 I was struggling to find it and then I finally did I like oh great and then Literally But for work, that's what I can say. Alums and the audience, that's what I'm talking about. Yeah, a lot of new folks, so. Yeah, a lot of new folks. Hi, I'm Scott, it's nice to see you. Thank you. Thank you. And what you're saying is really about this. Yeah, yeah, I just wanted to talk to you. What are you into? Well, I do have some music here. I don't appreciate it. Yeah, yeah, I do have some music here. And I know what you're talking about. Yeah, I do have some music here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right up the last. Yeah. Seattle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, right. No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Are you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, let's. Okay. You see it online. And also that music. Yeah. And also that music. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We got a big. Yeah. Starting. So I mean, we're. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know. Yeah. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. Maybe no. We don't have that. Yeah. So we say, we're not involved in the same work. These days are being made. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the whole place. Everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're getting. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know. Normally I would be matching. Yeah. More than Mary. Well. Just like standard. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think we're going to get started here in a minute. Charlie's going to say. And then we're just going to all do it. It's going to be amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. Ready. Are you, are you Nathan? I'm Nathan. Yeah. You can come sit right here. Joe is going to join you. All right. All right, Charlie. We're ready. Yep. Good to go. All right. Welcome everybody. Capacity audience here tonight for the ward six MPA. Coming back in September. Excited that you all joined us. Thank you so much. For those who aren't with us in person, there's pizza here tonight and drinks. So that's pretty great. Hopefully we can lure you down to the building next time. So we're going to get started tonight, but important topics. So we're going to kind of jump right into it. We start these meetings with a public forum. Open, open for any announcements. That anyone here has in person. Our friend Sam. I see those helping to monitor the zoom room. So. If you have a comment. Please raise your hand. Let us know. Thank you. So this is a comment or this is a question. I wonder if there are any updates about the pit downtown. I am not aware of any updates on the pit downtown. There may be some other folks here in attendance who are, who are more familiar with what's going on down there. Anyone. I'm sorry. Well, well, this is a topic that comes up. Regularly on the agenda. So we'll, we'll make a note and try to get that on the agenda soon. So I just wanted to. Oh. My name. I really just wanted the record to show a commendation and thank you to the. The crew who is taking care of the rotary. Construction, which I walk by there every day. And every member of that construction crew is, has been amazingly friendly through the most. It's appreciatingly hot days. Gosh, even last year during super cold days. And I just am amazed by how, how they have been very intrepid and brave every day early in the morning, late at night. And the project is looking really good. And I hear it's on, on schedule. So I just think it's amazing. And they're doing an awesome job. You're here. Thank you. That's a, yeah, I couldn't agree more. Thank you for that comment. I don't see any other hands. I don't see any comments online. I do want to take a minute. There's, um, Dan Hill of Brooklyn Public Works was not able to be here tonight. He is the traffic manager. He's the traffic manager. And, um, had an important announcement, um, to note that we're in dire need of crossing guards. Um, so I think we're going to try to, uh, maybe if we can put the flyer up for a, for a minute on the screen. Uh, Call to action. If you're available. Um, and, and interested, um, Uh, we could use you. And as a parent to two young girls who were crossing Shelburne Road to Champlain every day. Um, There it's a really important job. Um, so, um, we will make that flyer. There's a flyer that posted with more information. We'll make that available. Um, in the minutes. Uh, Posted to the website. Um, I also wanted to note, um, That we have, um, Three new steering committee members here with us tonight. Um, we have another, I actually don't know if I see Nancy, um, Uh, joined. Oh, there she is. Nancy. Hi, I can see you. Um, so we have four, um, New steering committee members here. So, um, Mills, Forney, Um, Uta Regan, Anita Rapone, And Nancy Harkins, um, is joining us virtually. Uh, there's another, uh, Steering committee member Dale Azaria, Who is, um, Um, Traveling and not here tonight. Um, she and I, uh, It was a committee of two for a while. Um, we're happy to be a committee of six. Um, And we'll take a formal vote. Um, Uh, Next meeting. Um, for the four new perspective members. So thank you all for the effort so far. And look forward to hosting these with you in the future. Um, Any other, um, Any other, um, Comments for public forum. Oh, I'm a, Yes. Hi everyone. I'm a recent hire. Development manager. We work with my colleague, Sam to us working MPAs. And I'm looking forward to getting to know more about your work and about your neighborhoods. And, um, I will get you my, my phone number and email and, and look to keep the conversation going. Thank you. Welcome. Yeah, thank you, Scott. Okay. With that, um, I'm going to go right into the first agenda topic because that's an important one. Um, we have, um, Some, uh, I don't know if I actually, oh, I see Claire on the line here. So, um, We have some of our school board members joining us, Claire wool. Um, Uh, I don't see Jeff wick. Um, Texted said he's a couple of minutes away. Okay. Great. Um, But I also have here with us, uh, Nathan Lavery and Joe wife, uh, part of the team. Um, And we're going to get an update on kind of where we are and the, the status of the new high school. Great. Yeah. And, um, Do you folks have the presentation that you can put up for folks on screen? Oh, It's, it's a Greek church. Yeah. What, what is a presentation? And I think one is just a one page flyer. Right. Probably. I do have, um, With me for the folks in the room anyway. Some handouts. Great. Yeah, that'd be awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So my name is Nathan Lavery. I work for the Burlington school district as the executive director of finance and operations for the district. Joe wife. I'm with white and Burke real estate advisors. We are the project manager working with the district on this. The high school and tech center. And while we get the presentation set up, which we'll run through briefly, we'll circulate two documents. One is kind of a one page summary of the project. And another document is a list of some of the most common questions that we get. So it's kind of a frequently asked questions. So thank you. I think we've got the presentation up. Okay. Awesome. You're ready. So we will move quickly through this. Try to leave some time for questions. I think we have, what 20 to 30 minute range. Yep. So you can keep us. I'll keep you on track. Even for a seven o'clock. To move on to the next topic. Okay. So, right. So we're going to give folks a brief update on the status of the project to. Build a new high school and tech center. Primarily at 52 Institute road. We call it the BHS BTC. 20 25 project. So if you have any questions, please feel free to post them in the chat. We call it the BHS BTC 20 25 project. So if we go to the next slide, I'll just go over a really brief history of the project. In short, folks may remember that we had a plan to renovate the high school on Institute road. During the infancy kind of of that work after we got a public bond vote for funds to do that work. We. There are a handful of things came up, but the first kind of high profile one was the presence of PCBs in the building materials and then ultimately in the air, which caused based on consultations with the, the state caused the school to be closed. Students vacated ultimately as many people know, we're now in the former home of Macy's and downtown Burlington. One of the things I just want to quickly touch on here because some people say, and it's on the frequently asked questions document. So what happened to that $70 million? The shorter answer is we spent only about 4 million on preliminary design work all the way up through and including all the testing and work done to determine the presence of the PCBs, how widespread they were. And ultimately the assessment that's trying to rebuild or remediate the PCBs from that building and re, reoccupy it would be a big waste of money. So the balance of that money, we never access. So some folks I've heard the community like, oh, we just spent 70 million and now we need to spend a lot more. That's not accurate. We actually have only spent about 4 million. And thankfully, if there's a silver lining to that, most of that money actually offered some value to this project by allowing us to understand the, the site and the contamination on site. So that's a brief history of kind of where we were. Ultimately. Welcome, Jeff. Come on up. Just going over a brief history here. So we pivoted to the need to design a project to build a new high school and tech center. And we went through a process to determine first of all, whether or not it should be located in the same place. We explored a lot of different opportunities, including some of those downtown sites to the proven problematic. Ultimately, it was determined that the best option was to rebuild on institute road for a number of reasons, which I'll spare you tonight, but know that there was a thorough process, a kind of site selection process that went into picking the site. So if we can go on to the next slide, please. The school board ultimately had a series of designs, options, kind of conceptual options created from which to choose for the design of the new high school. And that selection was made earlier this year. It was, I think a choice that, and Jeff can speak to this in more detail, but ultimately it was probably the most compact. And it was the cheapest option of them all. That's not to say it was a cheap building, but rather to say that it was probably the most cost effective way to provide the space that we needed. Subsequent to that, we had been working on both on efforts to design the new high school and efforts to fundraise further money to reduce the burden on taxpayers of the total project. So that work is ongoing. And if there's questions about that, we can go into a little more detail. So working on design, working on bringing new money into the project, and then also working on reducing the cost of the project. And then one of the major ways that we identified to reduce the cost of the project is to relocate some of the tech center programs up to the airport. We're able to do that because we were awarded a $10 million grant in thanks in large part to the effort of Senator Leahy and his team to expand our aviation focused programs at the airport. Folks may or may not know that we actually have had an aviation and aeronautics program at the airport, which is really cool. So this is going to allow us to grow and expand that and potentially collaborate not only with the Burlington International Airport, but also in particular with beta technologies up there. So by removing those spaces using separate funds to pay for those spaces at the airport, it reduces the cost of the project on Institute Road. So where we are now in the process and what we're going to get into is what's called, we've completed what's called the schematic design phase. We're going to see some images of what the high school could conceptually look like here and know that a big part of that project was then to estimate the cost of that design. We went through a thorough cost estimating process, two different firms doing estimates so that we could bring them together and be confident in them. And ultimately that cost estimate put us in a realm where after you subtract the other money that we've brought to the table, both from funds that we've identified within our own budget, we've allocated capital funds and obviously we've, you've probably heard that we've allocated a major share of our federal kind of recovery funds to, to this project. So it's brought us to a point where we still need an estimated $165 million bond and that is what is going to be on the ballot in November. So hopefully that kind of brings people in brief right up to speed of where we are today. And I believe I'm going to turn it over to Joe now just to give folks a few highlights of the site plan and the design of the building. Sorry, next slide. Okay. So, so this is a, the site plan for the new high school and tech center. So our plan is to demolish and remediate all of the hazardous materials that are in the existing buildings. Do that before we start construction of the new school. So the plan right now is to start the abatement work and demolition work in either December or January. Get most of that done so that the site is ready for new construction in, you know, July of August of next year. So the building is it's, it's planned to be approximately 260,000 square feet. It's situated in kind of a linear. Orientation with a long Institute road there. There will be two main entrances to the building. There will be a south entrance that faces Institute road and serves a visitor parking area and bus drop off area. Along Institute road there. And then in back, we have a north entrance, which is going to serve the larger parking lot to the north, north of the street that steps up the hill a little bit. And both of these entrances will provide access to a, a main student commons area in the building. And this, this student commons area is designed to be kind of the heart and soul of the school and the hub of student activity. And the way the building is being situated now is the high school, the academic classrooms and labs and so forth will be on the, the right side of the plan or the, the east side of the site. And then in the middle will be the gymnasium auditorium, the library, which will all be served from the student commons area. And then to the west side and kind of the southern side of the building will be the tech center. So I think, and then some, some other nice features of this is that there will be some outdoor learning spaces and, and then maintaining access to the hiking trails that serve the arms for us. So there'll be an opportunity for the, you know, the community to park there and then access those trails. I know the next one. So here's a few renderings of the building. This is a view of the building from the intersection of North Avenue and Institute Road. And, you know, I don't recall exactly what all the materials are that the architects are planning, but they're planning to use a lot of brick, you know, a typical material used here in Vermont for, for many, many years. And then also some stone highlights with native stones found here in Vermont. I'll go to the next slide. And then this is the, this is a view of the North side of the, of the new school showing the North entrance off of that parking lot. Next slide. We've got a few, you know, interior shots. This is, I think of a typical classroom or learning space. There's going to be plenty of natural light serving this school. Every classroom will have, will have windows. That was something that came out from our visioning sessions and meetings with various groups and students that, you know, everybody said, we need to have natural light. Something that the downtown BHS does not currently have. Go ahead, next slide. So this is a rendering of the student commons that I talked about. It's going to be a two level commons. The South entrance will provide access to the lower level. And then there'll be some stairs that go up to the second level. And that's where the, the Northern entrance will come in because the building kind of steps up the hill. It's a slope site. But this will be where the cafeteria is and plenty of spaces for students to meet and collaborate and network and, you know, just hang out. Next slide. And then this is a rendering of the auditorium. We're looking at a 750 seat auditorium. There'll be a balcony and a lower level. Serving that, that function. Next slide. This is, oh, this is a rendering. I believe of the library. It's going to be an open library. Design of which I think is, is kind of the trend these days. Again, allowing a lot of space for students to meet and network. Next slide. Great. Thanks Joe. So that's a quick overview, getting an idea of what the building is going to look like. This is, there's a lot more of design work to come as you can imagine, particularly on the inside spaces. So these are, these are concepts, but it hopefully gives people a feel of, of kind of what we're trying to construct here. I'm going to talk a little bit about the financial impact, which is obviously a major consideration for project of this size. I think it's important to understand that the way we pay for something like this is to borrow money. You issue a bond, a tax exempt bond that, and that's the kind of question that is on the, the ballot in November provided that passes. We then borrow the money to pay for the work that gets done. And we pay that money back over time, just kind of like, if you have a home mortgage, for example, or Carl, and you know, you're paying back that principle. So on an annual basis, once we've borrowed all the money necessary for the project, if it's that full 165 million, we're estimating that there'll be an annual cost to the budget of a little over $11.5 million. And what that means to taxpayers, all those of us in the room, probably, I think everyone here probably lives in Burlington is, you know, a real tax increase over time of potentially up to 15 and a half percent give or take. That has impact obviously on those who pay their education taxes on the basis of their income. We've provided an example here that on a $370,000 home, that could be 800, a little over $800 a year. And on the next slide, we'll see a little chart that describes, gives kind of a range based on home prices. But one common misconception sometimes people think that, oh, if I pay, if I get an income credit, somehow my taxes won't go up. If the school district spends more, that's not the case. There is an impact there, but obviously it's a different impact. It's a system designed to, to provide credits to people of up to a certain income level. So we have provided an estimate here again, as an example for a family income of a hundred or sorry, $50,000 that the costs could go up by as much as $190 a year for their education taxes. So on the next slide, and I know it won't be very readable on the screen. So I've just direct people to, to take a look at this on the website, but we provide a range of impacts and I'm actually not sure. I don't think that one is on our supporting documents. Let me see here. No, it isn't, but it is online. A range of impacts. I'll just give people a few highlights kind of going up, right? We estimate that if the house site value is $500,000 that, that could be as much as $91 a month or a little less than $1,100 a year. And the chart goes all the way up to $700,000, which is $127 a month or about $1,500 a year. So that gives a little sense of, of the range there. And again, I encourage people to take a look at that. And at least you can kind of get a ballpark sense of what it would mean if you are a homeowner on the next slide, please. And we also provide a little chart that shows the phasing in of this borrowing, because we're not going to build this thing overnight. The goal is to have the school open in August of 2025. And that means that we're not going to need all of the money immediately. So we are going to access the money probably over a period of three to four years, which means that the full tax impact won't be felt all at once. It won't happen all at the beginning. It won't even happen all at once, right? It'll be phased in over a few years. And so we provided kind of estimated borrowing schedule here that shows the tax impact in the first year that we have borrowed funds and that we begin repaying them of going up about 2.85% property tax rate increase, increasing then to the 9.5% and ultimately up to a little over 15.5% once we have fully borrowed all those funds. We then begin paying or continue paying back those funds. These are likely to be 20 year bonds. That's what the estimates are based on. And as those bonds expire, obviously the tax rate, you know, all else being equal starts to decrease. And one more slide. I think we have. Maybe two. I spoke briefly about this before we are committed to reducing the cost to taxpayers as much as possible. And through a number of fundraising efforts, we've already identified $35 million worth of other types of funds that can be used to support the project, reducing the need to, to borrow. Including I mentioned the Esther funds already and the the reallocation of capital funds relocation of some of those programs brings $10 million from the, from the grant for the tech center. So we've, we're working hard and we're going to continue to work hard. I think that's one other important thing to emphasize is even with a successful bond vote, we don't have to borrow all that money, which means that we can potentially reduce the impact on taxpayers by continuing to bring in other funds. Whether that's funds related to the PCB mitigation efforts, which we are looking at a number of federal opportunities potentially do that, including getting a brownfields designation. And it also means that there are funds out there that we're going to try to bring into support various parts of the project. For example, there can be a collaboration with Burlington electric department for incentives around energy efficiency for the building to reduce the cost of the building, not only up front to us, but obviously the operating costs year after year after year. So we're excited about that opportunity as well. And lastly, just an updated timeline here. So we have a couple, we have a town hall coming up September 21st for folks who want to again, get similar information, have an opportunity to ask questions. We have September 26th is the last day that ballots can be mailed in if you plan to vote by mail, November 8th, the bond vote and provided that it passes, we would expect to begin demolition potentially as early as December, more likely January. We would start knocking down the old buildings there to pave the way for construction to begin in June 2023. I do want to say that the district is on a pretty ambitious timeline for this project. So folks probably pay attention to the news. There are issues with getting supplies, materials, contractors right now, like there's been a lot of uncertainty around some of those things with respect to responding from COVID and then the other global events that are happening. So we believe this is still a realistic timeline. We think it can happen, but folks should understand that it's also aggressive. We think it's necessary because our students are in a temporary space in the downtown mall at this point, or the Macy's building, but we believe it can be achieved and we would, you know, like nothing more than to be welcoming students into the new building in August 2025. So that's where we are. Why don't we pause there for questions and potentially as well. If Claire or Jeff notice anything I missed, I'm sure they'll chime in too. Plan B if the bond doesn't come through great question. So most likely what we would have, what plan B would be, would be to revise the design. If we, if we've assumed that it didn't pass because people felt that it was too expensive, we would probably revise the design, try to find other ways to cut costs that could be making a smaller building, cutting out some of the elements of that building in order to bring, go back to the community and bring forth another bond proposal. That would obviously in a, that would cost money just to go through that redesign effort as well. But it may be necessary. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. But unfortunately staying where we are right now in the downtown space is not an option. We don't own that building. We have a limited term lease and it, it is a good emergency space for students to be learning in, but it is not a good long-term high school. It lacks some really basic elements that a high school, you know, in our community would expect to have. Have you done any analysis on the impact or mentors? I know that's a harder thing to calculate given the fact that we're not going to be able to get the property tax increase, but, and we'll pass that along presumably in the form of rent, but a lot of us are renters, not me, but a lot of furling Tonians and I'm curious, we've done that analysis. Yeah. It's a good question. There isn't really a good way for us to do that analysis. I think you, you know, explained it. Yeah. But there's no doubt that there would be an impact on renters because landlords typically are going to be passing on some of the costs. So you, it's important to know that the, there is a different tax rate applied to those buildings and to the, the landlords who own them. And then of course there, a number of market forces will kind of coalesce to determine how much of that cost they will pass on to renters. So it's definitely a fair question. I regret not being able to kind of give you a more detailed answer folks who are renting do have the ability to apply for that. So I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question to rebate similar to kind of the income, the education income tax credit. But. You know, at the end of the day, we're talking about an increase for, for those payers as well, even if it's an indirect one. Is the cost scale. 50% plus one. Yes. Yep. That's good question. It's a different, different standard than the municipal bond, which is two thirds for the school district. And so we're talking about the cost of like issuing the bond and so forth. Well, the interest you're going to pay on the bottom, right? Yeah. So, um, if, uh, well, I'll just, I'll talk through it here. So the. When I talked about that annual cost to the, um, to the budget of being about 11.6 million dollars, that's repayment of both principle and interest. Right. And so we would, every year we would build that money into our budget. And it's because we've built that into our budget. Um, it's because we've built that into our budget and our budget. And so if it's not, we're going to have to move that into our budget and our budget. Our local budget is higher. There. See Claire has a question. Jeff. Any. That you would like. Why I did. Speak to this. Oh, absolutely. Uh, thanks. Claire. I actually think that I'm Jeff. I am the. One of your school commissioners with Claire. Well, I'm also the vice chair of the school board. for, I don't know, five or six years now together. One of the things I wanna discuss or at least mention is I think we've assembled the best folks we could possibly bring together, the smartest people, the most experienced people from architects, engineers, and others. And it's given me as a school board member, a volunteer, right? Just lay person, if you will, a fair amount of confidence that we are not overbuilding, that we are doing this as right as possible given the uncertainties, the inherent uncertainties. And I actually am very pleased with the folks, Joe and Nathan. We've been very lucky to have Nathan as what I'll call our district's chief financial officer since I've been around. And we have thanks, I think at least in large part, the Nathan's Good Fiscal Management delivered modest surpluses each and every year. I've been on the school board. And so I think we'll continue to provide a very professional level of management and oversight over this project. I think I will admit it's not a project that any of us really wants to do from a pocketbook standpoint. We were all incredibly disappointed to discover that the PCB contamination was such that we could not safely re-enter the building and to further discover that it would not be economically feasible to remediate the existing building that it would be throwing effectively good money after bad. So given those unfortunate constraints, I think the folks we have hired and retained to help us navigate this project are doing a very good job. And I think we're being as fiscally prudent as we can be. I'm not excited as a Burlington taxpayer to take out the $165 million bond. And I am hopeful that between now and the time we actually need to draw down the money that there will be potentially some other pots of money that we can draw from as outlined in some of these materials. Incidentally, were those materials? So we've got two sheets here, which I've just read over and I thought, wow, that's right on. So I encourage you to read these, but I am hopeful given some uncertainty that we won't have to draw on all of that, as Nathan mentioned earlier. And we've built in a substantial contingency in that 165. So there are never any guarantees, but I'm also hopeful that we've overbuilt a contingency. But given the inflation environment, it's hard to tell. But one thing we have promised not to do is to go back to the well and ask for more. We are going to do our absolute very best to bring the project in on budget and God willing on time. And we've been very fortunate that Macy's was empty at the time we needed it. A friend said, what would you have done? What was your plan B? We don't have one. And most other cities and towns in this state don't have one. And as you may know, the state has started testing for PCBs in all schools of a certain area across the state. I think we're just the beginning of this. And it's unfortunate, but I think once you get through the phases of grief here on this, at least I'm just speaking for myself, I'm now pretty excited, very excited about the possibility of this new high school. Unfortunately, not for my kids, probably not for your kids, but for the city of Burlington and the families and the generations to come. So I'm very optimistic. Incidentally, I do of course, hope you'll vote yes on the ballot item when it comes up, when you get your ballots in the mail. I'm happy to take any other questions as well. Yeah, sure. Given that there will probably be delays in construction, what is the term for the lease of Macy's? Yeah, right now I've recently reread the lease. I think we can, right now, I'm pretty sure we're pretty equally matched to our start date, but if there is a delay, we are going to have to negotiate an extension to that. And we pay a million dollars here and as you call it, they're all in burden. I can translate. I think she said we pay, Claire, did you say we'd pay a million dollars a year in rent for the, actually, Nathan would know? Is that roughly? It's more than that, actually. Yeah, now I think we're... Incidentally, rent's not cheap as we're on. But yeah, we'll do our best to get in on time and the worst case is we're going to have to extend at least one way or the other. Can you fix the audio so that I can speak? Sounds like it may be a connection problem, like hearing it down and what's the issue. No? No. We can hear you, Claire. It's just a little choppy. You may want to turn off your video. Okay, thank you. We'd be happy to take any other questions, but we don't want to dominate the evening. There are other interesting things going on. I see Mary as her hand raised. Maybe we have one or two more questions and then we're going to move on to the next topic. Awesome. Mary, go ahead. Yes, okay. So this is Diane Gayer. I'm here with Mary Twitchell. And going back to the amount of money spent being proposed for a new building, can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Thank you. My question goes to how green and forward thinking is this building for this amount of money? And are we really talking about solar collectors on the roofs, like should be happening across all of our schools? Are we talking about natural materials within the classrooms? Are we looking at proper ventilation? I know some of these ventilation isn't on, I mean, that's by code, but really how forward thinking is this building for this amount of money? You know, I think the, Joe, do you feel like maybe the right fellow among the three of us to answer that question? Sure, yeah, I'm happy to give that a try. I mean, we are pursuing a LEED certification for the building. So it will be, you know, sustainable energy efficient building, you know, with, you know, really large R factors for insulation and the building materials will meet the LEED certifications as well. As far as solar collectors, we are talking to a third party solar provider, the party that owns the solar collectors that are on the old high school now to continue doing that, to provide a solar on the roof of the new building and possibly, you know, on some of the grounds. Okay, so if I look to the Davis Center at UVM, which is now quite a few years old, it was LEED certified and I think it got a silver and it got a silver despite being a building on steroids, i.e. overbuilt for what it needs to do, as well as gaining credits by absconding with other credits from other buildings. So LEED certified to me is not as good as we can get when we're spending $65 million for a future building that represents the city of Burlington and the education of our students. Yeah, a couple other features that we can just, you know, in addition to the LEED certification, which is really just kind of confirmation that we built to an efficiency standard. Other things that works boring include the building's gonna have a geothermal in it. It is likely to be net zero ready. It may not be net zero when it opens, but the hope is that with improvements of technology and other innovations, we actually could have a net zero building by as soon as 2030 potentially even, and that essentially means that the site's generating the energy that it needs to operate. So that is a conversation that is gonna continue with BED that we're hoping for, we have high hopes for. And I think it's also important to understand that in addition to the kind of energy efficiency elements of the building, that we've also been intentional about making sure that it has connections to the natural space around the building to allow students not only to hopefully have a good experience within the building, but also to be able to use that campus in the form of outdoor classrooms, connections to the arms forest, and so forth. So we're thinking about not only the energy efficiency in that narrow sense of the environmental impact of the building, but also kind of how we can more broadly make that building a kind of space for students to learn about their environment from an energy point of view, but also just about the setting and so forth. I think the outreach effort of the education component to that, and I believe some of that is already in place. I wonder though, knowing that, I mean, I'm not totally together with the Climate Action Plan of Burlington, but I think that the date lines that you're referring to miss some of the BED and N-C-A-P Climate Action Plan for Burlington, you're further out than that. So I should think that it should be opening at net zero impact. And I don't hear that. We're going to be net zero already, as Nathan said. We hope to be able to, definition of net zero is produce on site as much energy as you consume. And that is our hope, but not on day one, as I understand it. And I do understand that to some degree, because first of all, the speakers at Mary, I sense your passion and I think, well, I share it, and those on the board share it, and those whom we've hired have shared it. And I've asked that question and some of this is a function of money. So if our bond were to be 10, 20, 30 million more, we may be able to do something like that from the get go, but there have been certain economic efficiency trade-offs that we've had to make. But nonetheless, I can assure you that it's very much in the forefront of our mind. And feel free to email me if you want to, jwek at bsdvt.org with your specific recommendations. And I can take it back to our architectural and engineering team and get you some further answers. But I do like where you're going with this because we all believe in it, we need it. Sorry, and I am Diane Gayer. I'm partner with Mary Fitchell. So just to clarify who's speaking. Jeff Wick, Jeff Wick. And Diane, this question about the school building and its future and its redesign and its now new design has been a long one. And it's hard for me to swallow that you're saying if you spent 30 million, I heard. Well, don't quote me on that. Incidentally, I was just throwing out numbers, but it would be substantially more. I don't buy that. This is the moment to question what we're spending and how and get what we want for the future. Yeah, I fully understood. And like I said, I think we are, well, send me an email. I can get your questions answered. Happy to put that up. I don't have a question. I'm asking why the design isn't meeting this. I think it is meeting it actually. It's going to be, we're going to have everything ready for solar on the roof. That's not good enough. It has to be now. Now. Now. All right. Sorry. Well, this is a, there's not a good point in this conversation. It's an important session. I think this topic in particular is very close to a lot of us in our passions. And I appreciate the comments that we're going to have to leave it here for now. The rest of the agenda that we've kind of delayed here by about 15 minutes. Thank you. Claire and Jeff and Nathan and Joe and Russ, I think. And we will have another update soon. Thank you for coming. Thank you for having us. You're so welcome. Thank you. Okay. Moving to our next agenda topic. So. You're going to write the deputy chief of operations. Yeah. That's the right title. Yes. We're going to talk to us about telling the status of public safety and security. I think we heard some concerns from board six residents, very specific one. Well, like that same car break ins. Why did I say? Or there's a six residents. Oh, we're in for some more. Yeah, sorry. That's the. If you don't mind, I'm going to go sit up there so I don't feel like I'm talking to people like that. Yeah, please do. And I mean, yeah, general, general friends, staffing issues. I know we were seeing there's a lot of topics. So it's working out, so please take it away. So I have an update. I think that might answer some folks questions or might generate some more questions. But thank you. My name is with a wreck. I'm the deputy chief of operations. So what does that mean? That means all the folks that are in uniform. That's the side of the building that I that I run. The other deputy chief position is the administration and he runs our dispatch records and detective unit. So that's kind of the the division of labor, you could say. I was born and raised in Burlington just so folks know, I grew up on Buell Street corner of Hungerford and hunger, terrorism, Buell till about the mid seventies. And we were the last family left and we ended up moving to South Burlington. But I started out with lots of friends and kids in the neighborhood there, I went to Taft school so that some new people might remember that. And my second grade teacher told my mom that I was Miss Heath, I believe her name was and she said I was a candidate for trouble. That was her word. So my parents put me in Catholic school on North Street. So I went to St. Joe's for a couple of years and then we ended up moving. So I, yeah, I'm quite familiar. I was with Burlington. I've been a police officer for 22 years now. Hold the microphone a little closer. I can talk louder. My wife says I was trying not to, you know, use my, as my wife says, my cop voice. So, but I certainly can speak up. I have no, I don't actually don't need the microphone. So, yeah, I've been there 22 years. I spent a majority of that before I became a supervisor as a canine officer in this area in E area. So, you know, between 2008 and 2015, if you saw a police canine car driving around down here, it was probably me. But I'd been deputy chief for two and a half years now, two years, actually almost three years now, sorry. So just to give you an update, a little historical knowledge of the calls for service or incidents that happen every year, every time someone calls in or logs online to ask for police service, no matter what it is, it goes into our record system, which is called Valkor, after Valkor Island. Just to give you how busy we've been in the past, leading up to now, 2017, we had around 21,841 calls for service. In 2018, we had 19,233, 2019, we were down to 18,396. A lot of that came from the number of car stops we were doing decreased drastically. Then in 2020, we went down to 16,053, that's when COVID started. Last year, 2021, we had 13,511, we were still kind of in COVID, and it was a little slower, as we could say. And so far this year, as of today, I ran the numbers, we are at 16,473. We're probably back on track for either 2019 or 2018 numbers. So right around 18,000 to 19,000 calls for service. So far this year, there has been, I took the major increases that we've had in crimes. Stolen vehicles are up 541%, over a five-year average. And so far this year, 226 have been reported, happens also be my badge number. But that does not, so that does include not just motor vehicles, like a car, but it also includes scooters and mopeds. Those are a large number of the thefts that we have. Unfortunately, gunfire incidents are up 340% over a five-year average. So going back all the way to 2018, overdoses are up 146%, larcenies are up 104%. And that does include bicycle thefts, the way the BALCOR system works, which the rest of the state now is on. The categories are very broad, obviously for reporting, for us to be able to report to the federal government every year, the categories themselves are generalized. So if you say my bike was stolen, that actually falls into our larceny. It's very, the system itself is sometimes hard to search for specific data like bike larcenies, but they are up 104% or larcenies are. And the hotspots where most of the bike thefts are happening are in the old North end, the Hill section and the downtown area. Burglaries are up 17%. So those are five of the categories that are basically four of them and triple digits and the next biggest one was burglaries up 17%. The rest of it isn't the percentage that are up is not that significantly, I think different because we're coming out of COVID, people are getting out more and stuff like that. So I do have some tips just to put them out there before folks ask questions. When it comes to stolen vehicles, I think the biggest one I could tell people are to spread with your neighbors and friends and family, don't leave your spare keys in the car. That's probably the number one, close to the number one reason why we have a huge number of car thefts is people leaving their spare key in the car, leaving the keys for the car in there or leaving their valet key. I know that's not a big thing up here, but a lot of cars have valet keys that you may have forgotten about, but people that are stealing the cars are not forgetting about that. The other one is don't leave your car running with the keys in it, locked or unlocked and do something for, and I've seen this quote numerous times, just a second. We had one gentleman who was stealing cars, he learned quite quickly, he was good to go to the Cumberland farms on either Pine Street or Riverside and just wait, and sooner or later, somebody would drive up, hop out, run in to get a coffee or if he was really lucky, one guy filled his gas tank up for his left keys in it, then went inside. So they had a full tank of gas. A lot of people pulled up with the car actually running and unlocked and running and most of the times, that person also tended to leave their firearm in somewhere in the car. We watched one when we got the video, Surveillance Guy drives up in his really nice truck, car running, truck running, jumps out, we watched somebody ride up on a bicycle, lean the bike up, go over, look in the truck, get in the truck, drive off with the truck and a firearm. So that was a surprising, another one. And then here's one that a lot of people don't think about, I live out in Jericho, so it's kind of out in the sticks and I have dogs, but leaving your keys on the inside of your house, but near an entrance to your home, like in your mud room or if someone's going around at night trying doorknobs and breaks in, they're usually looking for your wallet or your purse, but also people leave their keys. We've had people wake up in the morning, wallet's gone, keys are gone, car's gone. So making sure your doors are locked and hanging your keys up or putting them somewhere where they're not like some of the walks in, like, oh, there's a set of car keys, or if you have like a little rack where you hang all your keys, we've had a few of those. So those are any chance I've gotten to be on the news, I've tried to put those helpful hints out there and it usually whatever I said gets, that part gets chopped out because it's not really that glamorous. Stolen bikes, we've partnered with the city. I know there's a national registry for bicycles, but one of the biggest problems we have is we have encounters with people all the time and people are like, oh, that's my bike, I know it is, what's the serial number? I don't know. So we go out with this person, it could be that person's bike, we run the serial number and it comes back to nobody. So one of the biggest things you can do is have, once again, spread the word, write down your serial number, or have them write their serial number down somewhere and keep it somewhere in your house. So you have a password book, which probably isn't a good idea, but I have one too. How about write your serial number for your bike, serial number for your computers? Anything that has a serial number, we have a lot of stolen property that we do recover and we can never find the owners because we have no way to match it up. And a serial number is a really good way. We also, on our BPD website now, you can click on the left-hand side, there is a little tab that says services and guidance. If you click on that, it drops a dropdown menu and on that you'll see register a bike and there's a form you can fill out on there as your name, your address, phone number to contact you at, your serial number. You can upload a picture of your bike, you can upload a picture of your serial number, but name, phone number, and serial number, if you can put that much in there and a picture does help, that would, we would probably be able to return a lot of bicycles, especially when- You're not required in Wellington? No, you're not required. You'll have to register your bike. No, there's no like registry. We don't require it. Oh, he goes, anyone else? Oh, that's beyond my capability. But just registering your bicycle is in putting that serial number in there, your name, the serial number, and your phone number. If you don't want to put the rest of it, I'm fine with that, but that would really help out a lot with the stolen bicycles. I talked about gunfire being up. I just want to let you know that we've made arrests in the last three gunfire incidents that just occurred. We had one mail we arrested that was responsible for two of them. One was the one down here on Shelburne Road when that caused an accident as well. The operator was shot through the back seat and then crashed. And then the very next night, there was a gunfire incident in front of a burn gallery at the corner of basically Main Street and St. Paul, that guy was responsible for all three of those shootings. And he's been caught and he's now waiting trial, or, you know, waiting trial. He's been held without bail so far. The one at Perkins Pier, we just arrested a female two days ago for the shooting that occurred at Perkins Pier. We do have somebody in custody that we're looking at for the homicide that occurred over on Luck Street. And overall, in my last 22 years, there's not been anybody who has been murdered in the city that has not had the person who murdered them caught. I dare anybody to find another large city in a state, you know, and we're small compared to other, but that has that kind of track record. So overall, and we, I didn't dig going back, if we, if somebody's been shot, like physically hit with a bullet, we have, I would dare say caught the person who's done that. Whether they were, it was a homicide or it was just aggravated assault and the person was hit with gunfire but lived. So overall, our detective bureau has a really, really good record of catching the folks that do these, that commit these crimes. It's not unfortunate, I really wish it was like TV and only took like 50 minutes or 53 minutes, right? Seven minutes of commercials. But it does take a lot longer than that. And the fact that a lot of these we've already solved this year is a pretty good indicator. I'd like, hopefully that can, you know, at least allow some of your fears that these people are still gonna be running around out there doing this. We, like I said, I like just think we do a pretty good job doing that. So that kind of rolls in my last thing. Last two things, I can talk about staffing. So just to give you a picture of in June of 2020, we had a total of 92 police officers working at the Burlington Police Department. Now that includes all the police officers, all the detectives, all the supervisors. As of today, we have 61 police officers working to give you another picture in 2020, the Uniform Service Bureau that I run, all the cops in uniforms. We had 45 of them. Today, I had 21. So in, we talked about earlier in June, or say for the year of 2020, there were 16,053 incidents. When those incidents come in, almost every single one of those goes to a uniformed officer first. So if you have a burglary, the officer is the one who's probably gonna show up and take the initial report, maybe take some evidence, maybe have our ID unit come take some evidence that may get turned over to a detective. If it's a spree of burglaries, which is another one we've actually been pretty good at is catching the burglars too. But it always usually starts with the officer. So they're either responsible to write a report and then it gets sent to like the detective bureau or they write a report to just close it out because they're responsible for it or they actually arrest somebody, give them a citation and then they're responsible for all the court paperwork that goes over to court so the person can be charged. So that averages out to about 357 calls per officer in 2020. Like I said, this year just as of right now, we're at 16,473, I have 21 officers working, that's 784 calls per officer. So I've lost over 50% of our uniformed officers and they've pretty much doubled the number of incidents they're required to go to. So to say that our officers are at the breaking point is probably an understatement. Now, there's been, there are other resources perhaps that we could have looked at. Our detective bureau, there's 10 detectives. There's five that are in the general detective. They investigate shootings, burglaries, all that kind of stuff. Two of them worked for the Chinden unit for special investigations, CUSY, the sex crimes unit. There's two assigned over there. And then we have a drug unit. We have three in there, but one is on military leave. The other two, one of them works also as a task force agent. He's still a Burlington officer, but he works for the DEA and he's paid, correct me if I'm wrong, Jay. He's paid by the DEA, I believe, for some of his work. But he's actually very important to have when we do drug work, because then we not only can usually have state charges, but federal charges as well. And so that leaves one drug unit guy to kind of work the city. And we've assigned an officer from the road in eight months stints just to keep the drug unit open. Cause if we didn't have that officer from the road working in there, the drug unit most likely wouldn't, he would just get pulled back into general. But even those officers, those five or six that are in there, like why not put them in uniform and put them back on the road? Then we'd have nobody to solve the shootings. They're, most of those detectives have a couple of shootings each. So even the ones that maybe it was just an exchange of gunfire, no one was hit. We still have made arrests on those, or those are still being investigated. So I don't really have anywhere to go from there, which leads to, I'm sure everybody's heard about the airport, right? There's police officers at the airport. That is actually a federal regulation. There has to be the federal government requires someone, anybody, any officer that's working at the airport or any, if you want to call them security have to be able to enforce state laws. So they, and they also have to be able to arrest for state laws. So TSAs have no law enforcement powers. Federal agents don't enforce state laws. So it is Burlington police. And we are the final, like most of their plans there, they have plans for all sorts of stuff. But the last thing in there usually is call BPD. So we're required to have a certain number of officers for each checkpoint that's open. And in fact, I think we, so that's not loud. We probably get away with a little bit because the ticket counter actually counts as a checkpoint when they screen your bags and the containers back there. But each checkpoint where you go through the TSA checks all your bags and stuff, those are have to have an officer available to respond to them. So two officers have to at least be working during the day to respond to those checkpoints. I did eliminate the midnight shift out there and that gained me an officer downtown. So between midnight and like 3 30 in the morning, cause the first officer actually arrives on scene to work the gates open at like 4 a.m. Between that point right now, there is no, there's no police officer working the midnight shift out there. So we've done, we've done what we can with what we have So going on, just we, people probably heard we had a new contract. We're starting pay right now is $71,000 a year, which is roughly $7,000 to $10,000 more than most of actually probably any agency in the state of Vermont right now. And a senior corporal who has 15 years on, which is the final step in their pay trades over all the years in 2025 will make $100,000 a year. So those are incentives that are out there to try to entice people to take up this profession. There's also a $15,000 hiring bonus that's paid out and I think it's $5,000 increments over three years for folks that decide to join us. Those are for an officer who comes in, we call them lateral transfers. They would be somebody who's been an officer either in Vermont, they're certified in Vermont or they come from another state that the police academy recognizes their certification from. And just to give you an idea how long that takes, we have three folks in the academy right now. They will go through 16 weeks down at the police academy when they graduate from there, they will come back to us and then they are required to finish 14 weeks of field training. As you probably guessed, this is a very involved job. There's lots of things that they have to learn. One of them alone can, if they didn't grow up in Burlington is just learning the streets. We're not gridded off. I lived in Miami, that was a great place. Everything was Northwest, Southwest, whatever 15th street or it was easy to find your way around. Burlington's a little more like Boston, not that bad but pretty close sometimes. And if you don't know the area, you'd be surprised a lot of their challenges for folks that are new to the city, that are new officers up here is just finding themselves from point A to point B. The new North end, everything's named after a tree or a shrub. Even I sometimes, I had my God parents lived up there. I spent a lot of time up there. Every once in a while I'll be like, green briar, okay. Or wood lawn or it can be quite challenging. So they have to make it through 14 weeks. So now we're already looking at 30 weeks. So the folks that are in the academy right now, everything works perfectly for them. They will probably be able to come on to the road at the end of March. We have one officer right now who just got out of the academy. He's in field training right now. Hopefully by the end of December, he'll be able to come on. So that will give me four new officers but not to rain on my own parade. I'm gonna lose three officers for sure between now and the end of September. So I might gain one officer overall. And that's kind of the state of the state uproar, PD. That's great. I just, I appreciate the summary. I wanna make sure we leave some time for questions. We're running a little bit behind Sam and Rana and Eli. I know you guys are waiting on, I know Ben traverse is waiting as well. Are you guys okay if we go a little bit longer? Okay, thank you. I have a question. Do you feel that the court system is back in action probably like it was prior to the pandemic and doesn't have a lot to do with the increase of criminal action if it isn't? I think the backlog is not helping because of COVID but I just saw an article today. I believe is it maybe at the end of this week or next week, but the judicial bureau is going to reopen the courthouses. So they're gonna lift all any restrictions that they had left. So that might help relieve some of that. We also as a department have been using the community justice center or alternative justice referrals for nonviolent misdemeanor crimes. That does include like a simple assault when somebody, you know, two people get in like a little bit of a fist fight that so that is violent. But those will unlawful mischief that aren't expensive, you know, that doesn't have a really high amount of damage. We are pushing those, moving those into the alternative justice system first to help the courts concentrate on the bigger cases and stuff that they needed. So we'll see with the bureau lifting that if they do lift it, if that helps them go back to functioning with everybody in the building, everybody working. First, we can say thank you for everything you're doing. It's an incredibly tough job. Anyway, it's not nearly enough resources. So thank you for taking the time to be here. Now there's a lot of other things going on that we really appreciate for you and your team are doing. Second question is, sort of the question is, do you have a hiring target you're aiming for in terms of kind of your total number of officers you're aiming for? Yeah, we're aiming for like between 85 and 87. 85 I think is what we're allowed to hire to now. As anybody here could be worked in a larger business or something like that, you can never really hit that number because you hit 85 and three people are gonna retire. So you really need to be at like 88 to kind of keep that stasis there. But that's what we're aiming for right now is to get back up into the, you know, 85 to 87. But unfortunately for hiring just in general, like over the whole United States, we're not alone in this. Like they're most police departments anywhere in the United States if you ask them, they can't find anybody that wants to enter this profession now. And we're going through a pretty radical change and necessarily one that we necessarily need to do. But it's, you know, where that's gonna go, it's probably gonna take three to four years, maybe five years total to get those numbers back. The state of Vermont itself, even the state police are, you know, a good example is we, the state police always had the most going down to the police academy, like the biggest chunk of the candidates down there. And then Burlington was always the second. Like I had five, six people in my class that were from Burlington and a class of 42. And the state police had, I think 14. The last class we had one in and the state police had, we had two in, sorry, and state police had six. That was all they could hire was six people when they used to have classes of 15. Even a couple of them were big, like up to 20. So when the largest agency in the state has having issues that, you know, trickles down to everybody else. Thank you. That was a good question. Yes, ma'am. This is a good question, but why do you see this, the lack of interest in this? I mean, what's like the main reason why people- I think, you know, to be honest, you go back to George Floyd and the defunding the police and how police are viewed. And I think in general, people like don't, are looking at this profession as one that they don't really want to get into and be brought under that kind of microscope. That seems to be kind of the trend, like nationwide. What are the changes that are being initiated? Well, I guess to start with like, we actually, I mean, I'm really glad you asked this question. The de-escalation, the negotiation stuff, we started that before it was the new in thing to do. In 2016, another Sergeant and I went down to New York City to NYPD and sat in a room with police chiefs and lieutenants from all over the country, Dallas, Seattle. And we were working with the police, sorry, the police research executive firm, Perf, police executive research firm, sorry, Perf. And we came up with a guideline or a basis for a plan called the integration of communication and tactics and what that became, everybody calls it ICAT. But what it is, is de-escalation. And so before any of George Floyd happened and all this de-escalation, we were actually at the forefront down there putting this program together and rolled it out at our department before it was the in thing to do. I'm a negotiator, we have a pretty large negotiating cadre, fortunately I haven't lost a lot of them. But our main goal is to slow things down and try to establish a rapport. Now that was, I will tell you, it was a lot easier when there was 90 some odd officers. I'm sure everybody's aware of the officer involved shooting that we had weeks ago. So the officer who shot was a sergeant. He should have been in charge of the scene, not the one providing cover for the other officer who was trying to talk to the person who had met on other calls and actually had a rapport with. And then the only other officer working, so there was three total working on a day shift on a Saturday, he showed up third. And then we didn't have the luxury of being able to have eight people, nine people, officers there to set up a perimeter and keep people back and use, we have polycarbonate shields that we would have, that's part of our protocols when we have enough officers. So it's a, we're kind of stuck in a little bit of a catch 22 in these situations. But there's still a group of officers that train regularly, we find a way so they can train that run our emergency response vehicle. And they're all either half of our instructors in ICAT. So in negotiations or they're negotiators themselves. So we're still like, that's one of the innovations I think that we've really, we started ahead of everybody else and we're still on the edge, sorry. No, no, that's great. So I think we'll, we'll open this up. I see Melo granted one more, please. Got her hand raised and then I think we'll move on to the next agenda item after this. Melo, go ahead. Thank you, can you hear me? Yes. Thank you so much. Commissioner Seguino and Cumberford were not available this evening. So they just asked me to listen along. I just want to thank DC LeBreck for his presentation. I think this is really an excellent example of the type of community outreach that we need, giving people information that they need to help prevent crime. Sometimes there's this mythology around what our police officers can actually prevent versus going out and solving. So the more people are aware of what we can do to make their jobs easier by doing more to protect ourselves so certain crimes don't occur is to be helpful. And in the past, I felt that our department didn't always do a good job of that. And so I'm happy to see this, this type of outreach continuing. I just wanted to mention biteindex.org. I don't know if the police department is looking at that site at all. I am aware that a lot of Burlingtonians have been using it. So now that we are collecting these registrations, would we want people to be registered in two places or would the department also use that index? Just a question to take back to talk about internally in terms of messaging. And then I wanted to speak really briefly about, we are having very traumatic times in our country and there was a great movement of protest after the horrific death of George Floyd but it wasn't just George Floyd. There were many incidents before and these incidents have continued after and there's a great call for reform. So now it becomes do people want to step up to this moment? Can they step up to this moment? And that's what makes it harder to recruit officers. So please feel free to reach out to me MEGrant at BurlingtonVT.gov. I would be happy to email people information on issues around recruitment because I actually read about this a lot. And that's all I really wanted to say. I know you're pressed for time with other items but thank you very much and thank you again to DC Labreck for his presentation. Great, I'll end up with one last quick thing. We did promote two new lieutenants. This guy, I'm going to mention, he's the area lieutenant for E area. So this end of the city, his name is Lieutenant Mai Nguyen. He's been an officer and he's catching up. So he's like 16 years, I think he's got, oh no, 17 years, I think he's getting pretty close to his 20. But he is the area lieutenant. I will have the area lieutenants now posted with their email addresses on the website, on our website. So you can also reach out to the area lieutenant with questions or concerns and stuff as well. Thank you. Thank you. Yep. Hey. I appreciate. Go ahead. I appreciate folks sticking around and bearing with us as the agenda of stretching out here. Next topic is, we're joined by Ben Traverse, city council with five talking to us about proposed charter change, I believe for non-citizen legal resident voting. And I don't know if I'm deaf or terminology exactly right, but then you can. All right, thanks Nelson. Can you hear me all right? Great. So I'll do my best to get you as close to back on schedule as possible here. I appreciate you're having me. Thanks for hosting that great discussion with DC Labreck. My name is Ben Traverse. I was recently elected as the new city councilor for ward five and I serve on the council's charter change committee on others, but it's my position on the charter change committee that has me here this evening. Folks may remember that seven years ago in 2015, there was a ballot measure put out there to allow for non-citizens, legal resident, but non-citizens to vote in local elections, as well as to hold positions on city boards and commissions, including the city council. That failed before the voters in 2015, roughly 58% to 42%. The council looked at the issue again in 2020, but decided at that point in time not to put the question on the ballot to voters. Back in 2015 and 2020, there was a lot of discussion around why these measures failed and why the council had apprehension back in 2020 to put it on the ballot. And a good amount of it revolved around some feedback and some concerns that folks felt like they hadn't had enough opportunity to consider the issue, to really understand it, to understand what its impact would be, not the least of which on those that would impact the most, which is non-citizens who would gain the opportunity to vote in our local elections. Since 2015, 2020, there's been other Vermont communities that have enacted all resident voting. It happened in Montpelier. It happened most recently in Winooski. So with other Vermont cities and towns considering the issue, we felt as the charter change committee that this year presented a good opportunity for us to re-approach the issue, but we're approaching it very carefully and are very mindful of not wanting folks if we were to put it on the ballot, which this would be for town meeting day next year, March of next year, wanting to ensure that folks have had a full opportunity to provide feedback, to ask any questions about it, and to fully understand what the measure would accomplish. So the counselors on the charter change committee are going around to all of the NPAs. We've been working closely with CEDO, which has been assisting us in working with a number of community stakeholders, particularly in local immigrant communities, to have discussions with them about what the impact of this would be if we were to put it on the ballot and it were to pass. And would love to hear your feedback or receive your questions, certainly if we have time this evening, we could discuss it now, but also would welcome your reaching out to us on the council, or I'm sure we'll no doubt continue to have meetings on this as a charter change committee and then as a full council. So just very briefly here, just as the ballot measure would have done in 2015, if the council puts a proposed charter change measure on the ballot in March and voters vote in favor of it, it would allow for all legal residents, regardless of their citizenship status to vote in local elections. So what does that mean? It means your local positions, like city council, school board, your ward clerks and inspectors of election. And it would also allow non-citizens to serve on local Burlington boards and commissions. We don't have authority as a city to extend voting rights beyond local elections. So it would only be with respect to local candidates and local questions that non-citizens would be able to vote on. If voters approved it in March, it would have to as a charter change, then go to the state legislature. It's possible that they would consider it in the next session. If not, it would come up in the session after that in 2024. But I would anticipate that if we put this, again, question on the ballot in 2023 and voters approved it, that come the next local election, whether that be that November or whether it be in March of 2024, that all legal residents, regardless of their citizenship status, would be able to vote. So that is what we are working on as a committee. Wanted to bring that to you all as the Ward 6 NPA. Again, happy to hear your feedback or to answer any questions you may have. Do you have any numbers? As to how many people would be impacted by this? Exactly. Yeah, that's a really good question. So we're not entirely certain with respect to that. I will tell you that in Winooski, since they enacted all resident voting, relatively few people have come forward to register to vote since then, but they are working on it. I apologize for not having the numbers right in front of me right now. I can look it up as to what the exact number of eligibility would be, but that isn't a number we have been considering. Just following on that, I wonder if there is clarity about what particular areas of the city non-resident voters would be concentrated in or if there is a concentration? Yeah, it's another good question. I think it's another question that we've been looking into where you find the highest concentration of non-citizens is in the city's more diverse neighborhoods. So you do find a higher concentration of non-citizens in the Old North End, for example. In Ward 5, there are certain neighborhoods where there is a higher concentration of non-citizens who would be eligible to register to vote under this. There are certain wards where it would impact voter numbers potentially more than others. And just to follow on that, what about college and university students who may be registered to vote otherwise in other places? That is to say not in local elections in other places. Would they be eligible to vote in local elections here if they were from Illinois and voted in national and state elections in Illinois? That's a very good question, a question that has not come up yet. It's a good point, though, because obviously if Burlington were to stand up this system, we would register legal resident non-citizens ourselves. It's not a system that would go through the states because folks would not end up on the state voter rolls. So it's a very good question and it's one that I'll certainly take back and get you an answer on. Thank you. Last one. Hey Ben, this is Matt Grady. Thanks a lot for presenting. Is the ballot I'm going to be worded just the same as the one that didn't pass? And if it is, do you have reasonable feedback about why it didn't pass the first time and how we can work against that? You know, work to get a better result. Right. So to answer your first question, we've agreed on language that would end up on the ballot and it's not the same as it was in 2015. Instead, the language pretty much mirrors the language that was on the ballot in Winooski. And there's a couple of reasons for that, not the least of which is that Winooski voters passed that, it went through the legislature, it was enacted and they did not run into any legal hurdles at least at the legislature at the legislative level. So it's tried and true language and that is what we are basing it off of. Okay, you answered my question. That's great. Thank you. And then just as to your other question, why didn't it pass back in 2015? I think there's various reasons. If Burlington had done this in 2015, we would have been the trailblazer really in Vermont with respect to this issue. I think that there were a lot of questions then that don't necessarily exist now in part because Montpelier and Winooski have already gone forward and done this. Obviously the world has changed quite a bit. In the last seven years as well, and folks are looking at democracy and participation in voting and our systems of government more or differently now than they did seven years ago. And so we thought if there seemed to be more interest this time around then in 2015 that now presented a good opportunity for us to re-approach this. All right, thank you. And excuse me, thank you for joining us. I think we'll leave it there and folks can contact you and I'm not sure who else is on the Charter Change Committee with additional questions. Yeah, so please feel free to email me, betrevers at BurlingtonVT.gov. There are two other counselors in the Charter Change Committee, Gene Bergman from Ward two and Sarah Carpenter from Ward four. We will continue to meet as a Charter Change Committee to discuss the issue our meetings are posted online. This would not be put on the ballot as well until it went back to the full council. Certainly your counselors and Council President Paul and Councilor Shannon would at that point in time have an opportunity to vote on it and weigh in. So stay tuned and thank you very much for the questions. You've raised a couple of new issues for me here that I will get back to you on. And I will also would be happy to email you all for the minutes, the information we have as to the percentage of folks who may become eligible to vote if this were to go through. That'd be great. Thank you. All right. Thanks very much. Have a good night all. Thanks, Matt. Okay, last but not least, thank you for your patience, all of you. Where it would be best for you all to sit. Right here. Perfect. So the last agenda topic is especially about a new, and you'll correct me if I go around here, but a new multi-unit housing development on South Buenos Aires Avenue. So we're joined tonight by Maria Scouds, my second. You are? Yeah, nice to meet you. Okay, the January Housing Trust, Sam Beal and Eli Marotcher. Here you go. All right. We're going to tell us a little bit more about the project. Great. Thank you, Nelson. Can you read it and change these things? I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Sure. I need a minute to put up. And sorry, guys, one more question. Will you have the click-and-slide for... Okay. Yeah. Yeah, so I think we need to be promoted to be a presenter. I think it's Duncan, by the Yankees. Yep. So maybe... Would you like the street elevation? As you speak. I'm going to start with that. So, please. Okay, that's fast. Okay, I think we're all set. Thanks for having us tonight. As Nelson said, my name is Miranda Lascaz. I'm from the Shantling Housing Trust. And I'm here with Eli and Sam from our architect team at Duncan Wyshnefsky Architecture. Also working on this project is their colleague, Taryn, who wasn't able to be with us tonight. And I think on Zoom, I've got a couple of colleagues from the development team, too. Kirsten Merriman Shapiro, Ben Shirts, and Amy Donner. So I've got a team here that we're excited to tell you about this proposed project that is at 176 South Wynewski Ave. That we are working in partnership with the VFW on a possible redevelopment of their site. So I'll start with just talking about the evolution of this proposed project. And I'll then turn it over to the architects to tell you a little bit about the design to date. We're at early stages. So we're really kind of talking about project concept for the building and welcome your thoughts and feedback. So as I mentioned, we're working with the VFW. The VFW Howard Plant, I'm blanking on the number right now, but Howard Plant 178, I believe, yes, is the VFW post that's at this address at 1 to 76 South Wynewski. And they approached CHT, Champlain Housing Trust, about possibly redeveloping the site because their current building has maintenance needs. And at the same time, the VFW membership is changing and the posts on opportunity to get some development assistance to maybe launch a new era for the post and contribute to the affordable housing crisis at the same time and also maybe even find new ways to support veterans in the community. The VFW post is the first in the state and has had their home at this location since 1979. And the site has a really interesting history. It's very close to and it seems to clip the historic Burlington Reveen, which some of you may know about. It was once an orchard and before the VFW moved to that location, the site was owned by the city. So our concept is a five-story building. The first floor we would develop to house nonprofit commercial space. And we would then have four floors of housing above. The first floor concept right now is to create those two spaces for nonprofit entities. These are tentative entities that would be in these spaces, but right now we're working with the VFW on a possible condominium that they might choose to buy so that they can continue to have a home at this location for their gatherings, office needs, and also for veteran services programming. And then the other nonprofit space is tentatively for the city's Community Justice Center, which you just heard. Please commission, please LC. I wasn't sure his standing, but Lebrac talk about that is really instrumental to the city's justice and justice programming. So they would lease the second floor, second ground floor space. The upper floors will house 38 apartments and support spaces for those apartments like a property manager office, a community laundry, and a community room for gathering. And because of the special partnership with the VFW, we plan to set aside five of the apartments for veterans that are exiting homelessness. So like I mentioned, we have our building concept with you tonight. There's still a lot that we're working out about the site that will certainly drive the design with these are our initial designs, but we're looking into a lot that will help inform that design, like the site stability, the influences our structural approach, environmental testing to know more about the soils on the site and the groundwater, construction costs and elements like that. So the details will change, but we've got a pretty good sense for what the form of the building and the site plan at this stage looks like. So I'll turn it over to Eli and Sam. Okay, so my name is Sam Beal. I'm a principal at Duncan Wyszczynski architecture and I'm pinch hitting today for Taryn, who is not able to join us today. And so primarily my role will be to be Vanna White and show the slides and zoom in as necessary. But I do sit next to Taryn and I've been observing this project and it's a great project. Before I turn it over to Eli who's been working on the project, just want to highlight the fact that this is one of the first projects to really go through the form-based code in downtown Burlington. And so we've been working closely with zoning staff to make sure we meet all those requirements and they drive a lot of what's gonna happen here both in terms of the materiality as well as the setbacks from the street, how close we can be to the street, how close we need to be to the edges of the site. And so what you see right here on the site plan are some diagrammatic explanations of these different provisions within the zoning code. And so it's not important for you to understand that unless you truly want to. But I wanna just make it clear that a lot of this stuff is baked into our ordinance now. And so we're doing our best to make a beautiful building with this ordinance, but it's something that we have to comply with. And so with that, I'll turn it over to Eli who can speak in more detail to the design as it is currently. Yes, that's a good intro because you're about to hear me say the code says about 10 times in the next, yeah, please. Is everybody familiar with where we're talking about on South Windy Ski Avenue? Yeah, okay, great. What's the South Street, is that King? Yes, yes. Yeah. King, yep. It doesn't go that far, you know. Main and King. Yeah. Okay, well, then I will just jump into it. Actually, if we could start. Oh, my name is Eli Meroche. I thought you covered that. And if we could look at the street side elevation, I'd like to start there. Just to give you an initial idea of what we're thinking this building might look like. So something you might notice right away is that the twin functions of that nonprofit commercial space at the ground floor and then the residential space above are expressed as two contrasting but complementary volumes. And then on the north end of the building, that volume we're thinking brick to connect it to the main, to Main Street, which you know has so many historic brick buildings. If we could go to the site plan, now is where we get into me saying the code 10 different times. A lot of the footprint is driven by the form-based code. This is defined as downtown center. And so the code expresses a desire for this to be developed in a way that feels like a vibrant urban development. And accordingly it specifies side setbacks of 12 feet. And these are maximum side setbacks, not minimum side setbacks. They want the building to stretch along the street frontage. And so, you know, you see that there along South Manuski. Where am I here? Yeah, so that as far as the depth of the building, although bike parking and storage is integrated into this project, the nature of the current tentative commercial tenants is that they have parking needs. To ensure that sufficient parking, we have really the most efficient parking we can get on the back of the site as the code calls for. And that kind of tells us what, how deep our building can be. Which although the site is pretty tight, that is just about enough depth for nice apartments along a double-loaded corridor. So, you know, hallway, apartment, apartment on each side along the length of that building from floors two to five. As for, can we go back to the elevation? Maybe I should have changed the order of. Yeah, so if we go back to the elevation, as Miranda said, a lot of this is, this thinking is in the early stages. So, what you might see here for this material expression is far from set in stone. But we are actively considering what's the most appropriate for the character of this neighborhood. And in addition to that, the form-based code has a very specific list of materials that can be used on the facade. Things like brick and natural stone and fiber cement, which we are, you know, definitely considering. And you'll see kind of expressed here. The building's height is the code specifies that it can't be more than 65 feet or six stories. Our building is five stories. There's a very practical reason for that. The code also specifies that the first story must be at least 14 feet. And we need about 10 and a half feet for each subsequent floor in order to fit our mechanical system. So it's really not possible for us to fit six stories on this site, given the code. But nevertheless, we're still getting, fitting in these generous nonprofit commercial spaces with 38 units of housing. And, you know, in addition to that, that very practical concern, we think it's pretty appropriate to the character of the place there. I mean, it is very close to that intersection with Main Street, very visible from that intersection. And so it's kind of a little bit outside of that downtown core and not quite as tall as some of those buildings along Main Street, but kind of transitioning, just slightly stepping down and extending that urban character. And, you know, to close, I just want to reiterate our excitement for the project. I think something we believe is this is central to Burlington, not just in this location, but in its purpose as Miranda was discussing. And so we hope to make it an important and beautiful addition to the community. So yeah, I'd love to hear questions because part of the purpose of this meeting is to get feedback, because we're still on these early stages. So please go ahead. And is it taller or equally high as the courthouse? The courthouse is taller. Yeah, this is right now at about 60 feet. And yeah. And second, I don't see any balconies. What is that? A private balcony. So these apartments, we don't have space in this building to provide private balconies for each apartment, but there is a community terrace that you can see on the upper right-hand part of your screen that comes off of the community room on the upper floor. So that would be on the roof. Yeah, that's, mm-hmm, with very nice views of the Adirondacks. Will there be gardens on the roof? There will be plantings. And, you know, we're exploring exactly where the landscaping will be, but, you know, we've tossed around different ideas for how that roof porch is being expressed and what it looks like. And here it's very much integrated into that volume and just looking like another window, but this is still all being fleshed out. I don't think I remember how many apartments we were going to be there. 38. 38 and only five for bedrooms. Five will be set aside for homeless veterans. Veterans are certainly eligible for the other apartments, but it's, yeah, but it's a kind of a set aside. I also want to... Thanks. Thank you. I'd also like to mention that Michelle Kever from the VFW is also on Zoom, so she's here if we want to address questions to her. I have just a quick question. Do you have any idea what they'll cost? To Brent. Oh, to Brent. Oh, we do have a general sense. I can't give you specific numbers right now, but the main financing source for affordable housing is called low-income housing tax credits, and those restrict eligibility for the apartments to households below 60% of area median income. So it depends on the household size, whether it's a one, two, or three-person household, but generally a median income is around 95,000 per year right now, so 60% of that and below. So that dictates eligibility, and then the rents, again, are well below market rents, and they're calculated to buy this program to be affordable to folks at those income levels. Yeah. It'll be a mixed income community, so some of the apartments will be set at that 60% AMI, others will be higher income, because it's important to the funders and to ourselves that we create a vibrant mixed income community. So they will be on the market for sale. Is that what you say? No, they will be for rent, their apartments. I see, I see, I think. And how large will they be? So for this downtown location, we have a unit mix that is primarily one-bedroom apartments, but it also incorporates four two-bedrooms and a couple of studio apartments. Yeah. What's the community role? And since you're looking to raise their feedback, is it an eventual approval, or what if it's involved there? Yeah, so we always want community input. It's great to talk to the community about projects that we have in kind of the concept stage. It's an opportunity for the community to give feedback, and it's part of Burlington's process to have projects presented before their neighborhood planning assembly, before they then go to the zoning office for permitting review. Thank you. Yeah. I'm Mark, how I didn't identify myself earlier, but I walk through that. I walk along that block a lot, and I ride my bike along there, and my wife does too, and that is a rough block. It's hard going through there just because there are a lot of people, there are a lot of people on the street who are not always very friendly. And so my hope would be that this really would fulfill that goal or meet that goal of kind of bringing community and bringing vibrancy to that block. You know, there's a gas station on one corner, there's community health. There's just a lot happening in there. And if there could be people living along there, that just sounds great to me. Yeah, it's so good. Thanks, we agree. I think, you know, it would really help to activate the streetscape, both with people living there and also vibrant community entities on the first floor. All in walking distance. Very nice. Is this a net zero building? It's unlikely to be net zero. It will definitely be high performance energy track from BED and efficiency Vermont's multifamily standards. It'll be for their high performance standards. We have difficulty with net zero at this point. I mean, we really pay a lot of attention and really strive for the best air sealing and insulation to invest in the thermal shell. But we often don't have enough room on the roof for solar panels to actually achieve net zero. Yeah. It's a surface area to volume ratio problem. You know, we have five stories of building and only so much roof to put PV on, but there's lots of places to put PV in this state. So it's a community problem at some point. Yeah. Do you have a question? Nope, thank you. It's a little bit here. Charlie. So, did I hear you say that this is the first project that's going through the form-based code process? I don't know that it's the first one, but it's one of the first ones. And so we've been working with Mary and Scott at the zoning office to make sure we all understand the code correctly and are interpreting it correctly. Because as you know, you write something, but then Robert hits the road and you actually try to implement the codes. You find things that are vague or gray. And so we're working through those with the city to make sure everybody understands what we do. So you've chosen to use a form-based code process because of some advantage to using that process versus? I believe we have to, right? Yeah. It's the zoning code for this portion of the city. Sure. Thank you. Well, it seems like you can kind of read the program and the way the elevations are open out. Yeah. What was in the brick volume kind of on the head? So on the first floor of that brick volume, we're currently programming it as kind of a community room. Within that nonprofit commercial space or more community-oriented room. Above it is just, it's other one-bedroom units just like are in the rest of the building. So that piece of the building is really to connect it to Main Street. Whereas then what you see along the south side is that, as you said, expression of different programmatic function. I appreciate that effort to kind of like densify the street. And I know the code is kind of pushing you there anyways, but it was like the site as it is currently configured is kind of a loop of a vehicle circulation. Yes, for sure. Yeah. So a little bit less part of the month. Seems great. That's right. It'll lose the exit of the current entry drive and a separate exit drive and entry and exit will be from one drive. Just one other, I may have missed this before, but what's those at least aspirational timeline for it? Is there one? I'm glad you used the word aspirational. It might not be aspirational, but timelines are never set in stone. We are working through design and permitting now and funding applications to our various funding sources. If all goes well, we might expect to be fully designed, permitted and funded this spring so that we might be able to start construction by spring or summer and be complete in a year or a little bit longer than a year after that. So maybe summer of 2024, it could be complete. Lots of traffic in the Zoom room under the hands raised. Looks like no. Okay. Is that it? Or is there concluding comments? No? Okay. No, thank you very much. That was great. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you all. Thanks also for your patience, kind of sticking with us to the end of the meeting, as well as everybody here and online. That's the end of this meeting. We'll see you all in October. Good night. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Nice to meet you, William. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks.