees. I would say Chris's schedule is probably the busiest. If we get lucky, we'll get one more big fee because one Taylor Street hasn't dropped in their permit. So if they do, we'll probably end up doubling that. We'll have 80,000 more fees for that. So it's possible, but those are more one-time funds. I wouldn't count it being consistent every year that we're gonna double those fees, but we will for a short time. This year's was big because of French Block. Last year's from Caledonia Spirits. We'll get the hotel next year. So that'll be big. So there will be some, I think that come in. And I think the chief is going in to get certified as building inspector. So we may be, we're trying to work with options that won't require that, but. Want to keep an eye on that? Yeah, it is. I keep an eye on it, too. Good questions, lots of people. So just coming back to the city plan. So, I mean, I, from the list that you gave us, there were five committees, there were five chapters and there were more than five chapters. They're gonna probably be more. I just put, that was just a quick snapshot of five of them. There's 10 or 12 required elements, most of which that have committees. I would, I would love to see, once we know where they're all going, I would just, I mean, don't even miss, for my purposes, I mean, you don't even necessarily need to come back and tell us. But even if we just had an email that said, here's where all the chapters are gonna start and, and roughly, I mean, my understanding right is that, so they start in these committees and then they go to the planning commission for review. Please do. I didn't want to interrupt Mike's presentation. Sorry, let's. You had a nice flow to it with all the dogs. So, I'm Leslie Wells, I'm the chair of the planning commission and I've met, probably all of you, I haven't met you yet, but I've met no one else and I've been on the, I just looked at that because I couldn't recall, but I've been on the planning commission since August 2014 and I've been chair since January 2017 and a lot has happened that time as you all know. And now we're really excited to be able to turn our attention to focusing on developing a city plan. And that's what Mike has really done a great job presenting why we want to go there, what we want to talk about. But one detail I want to elaborate on is the process that we have put forward as a proposed process to just kick off this process. So, we initially thought, well, maybe we'll build chapters one by one in each committee and then we'll put them all together and see how it shakes out. And we got some feedback from the energy committee, which was going to, no, they weren't gonna be our first committee actually, but they were very pretty far down the road with drafting a chapter already, that it would be really useful to get input from the other committees on their goals so that they could tailor the energy committee to sort of have that in mind as they tailored their own goals. And I thought this is a great idea to get everybody in the room, talk about three goals, three to five goals that all the committees have, give them five minutes to talk each committee. And we were all, and then that way we just have a broad sense in a comprehensive way of what are the, what's the universe of goals we're talking about here. And then I think being in the room with all the other committee members would help people to realize that nobody's trying to undermine their goals and that we all, we just have to figure out how to prioritize. So this would help sort of set the tone for the whole city plan adoption process of we're working together, we realize there are a lot of different goals we want to accomplish, some of them make it like, but we've just got to work to prioritize. So that's the proposed process. And the way that we're thinking this would go forward is I would draft a letter to the various committees inviting them to this event, lay out the format of the event, have it someplace we were thinking in the Lost Nation Theater space upstairs. But I haven't done any legwork on that, it was just sort of a thought that we've had. And we would do this with enough time, advanced time that committees that haven't discussed goals very much will have an opportunity to meet and have that discussion at a very high level. So it would be June at the earliest, we might be talking late June, just to ensure that all the committees have time to meet since some of them only meet once a month. So that is the proposal that we have. We haven't done any of that yet and I don't think any of the committees are even aware of this proposal. They will get a letter if we do move forward with this. One of the concerns we had is we just wanted to make sure that the planning department had adequate staff time to help us with kicking this process off because as you saw there are a lot of demands on their time and we wanted to be sure that the council wanted to prioritize the city plan before we move forward on that. So that's why we've brought that forward, that's the thought. Once we have that initial meeting with everyone then we can see what we have and make another plan for moving forward and it might make sense at that point to come back and check in with the council and give some feedback. So I love that idea of having a time for all the committees might wanna be ultimately authoring some of these chapters to come together and share initial thoughts. I think that would be great. I mean I'm sure the public will wanna go and weigh in and I trust your ability to like navigate all of that. But I think being intentional about inviting the public to that and in some form giving them a voice in that process as well. I mean yeah, I'm sure that there's a way to figure that out. So yeah, but I think that sounds like a great process. And when I saw your slides, Mike, I was a little surprised to see that final adoption would be in two or three years. Perhaps this is, I mean I thought it would be faster. But especially given that, I mean I wonder if June is or late June is too soon. Give people a couple of meetings to talk about what they want for their goals and then. But I don't know. Maybe it makes sense to have two of these events. One where we hear the initial goals and then they can go back to the committee discuss and we wanna revamp this at all and then come back and have a second meeting like that. And it feels a little bit like overkill, but it might actually streamline the rest of the process. Yeah, other thoughts on this? You're looking for a strong message from us that we support you going ahead with this and spending, dedicating the staff time to it. Yes, please. I am willing to articulate that. And I think that we should give them a message or the response of, we're trying to create a motion in my head that would get to that. And I'm not sure what that motion would be, but I'm there also, I agree. Don't, I don't know if we necessarily need a motion, just the knowing you've got the support of us to move forward on that. And just to address a little bit on the timing. Just remember, it took an entire year just to review the zoning. So when we talk about, if it takes three years to get to adoption, if we may spend an entire year just going through the hearing process, hearing people's concerns about whether this goal is really the right goal and whether that should be tweaked to be this goal. And then we have another hearing and another meeting and you can see how this takes a year. It seems to me that this makes sense for the planning commission to be their top priority. I just want to recognize too that other things that we have talked about on the council, which I think will probably come up in our strategic planning time, retreat time, is reopening or looking at our ordinances. And I know that that will take probably some staff time as well from the department. So I'm not sure how that balance will shake out or what the need for balance there will be, but I think that's something we can talk about at our retreat. And we wanted to make sure we got to you before the staff retreat as well, so as you're having the retreat, you can decide whether afterwards, we've got a few more things that we'd like planning staff to be working on and we may have to roll the city plan back a little bit or scale it back because we want to prioritize something else. We just wanted to make sure it was out there to go and say, this is what we'd like to work on and we can certainly adjust our work plan to reflect what your goals are. So I was actually gonna try to figure out a more delicate way to ask that question as you put it like that. So you're not necessarily looking for the firm commitment from the council. Tonight, you just want to make sure you get a clear message from them in the next two weeks about where the city plan stands, is that... Yeah, I mean, if we got a firm commitment tonight, I would be a little bit worried that when you sit down to have your strategic plan that you might have boxed yourself in a little bit, but... Okay, well, that's good to know going into that. So I saw Donna and then Jack. I think this kind of event of these committees coming together where you really want to get out of your silos and hear and each of them somewhat integrate the other perspective, it seems you really need a good facilitator. And I think we should look at that and add to the staff because it's a specialty. And it also wouldn't take... Would we help supplement the staff time to do this event and follow up? And I think it'd be really worth looking at and us thinking about some additional money to do it. And I think regardless of the strategic planning process, we would probably... We're gonna do this event anyways. So even if it were like, gee, we should slow down a little bit because we've got some other priorities. This is still a priority for the Planning Commission to have this meeting and to bring everybody together. It's just whether this is a plan that we try to develop in two years and then have hearings or whether it's gonna take three years to have hearings. It really depends on how many other things we're working on. But we already know how busy 219 and 220 are gonna be, Mike. Every year is gonna be busy, right? I think that this commitment from the council is the kind of thing you're looking maybe as part of the product of our planning retreat in a couple of weeks. And I think this is great. We've talked about this event at the last thousand task force meeting. People were very enthusiastic about it. And I would guess the other committees are similarly enthusiastic. I am personally. It was the energy committee. I have to give them credit for the idea. We just thought it was good. We had such good luck when we did it with all the transportation by pedestrian energy. It really helped everyone share. But one of my questions is, one of the things I'm gonna bring up in my council report is parks. I still think our parks and our park commission sits aside and needs to be integrated. So please have them, the commission and any of their subgroups on your list to be included. They're already involved in the official map process. I've already been meeting with them because they've been a key part of that official map. And so they're already in and they'll obviously, they actually asked to be one of, when we were talking about this as pilot, we're gonna do one chapter, two chapters or three chapters this year when we were talking about doing it in pieces. They had asked to be one of the, parks wanted to be one of the priority chapters to be one of the first ones done. So there's certainly an interest in that group about trying to get that conversation going about parks and open space and trying to keep that process moving or get that process started. We'll be sure to invite them and make sure they're part of the process. Yes, yes, thank you. Yes. Polly, Nicole, and along with Jen Hall are new co-chairs of the Hesse Task Force and I just said three quick things. One is to commission the planning department on the master plan. I also just wanted to say to the department for Kevin's help, he comes to all of our meetings. He provides us with support information. It's just absolutely invaluable for us to do what we do. And the third thing is we would like to come back sometime after your strategic plan if there's time, talk a little bit more about housing, maybe do some education for some of the newer council members and also continue that conversation that was begun with the last city council about a sustainable funding source for the public housing resource. Other comments or questions? Okay, great. Thank you so much. Thank you. Polly Rooks. Looking forward to chatting you again. All right, so. Thanks for the planning commission. They're probably still in PTSD from last year. We're ready for the next thing. Don't worry. All right. Now I'll have kids. This is nothing. Okay, so the council reports. So I think we started there last time. So I have been extremely busy with work for the last few weeks but returned and have no more work travel lined up in the next few weeks. So I'm very excited to get a little bit more engaged. And I have lots of folks I need to respond to emails on and I apologize for not being, having my head quite here, but I'm back. I did want to mention that I have been feeling a little disconnected from the Montpelier business community as some of these recent issues have come up. And so I've been thinking about how to connect a little bit more. And so I'm gonna work, reach out to city staff about attending some of the MBA meetings or somehow be a little bit more accessible. And so I wanna kind of open that up that I'm something I'm thinking about and interested and want to do more on. First Wednesday, 8.30 here. I maybe should have said this when the guys from the water resource recovery facility were still here, but I just had the opportunity to go on tours of the town garage, the water plant, the water resource recovery facility and uniformly, I would say I'm extremely impressed with the quality of the people who are working for the city in these capacities, the intelligence and dedication they bring to their jobs. And I think the city is very lucky to have everyone working for them that we've met on these tours. I've been thinking about this for a bit now, but as I drove to Norwich for my last class and took the D tour, I can't believe how far we've come. I mean, I was elected to this body just over a year ago and we had so much work to do. And I just, I really wanna commend city staff for all of that work. I mean, I know the planning department has undertaken and endeavored a huge amount of work to make a lot of these things happen. You know, we had the Brown Derby and then a huge number of other projects that DBW has also been involved with now on Route 12, the paving as well. And it's really exciting to see all of the things that are taking shape here in Montpelier and I'm really grateful to be a part of that. I definitely feel the park and the park commissions are being neglected. And I would like for the city council to consider having an appointed person to be a liaison with the park commission. And I certainly am interested, but any of us will be better than nobody right now. I've gone to quite a few of their meetings and unless there's a big controversy, it's really, I feel the lack of support there from the rest of us in the community for their work. But I'd also really like to see us tackle getting parks throughout the city. And I have a vision even of what I call a pretty park where you can go and sit and there's bushes and flowers and places for toddlers to play. Just something small and compact and not just always, it's wonderful we have our big parks, but it doesn't fit the same need. So I'm really park driven and community service driven this year. I am very, very much looking forward to our retreat. I hope everyone makes it, it will be huge. And I hope that we can really get a lot of work and getting to know one another a little more. So thank you. All right, a great new group formed in town. It's called People Against Plastic Pollution. Happy? I'm working on issues that I know I dear to the mayor's heart there, trying to get plastic out of our community, looking at different ways we do that coming with proactive solutions and also educating folks on what the problem is. We have a plastic island twice the size of Texas flown in the Pacific Ocean right now. So whatever we can do locally to address that is so important. So there's that if anybody's interested next meeting is going to be up on North Street on the 27th and just let me know if you want to attend that other quick just date to keep in mind May 19th rally for public schools on the state house lawn from 12 to two. Just supporting our great public educators. Thanks. I want to echo Jack's comments about the tours of the city departments and appreciation of city staff. I learned a ton of stuff and it was a lot of fun. I would also encourage more of those whenever there's an opportunity. I understand it takes a lot of staff time but it's really wonderful and I think it would be a good thing for interested residents to tag along on to. There would be a lot of value in that. So thank you to the staff and everyone involved in those tours. And I want to as usual invite anyone who's interested to come to hang out with me over breakfast tomorrow morning. Every Thursday I am no longer at open hands cafe because open hands cafe is no longer. Yes. George Estes found that it wasn't working out financially so he has closed that. I will be at Baguitos tomorrow morning and for the foreseeable future. Every Thursday 8 30 to 9 30. Talk about city anything else. Connors come and talk with me and some residents. It's always lots of fun. I'm hoping for good weather through the summer so that I can stay outside at Baguitos. That is really fun to have breakfast with. It may not be apparent. My morning self is very different from my evening self. So thank you. I just wanted to thank all the organizations that had some kind of contribution to May Fest this last weekend and thank you too much for your life for organizing and advertising all the events that were part of May Fest. And yeah, it was great. It was great that the weather worked out. So that's it for me. Just a few quick things. Taxes are due the 15th. It's the last quarterly payment for the tax year. Just to let you all know I've had a problem. I haven't been able to connect with our system that runs the video. So there may not be a video of this meeting available on the website. I suspect there won't be. So I may contact Orcas if I can get a copy of yours or at least a link to yours or something like that. We'll see. Just I think this is the first meeting since the meeting about the non-citizen voting. A lot of people showed up. There was a lot of interest. There was one person there who was sort of dubious about it. Actually said what if two or 300 people moved in here? Immigrants moved in here so they could, non-citizens so they could vote. I was like, where are we gonna put them? We should be so lucky, right? But in general, the crowd was very, very supportive. So I took down some names to get a working group going. We'll see where it goes. The next stage would be some sort of concrete proposals. Don't want to see where that ends up. I also need to mention that due to unforeseen circumstances as a little sign say, we're gonna have several days this month where the services in the clerk's offices are limited. We will take payments, we'll always take payments, right? So that's not an issue, but licensing including marriage, dogs, businesses, liquor are gonna have to, will not be available and there won't be any help for record searches, for land searches, the information, the vault will be available but there will be folks there to support it and that's gonna be tomorrow and the next day and then the first four days of the week of the 21st, which is the week after next. And after that, there's no, I mean, I got nothing on my calendar until Christmas so there shouldn't be an issue, but that's it. So thank you for all for the kind words about the tours. I agree, I learned something from time and they really, the staff really appreciates the interest from people. And speaking of tours, we do need, our next meeting will feature the fire department and we originally thought was to hold that tour immediately preceding this meeting but council member Bate with her eagle eyes remembered that we had set the Scribner Street inspection at that time so I don't know if there's another time that people want to try to find for that or have us, this is not bothered now, we'll put Jamie on it. We'll take care of that. Jamie does so good. And speaking of which, we did do the wastewater, the Water Resource Recovery Facility, we had the update tonight. Three of you were able to attend that. Would you like to do another one when we get closer to vote time or are we good? I would. If you have it, I'll certainly go, I've been there before but it's always good. So we'll aim for that at some point whenever it's coming back on its next agenda. With regard to strategic planning, you should have received an email from Julia Novak who's our consultant and she's gonna be scheduled anytime to talk with you so I hope you can do that. And I just wanna add to some of the comments, this is, first of all, I really appreciate that we're doing that this year and that we've got someone who's really skilled in local government leading it. But this really could be two of the most important nights that we have, not just for interaction with each other but really laying out our agenda and the beginnings of the plans for everything for the next couple of years. So I hope people will come and we're ready to work and looking forward to that, I'm excited about it. That's all I have until the next thing. Great, so I... Oh, I do have one more thing to add about last weekend. We would note that the Montpelier High School team won the Capital City Classic Ultimate Tournament. Yes, they did. Wouldn't want to say anything about the coach. That is very exciting. Yes, yes. So we're up to the executive session, so yes, Jack. Pursuant to one PSA, section 313A2. I move we go into executive session. I'll second it. And we're gonna invite Kevin Casey in with us and we will not be taking any action afterwards. So we won't be coming back to announce anything or vote anything. So there was a second. I second it. You second it, okay. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, great. Thank you. Thanks, Roy. I'm sure not, I find it Montpelier. Okay. Hey, this side of the council. I have chocolate, would you like chocolate? I was wondering what happened. I was looking at you. I was like trying to make eye contact and nobody was looking at me. Connor, do you want some chocolate? And it's gonna be true. And it's unorthodoxy, the leader. No, I'm sorry, that was so awkward. Like, how about everyone on top of them all at the same time? Is that noisy, noisy class? I know. Now I know. Don't get the noisy candy. Would you want one, John? Sure. Yeah. You can make me have chucks. Anybody want more? I have lots. I might as well give away now. Well, I think we can make him not disruptive. Great, thank you very much. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Everybody else, even I'm just used to standing on the chair. Geez.