 So, hi, my name is Melissa. I'm part of the One Arts and Business Network. And I'm not going to go into a lot about what that is, but it is a network, an organization of businesses in the Old North End. And we finally have a website up. And let me tell you, the website is amazing. It's really a way for folks to connect in the Old North End to look up. It's a directory of all businesses. There's the history. You can see the link right here. Our lovely, I forgot her title, Economic Person. Economic Coordinator Emma, put it together. You can be in contact. Go really check out the website. It's here. We're watching on YouTube. It's oneabn.org. That's oneabn.org. And it really just has a wealth of resources about our wonderful community. Thank you all for this thing. I appreciate it. Who would like the microphone? Who else has an announcement to come? It's an initiative we're interested in. Hi, I'm Trap Fryer. I'm a much-attended old fanonist. I spoke to the NPA a little over a year ago about the reuse zones at the dump going away. That was county-wide. There were areas for people to bring stuff that they didn't need anymore and people could pick it up for free. And the dump decided they didn't want to do that anymore. So they shut them all down. I went to a whole bunch of meetings to try to get them back. I tried to get a job at the dump. And I ended up getting a job of resource and through the city and resource department where we just reopened the reuse zone. It's not a whole room. It's now a shelf within the resource. But I'm working to maybe make it close to its former glory. So it's not something you can just leave stuff in and you still have to bring things to dump into resource. But I encourage you to do that. Any household items, furniture, building supplies, appliances, housewares, anything really. Computers, arts and crafts. We have those for sale, but anything that doesn't sell isn't quite sellable. It goes into the reuse zone. So we're open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and Sunday just till 4. And we're down at 339 on Pine Street. 339 Pine Street. It's kind of hard to see. We moved across the street from where it was before. People didn't know that. It was like on the right-hand side of the street. And it's tucked in. So I'm going to check it out. Thank you very much. Nice job. Yay. Another announcement so I know you can't win Andrew. You want to be the third? Hey, I'd just like to say that was awesome your work. I really appreciate that. Hyde Street rules, right? We brought some voting forms if anyone would like to register and if they moved within the city, we can change that right here. Early voting will start around Valentine's Day. We're about 80 days away from town meeting. And so if anyone would like to get registered or change their address, we'd be glad to help you. Thanks so much for coming. Thank you, Andrew. Others? Other announcements? Tony has one. Yeah, hi. Tony Redington. I'm also activist on the leaders of the Pine Street Coalition. And we actually have some news. The Champlain Parkway, which as you know is a $27 million, I don't want to call it turkey because it's unfair to turkeys, but it's a $27 million highway project that totally wastes the money. And that's one reason our group has been working actively along with Innovation Center, which you may be aware of, and that's an outstanding commercial office space building on Lakeside Avenue. I've been fighting this now for four or five years. The good news is the project is currently dead. And they come back to life in a few weeks and a month or two. But right now there is no parkway because the environmental document was withdrawn by the Federal Highway Administration. Why? Because this project actually increases, and here we are up here in the University Avenue with the Lowell neighborhood. Well, the Pine, the King Pine neighborhood is also like we are. 80% low and middle, low and poverty income. It also has one third of its households and no access to a car. So they're very dependent upon what? Walking, biking, and transit. So this particular neighborhood had no protection legally until about four or five years ago between the rules. So when the parkway was designed, they just pissed off the low income neighborhood, the neighborhood with minority and low income people. So the Federal Highway said, oh, we made a mistake. We've got to come back and look at this neighborhood again. So in order to do that, they actually canceled the project for perhaps now for two months and perhaps another three months going into really the spring of next year. This also will allow the Pine Street Coalition, which is in US District Court, to fight for a new design to increasingly have a good chance of winning. So at the moment, the project did not go forward. They could not spend any money on it. And we're hopeful that we might actually work out something with the city to compromise in which we get a separate and safe sidewalk. There is no sidewalk in the project. They take the sidewalk as in front of BED in this Public Works Department of Way. There is no separate and safe bikeway. There's a lot of bike coalitions that support it of our efforts to reduce the number of projects that is terrible, non-existent walking by facilities. I'll leave it there, but I just wanted to indicate that this is happening. The upper two blocks on Pine Street from Maple Street to King Street, from King to Main Street, where it's in Ward 3. It's the only small section of the project. So it is part of our area. Thank you, Tony. I'm North Kaplan, and I am having a studio sale this weekend, Friday night, 5 to 8, Saturday and Sunday, 10 to 3, where St. Paul Street, 309 St. Paul Street, and Southland. I live on Road Street. I work on St. Paul Street. Come down. I'm going to have hot, mulled cider, meat balls, crackers and cheese, and it's a pottery sale, I have Venmo, I do all kinds of stuff. Anyway, I hope you can come down and support me. We're on St. Paul Street. 309, thank you, 309. Other announcements? There's one right here. Alyssa, favorite part two. I have a fun half for all of you. Right now, the governor is taking comments on the governor's budget. It's not really a due date, but I know he does the budget over the holidays, and you can go online and submit your comment. I have a website. I'll put it like it's like that, if you want to have a website, or I should email it too. But I encourage you, just whatever you're most passionate about or want him or the government administration to spend money on, go do that. Same, read every single comment. You don't have to go over it, but I agree with you. They do read every comment, so it's a pretty good opportunity. Thank you very much. Who else? See anybody else? I hear you. Okay, thanks. I finished our last, and it's been week three. Thank you. I was going to ask people about rainwater catchment and pollinator gardens in the neighborhood, so anyone want to talk to me about that? All right. Thank you very much. This is the laptop. That does work. In this very room of the museum, we will do what we did last year, which is to have a gigantic living room full of fun that's part of the Highlights program, Highlights program that took over from the first day. So we'll have food in the entertainment and things for kids. So you bring your family in and have fun. So we'd like to see you be strong from noon to five on New Year's Eve. Thank you Ben. If people didn't know this is Ben Bergstein and we owe him thanks for maintaining the space and doing all our tech for us without him none of this would be possible. So thank you. Hi, my name is Steve Carey and I'm running for the second term of the school board. I have my petition here. If you're from Ward 2, I would really appreciate its signature. I want to get on the ballot and continue the good work that we've been doing for the last two years since I've been on. I hope the board continues to do excellent work for our great Burlington School District. You're going to hear from us in a minute or two anyway. But I just thought I'd mention that. I appreciate your signature on my petition if you are from Ward 2. Thank you. Thank you, Steve. Whoa. Get away from me. Okay, turn it off for now. Turn it off. It's interference from Anita's group. Upstairs. I've got to tell them. I've got to use the microphone. It's okay. Okay, perfect. Just in time to hear from three of our school board members, Steve and Carey, who just met. Liz Carey and Jean Waltz at the end of this school year. And we already have a process of a search for a new chair intended. The first step being two commissioners, Phillip and Sowers are working with HR Human Resources and the board chair is going to put together an initial plan and from that plan they have decided to work with the school's superintendent association directory of burns which essentially what they're going to do is conduct a national regional search and then between setting letters of interest and gathering letters of interest and ultimately choosing a firm. So we've got a firm to get a firm and and after we receive responses, the board is actually going to decide together of which firm we're going to hire and in the midst or very recently it's who comes to people who have been a part of previous searches the other one is the other one is the other one is Frank okay and I know right now people are driving these jobs soon to be posted and on national and local recruitment sites I don't know probably you don't know we've got a new human resources person in my opinion an incredible wealth of knowledge and of course support to this process and they can work in the middle of the city with the commissioners there are going to be some scheduled events for cleaning input in January I'm not sure where those three announced but they're planning on starting them in January and there is also an email in the meantime to if you want to give any kind of feedback any suggestions and it is superintendent search F B S D E T B S D B T dot com I just want to say that you know we have 500 students in the district we have 10 schools we have about 1500 employees so it's an incredible job being superintendent of the district is an incredibly complicated job because there are literally thousands of moving parts in every single day and I just want to thank Yau Bank for doing the work that he's done over the past five years and we certainly wish him the best in his future pursuits and it is an extremely complicated and difficult job in terms of what Gina just said the two commissioners who are responsible for gathering information about what we expect as a commissioner you know he said I made a list I brought it tonight I don't get to read it and I sent it on but you know when I think of it there's so much that we need I'm hoping we can get close to that if not achieve all of the requirements that we need our new candidate but anyway I just want to point that out it's a complicated and very important job I think it might be the highest page in the city in the city it might be but it's you know well worth the salary because of the complexity but I just wanted to mention that and again if you have suggestions or ideas about the qualities the board should be considering in its consideration of the candidates who apply please let us know through that website that Gina said you can email any of us directly we'll pass it on to Commissioner Sauer and bullet support for the school budget which you can't see but what I put up here is that this is a wish list that we would love to be able to fund it's worth $24 billion worth of cost so our task over the next four weeks until the second week of January is to kind of call through the list and really determine what's essential and what's a priority and what has to be on a strategic plan and that is mainly because the state legislature through our state education and funding formula has sent us the news that the state education tax rate will be 5.5 cents which is pretty high like last year it was 2 or 3 but the state education formula is based on total state enrollment which has gone down quite a bit and then they take all the school budgets which are increasing quite a bit the new health care plan which is looking at like a 12.9% increase in health care costs so school budgets are going up quite a bit this year but enrollment is down so the per pupil ratio has gotten really skewed so the number of pupils if you divide the total of all the school district budgets by the number of pupils there's like a higher cost spread out over the last few days so that then results in a higher tax rate so that will affect early tensibility to fund all these really important priorities so that's what we'll be facing we'll have a meeting next Tuesday and a meeting January 14 and that would be the meeting we decide that we'll be having one more meeting in between that because it's really difficult so people have questions, comments on budget items we'd love to hear from you and questions, comments I'll say a comment about the budget Commissioner Sowers at the meeting on Tuesday night mentioned it's so different we want to fund everything because these are needs that our employees have put forward to us and they're very serious needs and very important needs but it's important to think about what could be taken away I don't want to use that term but what would be withdrawn in terms of funding in order to fund some other things what the priorities are a couple of weeks ago the principals came to us and they gave a list of priorities which was extremely helpful because they got together as principals and they prioritized their needs and they were working together so that was very, very helpful but the bottom line is there's only so much money to go around and we have to make that decision about what can be taken away that's currently funded and how do we shift that money so it's more efficient and effective in delivering the systems that the kids need what we're trying to provide to them and we need to find a way to do it thank you I just wanted to say one more thing to summarize this list this year what we heard from the staff and the principals was that the overriding need in the schools is for socio-emotional behavior and social worker support so that teachers can just teach and that came up over and over again which is a good indication that our state legislature is defunding the social service system and shifting the cost onto the schools well either way but you know the schools are now becoming like the social service agency in this state which is makes it really hard to teach makes it really hard to be a teacher and just get your job done a little bit about it because you're just managing all the social services so if you have if you have a legislative legislative room which I think we will later please ask them what they think about that thank you questions, comments I wanted to add one thing about the budget too everything that is happening in the district right now is happening is included this is in addition to there's nothing in here right now that might negate or cut or eliminate something else there's none at this stage so what you know is what is happening I have a question I have a quick time when y'all was here two or three months ago he said he had insufficient data to fully achieve the data between a lot of white students and white students and after checking when they were in the loose way I found that there is data and it's just not in the analyzed can you shed some light on why we still have it here who's doing anything about it we are in the midst of actually figuring out what kind of data we should be gathering and yes and also having there's a new system there's a new position part of the hopefully future part of the wish list is an additional position to help with the study so much of the decision making and how we're going to have a unbiased view about how to fund different programs and eventually close achieving the gaps needs to come from this data and we have not had the kind of data that can be analyzed sufficiently now this has way better information this is the first year we've been able to hire a management person to create stronger data systems I don't think YAH was saying we don't know how we're going to close the opportunity gap I think YAH was saying closing the opportunity gap is a complex challenge and it requires a government institution to change so we still have the model of the classroom with the teachers coming up and delivering a curriculum and we have students coming to school with a wide variety of experiences that mean what they bring to school isn't always recognized as valid and the starting point for teaching now is that a pretty old model that the bodies kind of are making dumb and cultured values so there's this mismatch increasing mismatch between a student body that at the same time really changing itself culturally to be the dominant culture some of us don't really want them to and then we have teachers who were taught to teach a certain way and then you've got the complexity of social service needs in the classroom implicit bias and a kind of swirl of technology of learning methods and all of that is just kind of brewing and it makes it very hard to do what's called differentiating for a teacher and Steve can speak to this because he was a teacher or he is a teacher sorry differentiating means you have to teach it all these different levels in the classroom when you're managing all these different needs and so the opportunity for kids to learn is really different when they show up in class and some can't do that all day and so how do you do all that with a pretty uneven amount of money compared to the lean for the large class size there's not a lot of personal development and I'll say something about the dab too because as Liz was saying it's really difficult to measure after it grow given the variety of kids we have coming from parts of the world in different experiences at home so we can look at standardized data sets but they're not really accurate and we've talked to the new data manager about finding some growth that's more accurate in terms of individual students so not just entire classes of entire schools but how much have these individual students grown as a way to look at the success or failure of the system so it isn't a data issue and it's hard to get accurate standardized data from at all quite frankly I think the idea is that we don't want it to be standardized that we want it to be individualized and that's also moving towards these personal learning plans as well so of course it's ideal because SAT those kind of tests have never people living in poverty people of color have never excelled in a part of why it was all this criticism about H.O. Wheeler back when it was H.O. Wheeler we had EL students that were doing well on reading exams shocker but if you can show that these kids are improving their skills the achievement gap is being close I have a question about what's happening with the renovation remodeling of the high school it's getting some bad press and I'm just wondering what's going on yeah the challenge was that to get voters to vote for the bond you have to kind of go out there with like oh we're going to just wait in high school and have and we want to hear what everybody wants and so everybody had the opportunity to say what they wanted but at that point we didn't have the money to pay an architect to actually calculate how much of what it costs so once the bond passed we came out with the amount it would have cost to build what everybody wanted was about 120 million with a 70 million dollar bond so I think that's why we got bad press because it's hard to explain to the whole city that just because you want it doesn't mean we can actually do it but we need support to do something different because our industry building is so inaccessible and unsafe and energy hogging and all that so we did, through the brilliance of our project manager advertisement for Tom Heverson he was able to get the gap down to 20 million so kind of value engineering and it's still a beautiful building we've given up some external things and outside things but have preserved some of these essential things that really there was future incentives that we need and so now we have 20 million gaps so the 20 million is in such a big project a less significant gap is still a problem but I think it might actually be down to 10 million I think they got it down to 10 million gap actually in the last week so we're getting there it's still going to be an amazing completely different building but it will be much more functional energy efficient and really fully accessible which is personally my main goal thank you anybody else? okay city nobody thank you it's very nice to have three school board members who job is very very it is the mayor's update unfortunately the mayor can't be with us tonight so we have 20 family minutes city councilors are all here Perry, Brian, Max where is yours? Barbara we will try to touch on some issues that we think might be of interest that we're working on but also leave time for discussion and questions and make it a little bit more of a dialogue the issue I'll start with is that the ballot in March will include a question asking the voters of Burlington to authorize the tax rate which is currently on affordable housing which is the term is used to housing trust fund was approved by the voters 30 years ago March of 89 we have Kenny to support affordable housing for the trust fund I won't get into great detail about why it changed over time but basically as the grand list value grows the penny on the tax rate was by charter was required to keep revenue neutrality for several dedicated funds in the housing trust fund being one of them so even though over the 30 years the grand list has grown the revenue to the housing trust fund has actually decreased in relation to the tax rate so we're actually at about a half a penny break now so this is just a way to go back to the voters to say can we commit to the penny and lock it in and actually have it grow with inflation with the grand list over time so that's one question that will be before the voters I think it's really important I think the support at the local level is critical because federal support not entirely dried up but it is a fraction of what it was even when this was created in Burlington we needed to do something locally to support affordable housing for very low income, low income and moderate income folks so this is a critical piece there will be another question that deals with public safety I'll try to do it with the baby behind my back public safety is we don't know if I know it's really an issue that will deal with the number of people we have in the prior department through that also responds to medical emergencies so a new ambulance will be required in the new north end which hasn't never had an ambulance and it will actually require more staff to staff that so that will be a question on the ballot as a public safety question and the last thing that I'll touch on is the issue of overnight storage of the Amtrak and the question of will there be a second rail line on what I would consider the urban waterfront between college and King Street and a new option has emerged there was some news on what the options were all of them had problems and concerns with adjacent properties and impact on members of the community this latest option is actually a sighting that would be installed or created at McNeil plant where the train currently stops with wood chips and there would be a little spur that would come off and it would be the place where the Amtrak would overnight that's the latest option so the issue of whether a second track gets added on the waterfront is I love trains if I could take a train and not have to drive the car to go to New York I would be thrilled and it would do a lot of great things for the regional economy and I think we could all agree on that however adding another track on the waterfront there's this picture of what it would do it would take what is currently the bike path between college and King and it would be primarily a railroad track that would be available from our rail system to store their trains to build trains to be essentially an extension of what is really the rail yard which is south of there so it would bring a rail yard use to what has become an amazing place for residents and neighbors to like and I'm committed to that and not have but I don't think we should be re-industrializing that part of our waterfront even though I'm a huge fan of trains I think we have to find an appropriate place for them so I wanted to I wanted to seek about the work of the special committee to review policing practices which continues to go on also about the rain choice value machine which just came up and then a little bit about the airport which I think is going to be one of the best from Councillor Shrieker and regarding some of the technical aspects which I want to speak about regarding the special committee it was supposed to have recommendations by about this time and so the committee sent a communication to the council task for an extension and within that the council tasked the committee with coming back with originally it was use of force okay now I can now I can remember but within the next few months specifically and then I also pushed for that to expand to also community oversight because I felt like the scope of the committee has been so broad that it's been really sort of hard to dig into any specific issues or policy areas but those two sort of aspects the aspect of oversight and then also of there was I think a lot of interest from the council particularly use of force are really important so I'm really I think also my role I would like to see more focus just in terms of what I'm pushing for and I think the oversight aspect is something that I feel really strongly about and we'll start to really push forward back to the YouTube review and create some pretty strong recommendations so there was that aspect the range was voting this came up as an initiative that all the progressive all progressive councillors he might not be a co-sponsor did he co-sponsor? okay I thought it was a lot and it was something that councillor Nixon had brought forward as something he really wanted to push co-sponsored by all of us we were really looking to get it on the ballot by March in order to have it my opinion was I wanted it to be able to be implemented by the mayor election in 2021 so that got sent to Charter Change I mean I don't even want to speak about Charter Change I was at Charter Change as well it was the last agenda item the motion was to adjourn and table it and so it and I don't know how many of you saw the 70's article but it just effectively pushed it past the December 16th council meeting we would be reviewing it and putting it on the March ballot so that pushes it to the November ballot which means it can be implemented by the mayor election in 2021 so it wouldn't come into effect by the mayor election in 2024 I'm a big proponent of our CV of interest voting I think it's a more democratic and a fairer way to vote I was really excited to see it potentially be implemented in the mayor election because I think many of us were frustrated by feeling like we couldn't have more than two candidates in the last mayor election and I just, I really hate forcing voters making voters feel like they have to have strategic voting as a square candidate that people should run for elections and that we should have a democratic process we shouldn't feel like we that it's not yeah, that it's not open and fair so I was disappointed to see that that it's being delayed further but we'll continue to push it and then the last thing I want to talk about was the airport there was a presentation on the mitigation efforts in order to deal with the sound impacts of airport in general that I think really specifically the F-35 and I have a lot of concerns I felt like many councilors myself included well, I just feel like it's a lot too late in terms of really looking at how we're going to make sure that people are so negatively impacted by the F-35s and other, you know, the airport in general but really it's important to really look at the F-35 what I was really concerned about was there's no we don't know where the local match is going to come from, there's a 10% potential for a local match and I really pushed the director, Jean Richards to give some indication about where and I think he more or less assured that we would find it or wanted to give sort of some sense that it wouldn't delay the process essentially but they don't have a local match again quite at this point which is frustrating and it concerns me because I think when you have these programs that have a lot of funding coming from the federal, the state, useful it can delay it I think I mean I think they felt like they wanted to show that there wasn't going to be any issue with implementing it but then the part that I was hoping for assistance on was about the I don't really, I don't understand the modeling or it was also one of the things that they do in order to understand what the sound impacts are is that they do an environmental impact study and they model out how the sound is actually going to behave and so now that they're actually here they want to make sure that they want to make sure that it's actually conforming with that so another aspect of this is also installing sound monitor devices and again there's a cost, a significant cost to installing those devices just the process of figuring out where to place them so they get back to the appropriate data so that's one of the things that there's again that's still in process with this yeah and there's an ongoing monitoring cost exactly Thank you, I needed a refresher so that's it that was an aspect and then just in general I spoke about my frustration that we're getting $10 million to expand the airport this might not be the most popular opinion but I don't think that we I've said this many times that council meeting and publicly that I don't believe that we should be expanding air travel that I was disappointed to see that greenhouse gas emissions from the airport were not included in the roadmap to decrease our emissions and I'm concerned in real time about the impact we're having on our environment and I will continue to push for that and I think there's just the money that's going into the F-35 noise mitigation and the money going to expand the airport I said I'm just really concerned in terms of the humanitarian impacts and the financial impacts and the fact that we're in this crisis emergency and how are we spending millions of dollars and what I feel is completely the wrong direction so that was something that I just wanted to highlight there is yeah maybe it's not the most common but there is the flight free 2020 I've signed on to that I've been strong for five so thank you okay so a couple things I just want to touch on some of the things I've already been mentioned so with the Amtrak issue we are going to be having a transportation and utilities committee meeting I share that committee and we've been dealing with this Amtrak issue and that will be at five at DPW on Tuesday so if you're interested in already warning a foreign picture about what's happening with that particular issue please feel free to join us at some of the DPW facility on Pine Street and just a couple things to add with that we had invited the rail from out rail to come to that meeting to really answer folks questions and to just give us more information because there's concerns on if they do install a second track on what Council of Pine was referring to in terms of the re-industrialization that I think is important in this case that once that second track goes in they can use that second track because for whatever time they want because of the way that federal rail law works so they can build cars, move cars through that space they can really do what they want with it so that's a real concern I certainly share Council of Pine's concerns on that particular issue the McNeill site is interesting in the sense that it's potentially further away it might have less impacts on it we just got today they had done a study on the five existing sites far more than some sort of by the beginnings of North Beach then Southern Urban Reserve Main Street Landing so the area between King and College storing it in the rail yard it's further down in the south end and they did a scoring and it looked at how the impacts of each of those sites were great what we asked them to do was actually to run this new idea, this new site through the same metrics so that we can understand the environmental impact so we'll be hearing more about that in this new site there's some potential that we need to understand where did they work then I heard today will be more closer between city steel is what they're thinking about so if you're coming down the road in the air mail you're crossing the tracks or right there is where it would be so that's something for us to weigh that's that piece on the rank choice voting we are also because of the way that it played out in committee it was very frustrating we have basically I wanted to at least open the conversation and continue it but and I'd share that committee as well to open that discussion both of the other councillors said that they had previous commitments so they moved to adjourn and adjourned the meeting before we open that so what that means is that we were not able to vote it out to the full council for Monday's meeting which is the deadline the charter changes on because you have to whatever you put a charter change on the ballot have public hearings so what happens so what will happen now is it's still on the charter change agenda so I emailed them to say can we get another meeting on it for this week can we try to open this discussion they're busy so we couldn't meet this week so then I said well can we do something else in January in this month they said no so what we're looking at probably what that rank choice issue would be in January but I'm committed to continuing to discuss it at committee and give folks a chance to weigh in I see a bunch of people here tonight who came and thank you for coming so we really appreciate you participating I encourage you to continue to do so so we can move forward on that issue while we're on charter just wanted to touch on a couple other things that you're going to see potentially on the March ballot the councils that we moved forward to the council one is an idea to state ballots if you ever asked for a ballot an absentee ballot early you may have gotten your state ballot sent separately from your city ballot because they're on separate ballot forms the state ballot has to be available 45 days before the election the city ballot only has to be available 28 days currently so what the charter change that we move forward would say is that it would align basically the city ballot with the state ballot so they'd be available both be available 45 days before the election you would get them at the same time to send them back at the same time because what we were finding is that people would get the state ballot vote send it back say oh I did my job and then they get sent a ballot and they'd be confused and they wouldn't send it back and so we were seeing big differences in that so the one drawback is that it means that if people are getting petition signatures or people are trying to put stuff on the ballot it moves it up we have to have our process up but if it passes we'll know that for a year in advance leading up to it so I don't really see that as a big drawback but the other issue is regarding the airport commission and adding a member from Winooski given what we just talked about with the airport I think it's helped we already have a South Burlington member in the airport they were feeling the brunt of the F-35 side of their community and so what we forwarded to the full council was a proposal to add a resident of Winooski to that commission and then also to keep thinking about adding another Burlington representative so it would be seven representatives seven people on the commission but getting Winooski a seat at the table so that they can actually vote and understand these conversations and just really bring their concerns to the table so those were and then the last thing thank you for just reminding me the last thing we also advanced to the ballot was non-citizen voting in municipal elections and this is a question to allow folks who have permanent residence status in the United States the ability to participate in local elections and so that's a chart of change that if the council votes yes on Monday we'll go through that public hearing process and you can place it on the ballot for March so you can potentially see that on the ballot as well can I speak to that so in something I was glad to see was that the city and the office had reached out to Michael Justice but Michael Justice said that they support because there was some concern that it would create a separate list and basically what Michael Justice said is that the government already has this list these are permanent residence they're already highly documented so there's not like a separate list and even you know I serve whoever else it's not anything we don't already know and that really helped me I think knowing that information was that it could even go farther it could be even more expensive so that made me feel a lot better and I wanted to share that because I thought that was really good and important for you I just want to say I do support that I support all those chart of changes I think that those would be helpful considering participation and giving additional I see several comments and questions so I have nobody taking the mic around who has the other mic oh okay can you share one we have the mic what do you need to talk about the situation is there a way that we can persuade them to leave with you I mean there are times it's like call your you know call your counselor is there a way I don't know how charter works I don't know if there's a public influence that we can say this meeting needs to happen so we have to basically be like tomorrow or the weekend I don't think that that would happen really just in terms of the timelines yeah unfortunately yeah you can't do that yeah so that's the real challenge of it I really want to give there were a number of different ideas that were expressed styles of doing and I think it would be helpful to test the community process around it I thought we could at least have conversations at that meeting and then go to it out because we've already done this it worked well the system worked perfectly the system worked just as it was supposed to there was a very very small amount of support about it which indicates that people understood how the system worked so I think since we don't have a committee that we'll meet and discuss and put it on the ballot before the voters I think we need people though to express their support even though you have supporters here at council meetings wherever you can express support and build their political consensus that I think is out there we just need to fill them and I was wondering if we should because I can't quite answer your question I tried to amend the agenda but it sounds like there's been some interest in not wanting to make sure that there is a process through the gender change committee I'm interested in yours and put them I have Francesca and then Liz I was just hoping for some clarification on the non-citizen voting because from my understanding from the meeting this was affecting people who have work visas rather than just like broadly undocumented people and non-citizen to me is very confusing and unspecific though I was more like undocumented folks having voting rights I just want to be able to clarify who is being affected by I think the green card is the key if you have a green card under this scenario you'd be eligible to vote if you don't have documentation I just wonder I would suggest about if you're putting that on the ballot to be more specific with the wording because I think non-citizen sounds very confusing and I wonder about saying like permanent residence green cards or like blah blah blah like being able to sit we went over this committee and I can't remember what we arrived at as the final question wording I can get back to Francesca I'm sorry I don't have it off the top of my head but that's a great question because we definitely wrangled with that because we did want it to be clear as folks who is and isn't included in this in the question and we adopt a short form question that goes on the ballot that's supposed to be easily understood so that's something that we can make sure we take your account from that like I said I can tell you that what we actually settled on the term is like legal residence yeah and something along those lines it was like a legal permanent residence did you want to speak to her please and just if we again on the political sort of angle which is that we need to talk to friends, neighbors and everybody to just cross this threshold from people thinking that we're extending voter rights to people who are documented I think that's one of the challenges from there were people who thought we were essentially extending voting to people who were not documented I personally have a problem with that but that's not what this is I'm wondering if you all have anyone from the city has talked with the school district about aligning the ballot with the state because it will place an extreme burden on the school district to get its budget done we don't get the state tax rate until we just got it last week and that's the preliminary tax rate because then we have to they wait for like a lot of data to come in at the end of the year our audit isn't done until like the first week of January so we don't have real audited figures that we're working with and so between the state Homestead and income tax rate and our audit we can't actually calculate our real budget figures and our Burlington tax rate and the CLA until like the second week of January so I am really worried about moving the ballot data unless we can have a separate school district to battle it that's a great question that didn't come up and this came out of this came from the administration saying this is something that we've noticed in terms of information to address that but that's a great point I think that's something that's important to follow up on and thank you for raising that I really appreciate that questions comments Tony first Brian thank you for being here tonight it looks like everybody's been on the location I'll let this show us what this experience of suddenly trying to figure out a train that came up to the spring to help you lose your station no involvement with the community or the council and we're going to put it down right in front of right where the flight path goes to what's important here is the city really needs to do a long-term waterfront plan it will take into consideration the changes we will with the commuter rail we may have light rail being brought down the light rail plan was done in 1990 and it's nicely about light rail 100 percent renewable there's no no global warming, global heat lift so the point I'm going to get at is that if the transportation needs which will occur including the need to be able to get down to the waterfront we really need a comprehensive planning process led by the planning commission so that we're ready next month to explore what changes occur in transportation instead of running around in circles as we have the last three months trying to figure out where to put a train that we knew was coming here 30 years effort to bring Amtrak and Burlington from Rutland began 20 years ago we didn't have to run around and figure this out so we knew this was coming a long time ago I liked the rent voting, we should be doing that made that eight years of a governor who never got a majority vote wasn't a very good governor we don't need to repeat or end up with a situation like that other than that I'm really pleased that you folks have found that we are a climate emergency I too have considered ever flying in planes because of the basically emissions and I think that in terms of emergency we need to put pressure on our legislature and our legislators to deal with where half the emissions occur in global heating in Vermont from transportation it's not from global heating it's not from the building it's from the cars and from basically the automobile so I hope you've got it some effective changes both the culture within city government and also in the larger community and I think the university should be coming in this process Champlain College went from 800 cars to the students they said no more cars there are only 200 cars that aren't in the city of Wellington at Champlain College we have no such limits in the case of the university they should start to begin to weigh more in this program just a quick one Brian about the rank choice voting there was talk with the city council meeting about the history of rank choice voting in Burlington and who said something about it but like it didn't get too deep into like why it was, why it didn't go over so well and Max you mentioned someone about that briefly as well I'm curious what you know being involved in this system you're so well I'm curious what your take is on that I think it would be hard not to connect Bob Kess with the defeat of rank choice voting as much as Bob was a friend of mine for a long time he's a wonderful human being Bob made a couple of key mistakes and the voters conflated the two they conflated Bob's mistakes with the way that we elect people in democracy those were not the same thing and there was a narrative that was created they didn't like IRV because IRV essentially recognizes that the political system of just two parties is limiting in your options and is not as inclusive it's not pluralistic it's a fundamental less democratic and so the notion of having three, four or more threatens some people and so they didn't like it and so they used the mistakes that Bob made and the confidence that the public lost in the administration as a way to defeat IRV that's plan C4 and we did have it from 2005 to 2010 we are the only place to have repealed it which is fascinating to me and one of the things that was instrumental in the repeal was that the campaign was keep voting symbols what they said so they said keep voting simple keep voting simple but and that's what people say but I think we should give voters some credit first of all I think that people are pretty able to in the context of an election say what their first, second, third choices or what their first and second choices are and they don't even have to vote for it they don't like the third person and humans do it every day constantly for doing rank choices that was really amusing for people though the keep voting simple for people who didn't really understand what the vote was they voted for it to repeal it because they were like yeah of course I want it simple because I heard that from people who were like wait what did I just vote for it's like Brexit there's a comment over here hey there my question is so we have the net zero plan the ground to net zero plan and we recently also did the energy crisis language and I wanted to ask you what you feel are your role in the next steps that's a great question I don't I've looked at the for the last five years I served for Vermont Energy Investment Corporation and how to use financing as a way to unleash the desire of people to actually do good things for the planet and use a creative way to finance improvements in buildings focused on buildings in this case as Tony mentioned our larger driver is certainly the transportation sector but at the local level we need to come up with a way basically to call on bill financing and if you do it through the electric company you don't care if it's on bill but it's basically a way to finance the improvements that you need to get your home to as close to net zero as possible unless you want to install renewables of course that equation starts to get more feasible but essentially making energy investments in buildings and using the bill as the way to repay it so that your savings is greater than your monthly payment so paying $200 a month is a simple math but your payment to that financing is only $150 you actually end up with something in your pocket and you've made the improvements to your building utilities can do that, BPD can do that it's a huge lift to come up with a capital that we need but it would be a game changer if we offered that to residential and commercial customers and that sort of thing and it benefits rental units as well so renters benefit not just homeowners who try to go in the plans but they're refused as well the state, the client, the company the reason was because they've got eight years in the government and they're about 30 bucks emergency I think my thinking about this a lot and I see representative here so I don't want to, I'm sure you might touch on this but I did go to the climate caucus row show this is the state wide level climate caucus last Tuesday and I feel like I've been doing some soul searching since then I feel concerned about an underwhelmed by that presentation I've also when I started thinking about this role and thinking about policy right here on the municipal level I started looking a lot into if you know I was excited by the enthusiasm from our previous deal and so on the national level I was really curious to see what municipalities are doing as a response to that and when I was looking that up there wasn't really anything like it was so new and I think I'm really excited about like Kansas City is the first city now in the US and Missouri to have created a fair free transit system and I think that's kind of incredible and amazing and I'm so excited I think I'm feeling really did push for those kinds of changes and I think we're already seeing that a little bit there's some push around weatherization there's a campaign going on in Burlington right now to do some work around that I think I'm interested in how to bring a more clear framework to that and think about the, I'm frustrated I feel like there's not a lot of clarity around the political economy that we're living in and I go to production that we have and where is capitalism really leaving us at the end of the day it's exhausting people and it's exhausting our resources and I feel really frustrated and I feel interested in being more more thoughtful about that and I think you know what that means on a local level because I think cities can be and should especially with what we're seeing at a national level in terms of the Trump administration so I appreciate that question so same to you so couple things in addition to the I think what we've seen is we've actually lost ground in terms of ridership ridership is down 4% since the implementation next gen the new bus routes and systems so we really you address that and figure out ways I think part of it was the way that that was rolled out I think part of it was also delays and things in terms of the hazards that existed on certain routes but I think that also this fair free concept is something that we need to get to you to explore and that's another thing that I think we're going to continue to explore at the transportation committee there's a we have a traffic fund and we want to explore whether we can use some of the funds that we get from parking meters or from maybe not having builders build parking spaces but then contribute to a fund that would fund things like that so there are ways to fund that I think we also really need to continue to build out our bike and pedestrian network in the city of Burlington to get people out of cars to continue to lose ground on vehicle miles travel to continue to see the amount of vehicle miles travel go up year over year in the city of Burlington so we absolutely need to continue to improve our sidewalks to improve our right now to create connectivity and safety to get people who would ride if they felt safer actually doing so and then we actually need to maintain it because if you maintain it especially throughout the winter you can actually continue to see people ride and Montreal found that and that when they maintained their system and from the time that they started implementing their winter maintenance and really improving it 150% growth in winter ridership so you can really see that growth if people feel safe so I think that's a crucial thing that we need to do the other area on the energy sector that we were talking about and Mary that I continue to be interested in exploring and pushing is the idea of capturing the waste heat at the McNeil plant in the old north in the inner veil and then using that to heat in cool buildings in order to make that economically viable however we need to make sure that we have large tenants on hand we've tried to get the hospital to play ball we've tried to get UVM to play ball they've been resistant which has been incredibly disappointing and then the mall came along and they said as part of the sweetening of the deal that they were going to be an anchor tenant essentially helping us to create the demand that the opportunity to do so now we're really we're concerned with the project changing and this I think we need to really hold them to what they said they were going to do which is really sign on to this district energy concept because that was something that I thought was very clearly sold to the voters is this is something that we want to do in order to sweeten that deal and now I'm feeling like a little bit like they're being a little wishy-washy on that so I think there's an accountability piece to it as well but I think we need to continue to push it the challenge with it is that there has been a glut of natural gas on the market and that's caused the business case with regards to that to be challenging I think that the environmental case at this point overrides that and that we need to continue to push forward with that because that's the single largest thing that we identify as being a way that we can cut green gas emissions in the city of Burlington we've seen great growth on the electricity side in terms of renewables and those kinds of things but we need to do much more on the heating and cooling side in order to address that and be able to make that part of that I have this from the other side we've lost several hundreds of public spaces when the mall was taken down what they're proposing to prepare isn't nearly as many I'm here and I know you're considering this thing where developers will not be required to build parking with the developers I I don't want you to be in a bubble you're young, you can walk, you can bike but the public transport interests you out there because it's not there I have friends in Williston and South Burlington and Charleston and Charlottes they will not come into town even though the administration says there are dozens of hundreds of parking spaces the perception is to be near where they want to be near the fling, near the church there are parking spaces they don't want to come and eat they don't want to come and watch a movie they just don't want to come because is this not convenient to use and the bump out now you may get harder to drive I understand I really do understand the goal of having fewer cars in the city but you can't do that until you have the public transportation infrastructure that runs all night that's free or inexpensive, that goes everywhere this is not New York you don't have that you have 30 below sometimes you can't hike, you can't walk essentially just think about when you're 30 years older how that's going to be so I hope you really consider that building that comes up yeah, absolutely what Barbara is talking about is the idea of removing parking minimums for buildings what that means is basically that developers are required to build a minimum amount of parking as part of developments now this would not require them to continue to do so if they didn't then there's language actually that I'm hearing from Councillor Hanson that they're actually putting in to actually have them pay in to a transportation demand management fund so that they wouldn't be able to generate some of those alternatives that you're talking about but you are right that some people do need to use their cars older folks, disabled folks and this isn't about that, this is about getting people who, we need to get people who can walk and bike out of their cars we're facing a crisis of epic proportions in our society and we have to change we have to figure out alternatives and it's uncomfortable, it's challenging but we can't just continue to do the same thing and expect different results with this so I understand that it's challenging but I think that we really need to continue to try different things and see if they can work, I think that as part of that too, and I see this all the time is that cars that we're thinking permeate so much of our society and the use of cars being just a function of everything it comes off a sense of imagination about what the possibilities of the public might be and trying out other things and I think that we also need to be open to trying other things and seeing if they might work because sometimes in other places where they have done these changes they've actually found that the predicted harms actually have not manifested in nearly the ways that people thought that they would and that really has to do with the fact that I think we're so rooted in the way that things are now that it can make it harder to imagine an alternative future for ourselves I'm just saying Barbara, your mic's off I'm just saying from my culture don't throw out the train until you have the kosher which means you can't make it so difficult for people who are used to using their cars and driving economics of the city coming in from other places I have a parking space I'm okay, it's not for me I'm afraid that they're going to kill me downtown that's my work thank you so much other questions Perry did you want to say something about this well I just want to say I do hear your concerns about covering it with a better alternative public transit and I work with a lot of people who commute from like you're saying I do think we need to have stronger options for people to be able to get to that work I think that part of the reason why the alternative transit system and I'm glad that there's not just the I'm glad that the transportation and demand management system is coming to play because I'm push really strongly for it I'm still concerned that it would be a handout to developers so just say you don't have to pay into the transportation system but we need them to pay into the transportation system in some way so I felt really strongly about that I do, in terms of I work with people who have mobility issues I think it's frustrating I think the alternative transit gets people who don't have mobility issues out of their car to make space or just make space on the road or in our public road where people do have mobility issues I think all of those things are important I think centering people who have mobility issues and accessibility issues is super important and also people who are just who are priced out of living downtown and can't live where they work or where they shop or whatever and it's yeah they should be able to get around to where they need so I think that I'm glad you raised those words thank you I was just going to add that the requirement will go away under this scenario, under this design the problem is if a developer is trying to get financing to build something most financing sources want to see that you actually have a completely viable plan not just if you can build something but you have to provide some level of parking so it'll be more market driven if you will but I don't think it will be as many spaces are currently required I think you're right about that but there won't be like a building with zero parking I don't think there will be much of those I really don't think that's going to be the case then in buildings where there's zero parking because those are considered to be right now anyway until we get there those are not considered to be standard conventional what people are looking for thank you it's good to have our school board members here it's good to have our city councilors here so thanks one more question I'm sorry I was just really hearing your concerns I don't know like running around trying to catch a bus it's really not that easy to get around right now and still I feel really strongly about not having a car and that's great for me but I wonder if I have kids or if I have a mobility issue or whatever and I wonder about reserve this is just an idea I don't know I have a reserving parking spots for people that have children at a certain age having mobility issues and making it a pretty easy process to apply for those but reserving a significant number of parking spots so that people who are able-bodied and don't have kids or whatever they're extra distance incentivized to take cars and to use public transit they're more incentivized to use public transit to have bikes and without penalizing people who have those other considerations because I really hear you it's like with the system as it stands not that easy to get around and leave the climate crisis as a greater barrier but I'm also young and able to don't have kids and so I really hear that concern a lot and I wonder if something like that has come up I thought Jules, thank you I feel like I've had some proto-version of this but basically when there were conversations coming up with at the CCRCC meeting and I was like of course we should be centering people with mobility issues or whatever it wouldn't be so great if we could just prioritize parking for all those people people who are commuting sure and people who are commuting and are living in the suburbs just various people I'm glad I bring that up I haven't done any research on it or anything but thank you first so articulating that idea that's awesome thank you very much guys that's what very much not least you represent to the brand you guys here and is she okay so you have it all to yourself Jules you're all um so what do you want to talk about I mean I could preach to you about all the things I'm working on but I'm kind of curious maybe we could just hear some questions here are some concerns one thing I will start out with I love that the hands are immediately shooting up one thing I will say is I was in the Ward 1 8th MPA last night and somebody expressed they said do we ever put in public what we're working on and I thought about it and I'm like where? I'm like no I don't and every time I try to talk somewhere everyone else wants to out talk me or cut me off or whatever so there really isn't that option and I feel bad doing it on front porch forum but then this person said to me what do you think it's for they were like can you please post what you're working on before you go back so I'm going to do that so for what it's worth I'm going to post on front porch forum and then you can email it and troll me whatever but I'll post it but before I do that I'm curious to hear answer questions of hero people are concerned about I sit on this stool like a TED talk yeah Chris Haynes so we just left a conversation about the climate crisis and transit and so I want to look up there because the two are so connected municipal and state AOT has a ton of money and a lot of that money comes from the feds and a lot of it's codified in plans that tells that determines where the money's going to go and so I'm a big advocate for public transit because people I think biking is unrealistic for anybody who's not willing to withstand biking in the winter however capable I am I'm not going to do that but I would jump on the bus and free transit doesn't actually get people to ride the bus more because you already spend money in your car it just saves you a lot of money but people are, mass transit has the service the amount of service you need to get people to ride the bus is a lot more service than you have you need like 10 minute headways and so I think if we could increase operational funding for our transit system we could provide more service and we have a regional system and so the only way that I can think of is that municipalities can raise money for operational service because impact fees pay for capital needs not operations is to generate like permit fees like we all have to have a local local car registration if we all had to register our cars locally as well as at the state it would be a disincentive to have a car because it would make it more expensive there was also an SUV tax which Westman introduced like 15 years ago that got shot down tax on miles per gallon are those sorts of things so I would just ask you if you've discussed issues like this I'm also really disappointed in the climate caucus and if you looked at public transit if you could please elevate that in this legislative session as more public transit service everywhere of all kinds and we need operational money at the local level the municipal authority and the tool to raise money locally thank you, like the sales tax thank you so I heard a statement and I heard some question like a question and they're sort of like am I aware, I'm aware and I can say that there are some of us advocating that we look at the transportation budget and be strategic about how to shift the investments of the transportation budget and we have been doing that more towards transportation and one of the pieces of the climate caucus agenda which I support even though I don't think it's enough I'm happy to talk about what else I think we should do I probably should at least say a little bit about that but I won't be time for questions too so I'll try to make it brief that one of the pieces is working with the transportation climate initiative which will give us money to invest in those kind of projects and one of my concerns about that is that when we do cap and trading we say that pollution is a commodity that's bought and sold and I kind of have a philosophical problem with commodifying pollution like in our society it's an extractive economy and we just continue to commodify everything health care is a product now pollution is going to be a product so I believe it's a tool to get us moving in the right direction so I do support it but I think in the long term pollution and if I I'll just take a minute to say something about that so in terms of my own personal agenda I support the four pieces of the climate caucus I believe those are achievable small steps that will get things moving in the right direction but I think we need more and so I think we did a constitutional amendment protecting the rights of nature like they have an Ecuador an Ecuador they call it Pachamama mother earth I don't know how we would use the language I know Chris Pearson is working on this right now so you will probably see an effort for a constitutional amendment because we're still in the window where we can get one out there to be considered and then that would change the foundation of our law would give us a chance to make arguments for generations to come about how our decisions are taking away the rights of nature I think that we need to look at revenue and there are some people specifically the Progressive Caucus and the House and Senate is looking at the revenue sources and trying to find a way to call out all the wealth that's being accumulated by people who are benefiting from the Bush tax cuts and I'm not talking about small business people who might be making saving a couple of hundred dollars a year we're talking about billionaires and billionaires and that might sound like someone else who are making lots of money and so we'll just be creative about how are we taxing wealth and redistributing some of that money back towards the investments we need to make to build public good and that's one specific idea proposal that I'm working on right now and I'm vetting by various activist groups and I'm talking with the solid waste districts and the regional planning commissions and others is this idea of it's called an act related to the just transition to a regenerative economy and what it does is it's kind of it proposes a process to build a vision that's democratic so what it would do is it has a section of intent where it makes the declaration that we're an ecological emergency that we're an era of mass extinction and that we need to drastically change the economic system from an extractive economy to a regenerative economy and that this is more than just money it's also about power and how we distribute all kinds of natural and human resources and then what it does is it calls for the formation of people's assemblies in every region of the state and people's assemblies would work with local partners like the regional planning commissions districts and regional development corporations and each region would have a proposed regenerative economy plan those would all go to a regenerative economy council which would be 30 something, I'm not attached to the number but a big council, huge council is the hugest and it would have people from all sectors of society with different expertise who would then they would be monitoring and watching their own regional because there would be people there for every region they'd be participating in the people's assemblies and part of the local plan creation and then they would come together and they would lay them all out and they would say how do we make this into a regenerative economy roadmap and then there's a list of 30 criteria that I've identified and I'm getting more feedback from people if anyone else, but who wants to see this I'll send it to you and you can tell me what you think I'm trying to be really transparent with this process and open but the idea is there would be these criteria that are at every level of that process and at the end of it it would start the process from now to 2023 would be building that roadmap it would go from 2023 to 2043 and people would be like why that weird number and it's because I don't think 2050's I think that's too long, we have to step it up so 20 years and for those 20 years the people's assemblies would be every year to review the progress they would report to the council the council would report to the legislature if there's accountability measures in there so that's a level of accountability they can sue local entities for not following through I will stop there there's a few other details I left out but is this realistic? No I'm sure there's going to be all kinds of criticism of why we can't do it but the point is that without a plan what are we doing? We can keep throwing money at problems but we're not going to solve the problem but we don't have a plan and the plan needs to be done in my opinion in a democratic fashion that transforms the dynamics in our society about how decisions are made and it includes the Just Transition Principles of the Climate Justice Alliance in there and so if anyone wants to see it I'll stick around and you can come maybe your name and I'll email it to you like tomorrow or tonight Thank you I heard from a lot of people of feeling incredibly disappointed and frustrated by the climate caucus and also the response from the climate caucus and I was just curious I really like your idea and I was wondering if you could answer honestly about if you think the things they propose are actually all that can be done in the time frame that they be given or if you think more can actually be done Honestly if I put my visionary part of myself and I like numb it which a lot of people do this to survive these days I think that what the climate caucus is proposing that has been so the process of the climate caucus was that we had these subcommittees and I was the chair of the Green Economy subcommittee and we had more ideas and then we just kind of gave our ideas the leadership and in a not transparent process they decided what our agenda was and so I'm trying to do something different I don't think that's the way to build a movement and that's what we need, we need a mass movement it's not just going to be convincing politicians there needs to be pressure because if there's enough pressure from the people we will, people who say it's impossible will suddenly make it possible because they want to get reelected so I think honestly it's not it is the realistic things we can do functioning in the same way of thinking without a mass movement but I do think it's acceptable to me I think we need to continue building a mass movement we need to give people hope with realistic ideas the worst thing I see is when young people express how they feel and like a not to play into the generation wars that are going on it was the boomers versus millennials and now generation X and the generations Z are starting to fight that's the capitalist regime dividing us up with their labels but the point is that a lot of young people are expressing their concerns and they're told you just don't know you need to learn this is how it works and what I'm hearing is it doesn't actually really work for everyone so I think within the current system that those four things are actual things that we can hand to the governor which he'll probably veto I'd like to hand him bigger things to veto honestly and I think we may be able to pass some of these bigger things and then we can vote him out it's years to make things happen indigenous people's day was first proposed in Vermont 10 years ago and it just passed this year it just takes time to and so that being said we don't have time I could go off I'll stop I would like the meeting to end by 8.15 so Perry I'll be shorter with my English sorry my question actually isn't about the environment it's okay we've given it a lot of attention and there's lots of other stuff coming from me I know but this is coming from me and this is just something I've been thinking a lot about at the state level so I just kind of wanted to hit you with it this is coming from me both as Jules Future Teacher and Jules current program assistant for Children's Integrated Services in Chippin County and I'm just really concerned about the future of the state of Vermont when we're not adequately funding special education for children 0 to age 3 Children's Integrated Services in Vermont is in level 1 then for 10 years which is essentially a cut to its funding every year because of inflation and in addition to that there's now new administrative costs so it's doubly cut and we know there's so much evidence that the most critical years for children's development is around age 2 and so especially in Chippin County this has been I can't speak as much to other counties because I'm not as an early player with them but I know that we used to have in Chippin County a fairly recently an intensive autism program which we now have and we know that Vermont Family Network which provides early intervention services which is by the way a federally mandated program is kind of really having a hard time meeting the federal requirements and was actually recently applauded by the federal government and this is our requirement for receiving idea of act funding and I'm just concerned especially when it's already kind of a challenging place for young people to live in Vermont and we have young people living in Vermont in addition to not having to feel secure that your children are going to get their federally mandated special education services at the most critical years for their development I just think I really want this to be like on people's mind on the agenda because I know that every year there's kind of like a advocacy push for it but I feel like it's not as taken seriously in addition to wanting an environment for my future children which is like a huge driver for me as an environmentalist I also want the security to know that if they need special education services that they will be able to receive them Thank you for expressing that I didn't hear a question I hear a passionate plea for yeah well I think about I am a clinical social worker and my specialty is working with children and families so I think about child development a lot in the legislature one of the things we've been working on is improving the child care system personally I would like to see a child care system that seamlessly integrates into the education system and as soon as children are born we should be providing educational opportunities and resources for families because in terms of working families it takes a big burden on people whether they work or they take care of their child and that improves the stress in a child's life and then the children are getting optimal stimulation at every stage of development that's going to enhance their development unfortunately what we hear when we advocate for things like this is that there's no money there's not enough resources and once again it brings us back to that fundamental issue about revenue why is it that we live in one of the richest societies in human history and it's like sucked all the life and all the wealth out of like 99% of the people and prevention is cheaper it is cheaper and for what it's worth there are some of us who make that argument all the time and so we can talk about this more but it is in my awareness and I'm happy to talk more about specific ideas that you have later if you can think of some specific examples in the next year where I'm happy to advocate I will say that I've been advocating for the designated agencies and specialized service agencies and we were able to get a raise and a greater investment in the designated agencies because we have this mandate of services they have to provide but then we don't fund them so we were able to address that and now some of us are talking about specialized service agencies like Pathways to Housing and NFI Vermont who are having trouble because they are not being equally funded and so you point out another example another section of the population where we have a massive mandate but we're not adequately funding people to do the work Brian I have a question if it's hard to be a young person in the state it's really hard to be an old person in the state, it turns out I'm sure you're aware of the expose that Vermont DIGR and WPR have done on the status of nursing homes and assisted living facilities in the state that there are in fact regulations that aren't enforced and it's really having a terrible effect and I'm hoping that this maybe wasn't on the radar of legislators before but I hope it will be now Brian Well it is now I have to look more at the actual reports because I saw the story I expect that as a legislator we're going to be giving reports I'm not on the human services committee I'm on the healthcare committee but there isn't overlap so it is an area where I would be giving some attention so we need to find out more about what happened there there's protections in place that were not being followed and that's unacceptable and it's not the only area in the last week where we heard this we'll look at what has come out about what's happening in the women's prisons it's completely unacceptable Thanks Any other if there's one more I'll take that and then we'll go right to it She has a revenue suggestion but I don't think there's a margin for it Got it Do we still have a rainy day fund and how much is it I can't tell you how much it is It's like $70 million There is a reserve The state has a $50 million Every year we've been at since I've been in we've been building that back up because the amount we have is not So here's my suggestion We have this really conservative state treasurer who guards the money in a ridiculous level and we have this $50 million reserve and you could take that $50 million reserve and repit and weatherize every state building and make it net zero not by spending that $50 million but by leveraging that $50 million for a capital source from the treasury so she'd be happy because there's a guarantee but all the savings from the state buildings would double your pay It would be huge I think we're doing nothing So nothing else including putting that money to work in the climate conversation I agree with you and I think the point you make is that we can be leveraging our public money in better ways and if we had a state bank or a public banking system well never say never but the point is that we could be doing the same we could be doing it in state buildings and in local economies and in grants and initiatives for people to start making the Green New Deal happen in other ways but I hear you I appreciate it I'm just saying I think we could do a lot more with that money too Okay One last question Is there any chance for the state IRB? State IRB There is a bill for the state IRB and there was some talk about it People are looking at Burlington right now They really are They are looking at Burlington and what I've heard was some people were concerned that what we did in Burlington was going to sabotage the statewide effort because if it doesn't happen here then it's used by people and so what happened here which my understanding was a procedural maneuver to delay it is being used by people to say we're going to build a movement around the state to say that people want a better system if there is a chance it can happen on a statewide level if we do that I'd like to know what your main priorities are coming into the new session It's a long list and we have to end in a few minutes Can I just say a few topic areas? Fast So one area I talked about was environmental justice another is environmental justice like raising the wage, paid family and a car check bill for the labor movement in terms of racial justice there's a set of anti-racism bills that look at criminal justice reform and addressing systemic racism and one other thing because there are a lot two more things and then I'll stop one is making sure that we follow through on the recommendations of the artificial intelligence task force as creative and existential direct as climate change and it's happening kind of under the radar and then the last thing I will say is around criminal justice reform that I've advocated for us to change our model towards something similar to the Norway model and what's unfortunate is the commissioner of corrections was looking into that and taking significant steps in the right direction and so I'm hoping that this does not derail that that if the person is not in charge anymore that that vision can still happen because we can be doing things better in the criminal justice system in so many ways I'll stop there, there are a few of the priorities thank you very much it's the most consistent safe attitude here and I really appreciate that it's probably mostly the food that you made no kidding I really love our MPA so I've been coming since before I was elected for anything, I love the MPA people's assemblies that doesn't have one in here who would like to be the person who draws this it's $20 because you have to figure out the barrier you're making