 So being six o'clock, just explained to everybody this evening. So we've got a couple items on tonight's agenda. First thing we're going to do is run a liquor control board meeting, probably takes about five minutes. We're then going to call to order the regular city council meeting with the agenda that's on the back. We would ask that everybody, please remember to sign in tonight. We appreciate that, especially if you're going to speak any words. And after we call to order the city council meeting, we're actually also going to ask that the, when we get to that item that the planning commission called to order their meeting so that they can formally participate in discussions around economic development, and which will be a joint meeting, actually both bodies. So you'll see a couple different stages of that. And we'll have public comment in just one moment, but we're going to open and close a liquor control board meeting first. So with that, we'll call to order the Winooski liquor control board meeting of Monday, November the sixth, 2017, and ask that everybody please join us for the Pledge of Allegiance, led by Deputy Mayor Brian Corgan. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Okay, we've got one item on tonight's agenda for liquor control board, and that is the Walgreens Eastern Company Incorporated. And it is for the approval of a second class liquor license for 321 Main Street, which is currently the Rite Aid Pharmacy. So this is really a change due to, change in ownership of the property, nothing else about the service delivery method or location is changing. On FaceTime, the representative. Hello, Meryl, how are you today? It's the kind of cool progressive hip place that you're doing business now. I love it. So again, it looks like this is pretty standard in terms of the ownership is just transferring so we're issuing a new permit. Any issues with current location in terms of report backs from compliance perspectives? No, no. Okay, good. Any questions for Meryl or of staff from the liquor control board this evening? Nope. Great. Any questions or comments from the public? Great. So seeing and hearing none, I would entertain a motion for approval of the second class liquor license for Walgreens Eastern Company for what I assume will be a Walgreens located at 321 Main Street. So moved. Second. Motion by Brian Corgan, second by Brian Swinney for the discussion. Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And those opposed, motion carries and the license is granted. Was that the easiest hearing you've ever attended or what? Thank you. Thank you. Welcome to the town, have a great day. And with that, I would entertain a motion for adjournment of the liquor control board. So moved. Motion by Nicole, second by Eric. Any further discussion? Hearing and seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And those opposed, motion carries. One minute. What's that? We're in the city. Yeah, well, it's like welcome to town versus welcome to the city. Well, you said that to me. We're in the city. I don't know what else to do next up. This all night. Shit. Flashlights. Shit. You guys don't want anything by, huh? First the Eagles, now the town. And being 6.05 on Monday November 6th, we'll now call the order of the Wunuski City Council meeting and ask that everybody please join us once again for the Pledge of Allegiance led by Deputy Mayor. It's like I'm trying for you. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Okay, first up tonight, we have an opportunity for a gender review. We have a carefully balanced agenda tonight, but we are going to ask that an item be considered for movement. So I'm gonna ask that item H, which is the discussion of the goals update on economic vitality be moved up to between E and F. Okay, so item H, which is discussion on goal update, will now become item E. So, what's that? Item F. Item F, pardon me. So it'll come after the approval of the state regarding Wunuski, right? Yes. Okay. Just remind me when we get there. Any other concerns regarding the order of the agenda? I think otherwise we've got it stacked up for our guests here tonight as well. Okay, so seeing and hearing none, we will move on to the portion of the evening where we have public comment. This is an opportunity for members of the public to address the council about something that is not on tonight's agenda. We'll have time for each of the agenda items a little bit later, but if there's something that folks would like to speak to the council and administration in regards to something in the city that's not on tonight's agenda, this is an opportunity to do so. Any items for public comment? Okay. So seeing and hearing none, we will move on to the consent agenda. We have four items on tonight's consent agenda. We first have the approval of the city council minutes from October 16th, 2017. We also have approval of the payroll warrants from 10-8-17 to 10-21-17, counts payable warrants from 11-3-17 and the subsequent payout for September. Any questions or concerns from council in regards to the consent agenda? Okay, so seeing and hearing none, I would entertain a motion for approval of the consent agenda as presented. Can we all vote on that? No. I was going to say. I'm sorry about that. That's not going to be in separate, right? Yeah, we can pull it out in the minutes. So I would take a motion first on the approval of the city council minutes of October 16th, 2017. Motion by Nicole, second by Eric. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. And those opposed? Those abstained? Yes. Motion carries. I would now entertain a motion for approval of the payroll warrants of the accounts payable and the subsequent payout for September. So motion by Brian Sweeney, second by Brian Corrigan. Any further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. City update. Sure, thank you. So a couple of updates tonight, just a reminder that this is our only meeting in November, we will have a supplemental warrant. So we will need some signatures on that mid-month if people can remember to come by. You'll get an email from Angela as well, but it'll be between the 16th and the 22nd. So right before Thanksgiving. Halloween was a huge success in Winooski and we wanted to do a special shout out to some of the people who really helped pull it together, primarily Ray and Alicia from the community services team did an outstanding job along with the whole community services team who came out in full force. Sister Pat and her team obviously always do amazing things. Sally tips in and season greetings for all of their work on the pumpkins and the rotary. VSAC for hosting us. It was great to have everything downtown. Brian Tarrant and the mill who put on apparently a very popular haunted mill. And the rest of the city staff as well, Public Works and the police did a lot of support for that event. So thank you to all. It was really a community wide effort and thank you to all who helped. I wanted to give you an update that the Montpelier Police Department as well as Auxiliary other city staff of the male persuasion are participating in No Shave November to support the 919 Foundation which is a foundation stood up by. Turn the M upside down. The Montpelier Police Department. Oh, okay. That's the first time I think I've done that. Okay, we just want to catch it in the middle of the day. Winooski, thank you for calling that out. The 919 Foundation, which Lieutenant Cram has set up as a memorial to fund Children Going to Camp Tecumta. So the No Shave November will go to support that effort. So check out our police officers as they go through the month. You probably got some public media today about winter starting and Nixle alerts. So remember that winter season is upon us. If you want notifications about winter parking bans, please sign up for Nixle. And remember that there is a permanent winter parking ban in downtown Winooski always. We are putting up some new signage to reflect that. So hopefully that will be a bit clearer this winter. Quick update on hiring. The DPW director position closes on Friday. If anyone else is interested, please get your applications in. We have been able to do some equipment operator hiring. So we have an EO1 that started last week and an EO2 that starts next week or this coming on November 9th. And then one other that we're interviewing. So that's great. We are starting to see some applications pick up as a result of that change in salary posting. And then we have a bunch of other city updates that are exciting that are on your agenda. So I will hold off on that. Finally, do we wanna thank the staff and Angela? We are full speed into FY19 budget planning. I won't be doing a lot of work on that in the next couple of weeks. So be prepared for December 4th. It's gonna be really exciting. Brace yourself. Thank you for catching my mom. That's okay. As soon as you can see the end, get turned over to the WM. That's the sign. Okay, up time for council reports. Let's start that on this side this time. Yeah, absolutely. So the public safety commission met our recently and we're presented with public safety budgets. So there was a really good discussion around those budgets and at the end of that discussion, the commission did move to support those budgets as they will come to be presented to us on council. There was a lot of discussion that my understanding historically was discussion that occurred last year as well, just in regards to some commission members' thoughts around both police staffing and fire departments and department assets. And so in addition to advocating for the budget, members of the commission did also decide to move forward in passing along some of those thoughts to the council. So I'm sure as we move into the budget process, we'll see whatever form they decide to take to pass along to us. One of the things that did also come out of that meeting is likely individual members of the commission may be reaching out to, as community members advocate for some of those thoughts that they have along those issues. So you might be hearing from them. And then unrelated to the commission, but related to public safety, the attorney general's office alongside a group of stakeholders, advocates, the training council, the state police, just a large group of stakeholders have been meeting to make those changes that we've been hearing about to the state's fair and impartial policing policy. They're having a meeting tomorrow to hash out some of those details as they move pretty quickly towards getting the new policy out there. I'm hoping to be at all of the meeting tomorrow, but I'll at least be at a portion of it. I'm down in Montpelier and can give you all an update on what was discussed as when we come back. Great, thank you. Mr. Smey. The WCP had their retreat. We had Heather and Ray were there. Ray helped facilitate kind of a visioning process like he did with us for a vision statement. So the WCP is working on that. The WCP is now also officially known as downtown Winnieski. They dropped the WCP and just went with what people know them as downtown Winnieski. Do you think it was their original name anyway? Downtown Winnieski Incorporated, DWI. They dropped the I. So yeah, it was a productive retreat and hopefully more to come from them soon. Awesome. Planning commissioner, you can get plenty of tonight. So we'll talk about that. We held another since our last meeting, housing commission meeting that went really well. I think the group's really getting engaged now in the material and starting to give a lot of feedback and taking direction, not just absorbing tons and tons of information that Heather's prepared, which is always amazing, but they're really starting to ask some thoughtful questions you can see start to formulate. What I think is going to be the outline of what we're going to get for recommendations from them. So, and I don't dive into what the content of the conversations does look like, but I think it's probably pretty predictable what some of the data has led them to sort of change in terms of what their perceptions may have been coming into the conversation. And that's where the affordability in the community lies and where the needs for different types of housing have been. So it's been a fascinating maturation process for a commission that's got a really short deadline to do some work to see them evolve. Airport, we remain engaged meeting with meeting with Burlington and South Burlington tomorrow afternoon in regards to governance issues. So we continue to stay very engaged with that and we've met with some airport commissioners as well. So that's been coming along and we're still very hopeful that the city of Burlington will take lead on having a conversation around regional governance. But that continues to be a good focus for our time. And Nicole and I met with the treasurer and have started kind of peeling back layers of that task and we're meeting with staff next to go through what the administrative needs are here from the treasurer position. I think it's been a good start to the conversation. We've gone back to the roots of the charter and also looked at the decision description we created initially, so that's going well. And I wanna thank the Historical Society for having me yesterday, great engagement from the Senior Center and Historical Society folks around a number of issues that was really, it was great to get that kind of feedback. And just when I take this time to plug the folks that we don't have another meeting this month, when we come back in December, we're gonna be full run on budget stuff. So if you've got items that you've gotten your mind or questions that you've got about our budgeting process or the way the city runs or what services we're providing, this is a really good, any time of year is a great time to bring it up, but this is a really good time of year to bring it up because this is when we decide how the money's gonna be spent and what the investment looks like for the next year. So that kicks off. What for us is really a full two months of very intensive focus on budgeting. So just wanna encourage folks to continue to watch. We'll have a schedule out so you can see which areas of the city government will be covered, when and when budget proposals will be coming forward. So lots of great work to be done to help the folks in the community, stay involved and engaged. Public works meeting got moved again, right? I've got moved to next coming Thursday to the following Thursday. Right, to the following Thursday. So there's nothing to report out on that other than interviews that are going on for the public works manager. So in addition to meeting with staff from the treasurer to move that process along with the CNI, touched base in my role as administrative liaison to talk about her plan and thinking for presenting the budget discussion to council and some thinking around fund balance and how to keep that a separate conversation. So that was a good conversation. Really looking forward to the December 4th and the big reveal of the budget book. So really appreciate that thought that's going into making that a really productive conversation. Do want to thank the folks at the senior center for inviting me to come down and meet with folks a couple weeks ago. It turned into a lively discussion of my day job, actually, education issues, which was unexpected, but a real pleasure to just get to have some coffee and talk with folks around the things that they're thinking about and paying attention to with respect to what's happening on the state level. I do want to just mention to folks through my involvement with the School Boards Association, just an awareness of the property tax reality that we're, as we begin thinking about budgets, it's not within our control to respond to, but it's definitely part of the reality of that because there's a sizable whole in the education fund, there's a possibility of pretty significant property tax rate increases on the education side, so just to affirm that that is real and something that just is going to be in the back work drop of our discussions. That's it. Uncontrollable day job, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, good, thank you all very much. Any other items to add before we move on? With that, we'll move on to the regular items on tonight's agenda. First up is a discussion around the Economic Development Strategic Plan with a joint discussion with the Planning Commission, so we'll invite the Planning Commission to come up and we'll also invite them to call their meeting order. Do we maybe want to set? I think they're just going to sit. Okay. Okay, so please, make yourselves at home. I just wanted to be right in front of the camera. So the Planning Commission to order and thank you to the council for inviting this year to destroy the discussion. Excited to have you. So I'll turn it over to you Heather. Yeah. So the planning process for the Economic Development component of the master plan has been underway since March of this year. Using municipal planning grant funds, the city hired Des Moines Associates to facilitate a planning process to create an Economic Development Strategic Plan for Winooski. The Planning Commission sits here as a steering team for the process and they selected the consulting firm that we're using. Draft of the Economic Development Plan recommendations will be presented tonight to both of you for your feedback and your input. So I would like to introduce Rachel Selski and Alex Trammer of C'moyna Associates who will run through their preliminary draft recommendations for us. We don't really know where to stand. We'll figure that out when we're kind of in the round. And yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's absolutely fine. Mike, are you good? Do you need us to move anything around? Do you want a microphone in the middle? Yeah, different mic. I can do this. Sorry. You're commissioner O'Brien, it's different. I'll get started while this is just heating up. So thank you, Heather, for the introduction and the Planning Commission for being here to listen to us again and to City Councils all for inviting us to present our findings, our preliminary findings tonight. Like Heather said, I'm Alex Trammer. I'm the Arctic Manager for this process and Rachel Selski, my colleague, has been our strategy advisor throughout the process as well and it's about seven months to the day, actually, that we were here to keep off this process. So it's been a busy summer. I know it's been extra busy with the marketing study going on as well. So we appreciate everyone's time and effort into this process. So our goal tonight, we'll go through the agenda, but we'll outline briefly what we've done over the seven month period, how we arrived at our findings tonight. Rachel's gonna go through, we've got five main goals for you that I believe you've gotten a packet that have goals, objectives, and then more detailed actions. We're gonna go through the five goals and their objectives, talk a bit about their big pictures and some of the details that get into some of the specific areas for action and welcome some discussion around some of those goals after we've gone through all five of them. And just while that's warming up, just to remind folks in the crowd too, in terms of the work that's being done, the planning commissions are the stewards of the city's master plan. The master plan's up for renewal in the past few iterations of the city's master plan, municipal plan can be used interchangeably. We've put a document forward that's been passable and has kind of kept things going, but to be honest with you, the community hasn't had the bandwidth to really invest in a number of years in making a plan that we think is really usable on a functional basis for steering our investments and prioritizing our work. So as part of this, we're adding what will be for really the first time, economic development portion of the plan, chapter of the plan. Previously, really the economic development chapter was focused on redevelopment of the downtown. So this is a great opportunity to take a more broader, holistic look of economic development in the community and the city and have a chapter that specifically speaks to that. So we're excited to add this feather to that cap. It's part of that process and building the collaborative plan. I'll just run through briefly the kind of the context and the foundation that went into the plan. We first began by looking at a lot of the planning that's already been done. The transportation master plan and the needs assessment, the mean sheet quarter master plan. We know that there's been a lot that's been done and we want to build on that and make sure that those goals are reinforced in our plan. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel here, so we want to build on some of those goals. From there, we're going to enter our own data analysis. So we did some quantitative and qualitative data collection, building an socio-demographics profile of the city comparing that to Vermont and to the county. And I don't have to tell anyone if you hear that. Hear that. One is quite unique in terms of the county and in terms of its demographics towards the state. And that's where we start to figure out where the greatest opportunities in terms of economic development are. We also did a kind of physical assessment of the areas we looked at. Housing stock, retail market, the office market, and a little bit of industrial as well. Just to understand some of the physical constraints and opportunities. We also had the opportunity, Heather put together a really great community survey that was in person and online and we were able to use this data for this plan as well. So we found out some of the in-demand services and retail that are in demand. And figure out how to work those into some of the economic development plans as well. From there, we kind of distilled all of our data collection into these key opportunities and challenges and that's what really helped drove our community engagement session in September. And from there, it's been strategy development with Heather, Jesse, and Paul working to refine and really make sure that this plan is set to you guys up for success in terms of its organizational capacity and in terms of the specificity towards what can be done over a certain time frame. So that's the plan that we have built. We need to show up. Apologies, we had it set and running earlier but possibly far too early. So I think it has shut down since. Anybody has a skill? It's like turning on and off the projector. That's what my IT guy, that's the first thing. Anytime I call my IT guy, have you tried turning it off and on? So you're going to finish in a minute. So the presentation is on the website so the council has it in front of them and for people at home watching, they can follow along. Oh, okay, great. So if you, Oh yeah. Thank you. Oh, we appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, so thank you all for your patience with the technical, we'll get it up and running. So as Alex said, she gave a really good overview of the work that's been done to date. But one of the things I do just want to make sure that we point out is we have really taken the time to work out a strategy that is really realistic and right-sized to the city of Wojcicki. So we've really focused on what resources are there available. What can the city do and the city staff and the various volunteers and commissions do that will really have an impact. So we've looked over probably about a five year time period that will set the city up to have a real tangible impact. And so we've offered not only goals and strategies, but also really specific action items that will guide, hopefully guide Heather and her colleagues and volunteers in the right direction in things that they can actually do. And so just to kind of reiterate what Alex said. So we did the review of prior materials. We reviewed existing economic conditions here in the city of Wojcicki. We developed opportunities and challenges document, kind of pulling everything together. We held the community dinner where there was some really good macaroni and cheese. I will remember that forever. And finally we're here building out the action plan matrix. And so we've been working with Heather, with Jesse, with Paul, with the planning commission to develop an action plan matrix. And so the matrix includes not only goals and objectives, but also the many partners that will be needed in order to make this thing a reality. And so as part of the strategy, you can see we've listed out partners that need to be involved. So it's things like the downtown Wojcicki group, the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce, the Department of Economic Development, the communications coordinator, the community services agency. There are so many partners that really need to be brought together, but this document kind of brings all those efforts together and hopefully leads you in the right direction. And so I'll just go through the goals and offer some guidance on what some of the objectives are underneath each. And at the end we can have a conversation if you think something's missing. So the first goal is to foster business development by building out regional assets, local resources and existing business environment dynamics. So this really is intended to, go ahead. Yep. Boost economic opportunities for new businesses, but also support your existing businesses to help them be successful, to thrive and hopefully expand and create new opportunities for people. And so underneath this goal, we have some objectives that include things like enhancing and advocating for expanding the small business loan program. You can really work to target what types of businesses you wanna assist, where you want them to locate. Really try to use that as a tool to incentivize the type of development that you want. Advancing business to business networking opportunities. So not only things like maybe two businesses could partner to offer incentives to visit both businesses, some types of partnerships like that, but also encourage that businesses to get together to talk about what their major needs are. What are opportunities for solving those needs and partnering to work together to support both businesses and all businesses here in Winooski. And committing resources to attraction, retention and expansion. And so continuing the efforts that Heather is doing to get out and meet your businesses and visit with them and hear what their challenges are and help find solutions. So that's a business retention and visitation program we're recommending. We're also suggesting things like creating an investment toolbox. So if you have a business that says, you know, I'm really having a challenge and we have this new project we wanna implement, but we don't have the capital, we don't have the capital to do it. Heather would be able to say, oh, you know, I have the greatest tool for that. And she could just get that information right to the person. And this is stuff she's doing right now, but really building up that toolbox and marketing toolbox that these are the tools and the resources that are available here in Winooski. Just reach out to Heather and she can make it happen. That type of attitude and communication with your businesses. And also things like supporting youth entrepreneurship programs in the high schools. Maybe there's opportunities to have mentors and business plan competitions, but really starting that entrepreneurial spirit early to hopefully identify kids who have grown up here in Winooski. They have a great business idea. Maybe they go away and get, go to college, but then they come back and they're able to start their business right here in Winooski. And so we have recommendations around all those in this section. Go ahead. The next goal is to diversify and enhance services available to existing residents and the business community. So as the city continues to evolve and you have this really great momentum that you've had over the last decade or so really growing and evolving the city, you're gonna wanna make sure your resources and your services from the city are able to keep up and you meet the needs of your diverse population and your changing population. And so we make recommendations around the level of economic development resources that are available. So making sure that you have the resources and the capacity to implement your really immediate needs here for the city. Establishing clear communication around economic development inquiry. So if someone were to think about starting a business or doing a development, would they know who to reach out to? Is it clear? Is it outlined on the website? And a lot of this information is available, but making sure that continues with a clear website, clear pathway of how projects come in the door and who do they need to talk to? So really having that smooth so you don't lose anyone in red tape or in delayed. But we have heard, and I just wanna give a shout out that it's really great doing business in the city of Winooski. We often, we ask businesses during our focus groups and our interviews, how is it doing business with the city? Do you have any holdups? Is there delays? And we heard time and time again that it was pretty smooth working here in the city of Winooski. So that's a shout out to the staff here. And I think that's a shout out to the size and the commitment of the staff as well. And then continue to pursue the various planning initiatives throughout the city. So this is your master plan. Seth was just talking about the efforts going on, pursuing things like a parks and recreation plan, historic preservation, establishing an arts district that you can direct resources to and really build that up. So using your planning tools that are at your disposal to continue to establish and enhance and build out the city the way you want to. So goal three is maintain, manage and reinvigorate the city's built and natural environment. You have a great city here, really good, good bones, fantastic natural resources with the river and the trails. And so continuing to maintain that and enhance it throughout time will make it continue to be a great place to live and be attractive to a lot of people who want the access to kind of the downtown nightlife but also easy access to the river and the natural resources. And so we offer recommendations around priority of multimodal infrastructure improvements, making sure it's a safe place to walk, making sure it's a place people wanna walk and they can bike and they can do all the things they wanna do safely. And so making sure there's priorities around making investments in a variety of infrastructure improvements. Continue the use of form-based code and make sure you're maintaining an eye and making sure it's implemented properly and how is it impacting the environment? Do there need to be shifts or changes made to it there? So just keeping an eye on how those relationships and marketing, promoting and enhancing the various parkland and recreational trails here in the city. So making sure you continue to have things like Winooski Wednesdays to use the space, encouraging organizations to have things like runs and paddles and just overall usage of the parks will really enhance the quality of life here in the city of Winooski. And making sure that the open space is meeting the needs of your various constituents and residents. So spaces for young families, spaces for older adults, active and passive recreation options for the whole spectrum. And so we make recommendations about how to guide that type of growth to really enhance quality of life here in the city. Continuing on the theme of quality of life. So support initiatives that enhance residents' quality of life, health, accessibility, equity. And so here we focus on recommendations around housing. So making sure there's adequate housing for the whole spectrum of housing needs from including some continuing to see the market rate types of units to bring in and be able to serve some of the growing tech jobs or higher paying jobs that are in the region, make Winooski a place that people, if they wanna live here, they can find the type of housing that they want. So the whole spectrum of housing options. Also open conversations among residents about ongoing projects, events and neighborhood identity. City of Winooski has really, really fantastic identity and it's unique and the diversity amongst the city is really unique here in Vermont, in the Northeast and in the United States. And so encouraging each neighborhood to really build out that identity, build out that neighborhood spirit through things like maybe a neighborhood wants to do a block party. You could give micro grants to communities to hosted block party and really build that community and that neighborhood spirit. You could host different types of events throughout the city in conjunction with Winooski Wednesdays. That type of thing that just continues to build up that community spirit and make Winooski a place that people say, you know, I love my neighbors. I got this great, I've made, really made roots here. I don't wanna leave. I wanna continue to have my family here. And goal five is targeting economic development resources towards high priority industries that demonstrate regional and local or employment opportunities. So through our market analysis and economic base analysis, we were able to identify three particular industries or sectors that we feel are particularly strong here in the city of Winooski and regionally and that we offered recommendations around how to really support those industries in growing and expanding and creating jobs. And those three industries include entertainment and hospitality, regional growth and technology-based business. And then also really building on the history of Winooski and the manufacturing history of Winooski for things like small batch and specialized manufacturing. And so around entertainment, we want to create a situation where Winooski is a great place that people know of. They wanna go for their nightlife. They come here and they say, you know, that hospitality, those hospitality workers here in the city of Winooski were top notch. And so what you need to do there is you can create programs. You could create workforce development programs to be able to differentiate yourselves around your hospitality sector and your nightlife. And so just being able to offer just a little bit different of a service so that people wanna come back and they know what they're getting here in the city of Winooski. And so there's workforce development programs around that that you could implement and partner with. Also, as part of the community survey, it was identified for particular types of businesses or services that residents want here. So going back to that community survey and identifying what those particular retail sectors are or food providers, and you could look regionally and say, is there already established business that might be looking to open another location and would they be a good fit for Winooski? And that could be an option for attraction rather than trying to get a brand new business to locate here. One that already has some roots in the area. So we offer recommendations around that. In terms of technology-based company, we offer recommendations that include things like assessing your telecommunications infrastructure, making sure it's up to date and state of the art so that you can meet those needs, looking into options around co-working locations, as well as making sure that there's training in place with partnerships from the high school to CCV and other providers to make sure that your students and your residents have the skills they need to meet the needs of the ever-changing technology industry. And then finally around small batch manufacturing and manufacturing production. So again, building on that history, you could look into things like maker spaces. So these are locations where there is potential for kind of sharing of tools. Maker space has come in all different forms and functions, but one idea would be there would be shared services, shared equipment and tools that people could come in and work on their particular project and they are becoming quite successful in many cities throughout the Northeast as manufacturing is trying, as making a comeback with small batch production of different goods. And I think that could be a really good fit here in the city of Wenuski. And so we do, and just kind of before we close it out, I do just want to say we do offer recommendations around targeted industries and businesses, but I also see this strategy as really what's called economic gardening. So really setting the stage. You've had fantastic momentum here in the city of Wenuski over the last decade with growth and change of perception and people are moving here and it's a really cool and fun place to live. So setting the stage is not necessarily correct, but continuing to work the soil, which is part of the economic gardening kind of language, but working the soil, setting the stage, making it so that businesses want to come here, they have the resources they need and so really setting that those basic economic development policies in place will make it so that your targeted industries want to be here, but so do others. And you can really grow economic opportunities throughout your entire economy and not just focus in on, you certainly don't want to focus only in on entertainment and retail, but by setting the stage for entertainment and retail and making a great place to live, you're gonna see those other industries follow suit as well. And so we hope we've provided you with a strategy where you can kind of make your way through it and implement the things that are easy to do, nothing's easy to do, everything costs money, but the easier things that those low hanging fruits, continuing to do the things that Heather is already doing and make progress towards achieving those goals. And so that is the strategy that we've tried to provide you with here and we are open to feedback from the Planning Commission as well as City Council and the public as well. In terms of next steps, and I'll just wrap this up quick and then we can get to public comment. So next steps will be strategy refinement, so pulling in the feedback we've heard from Jesse, we've heard from Heather and Paul, some feedback on the matrix, but we're open to, we will refine it and then provide the final document and then comes the hard stuff, which is the implementation. And so those are the next steps for us. I would love to acknowledge Heather who's been instrumental in this process, Jesse's been fantastic, the Mayor, the Planning Commission and Council, and we had a lot of focus groups, we had people come to the community dinner, so really fantastic public participation in this planning process. So big shout out to everyone who's been involved. And that's it, yeah. Thank you for all of your work, it's exciting and it's cool to see a reinforcement of some things we thought we knew and some new things on there too, which is great. Awesome. So I think we'll open it up to general questions, I'm sure there's folks, we'll start with Council and Planning Commission first. Once you start. Okay. I'll kick off a question. Here's one that people bring up a lot in your action items, you identified a couple retail spaces, but I guess I'm just kind of curious as to what that environment is like, maybe not just in Manuski, but just in general right now, because that's something that's popped up a lot. We're a community where a redevelopment project created a lot of retail space and retail potential that frankly has not filled probably as quickly as people envisioned at one point, but it is starting to pick up quite a bit, we're seeing infill in that area. But kind of curious as to what's going on in retail. Yeah, well Alex can absolutely talk, she wrote a white paper on the subject of the disappearing retail in downtown, so maybe you're not the person to talk about it. Do you want me to start or you can go? You can start. Okay, so absolutely retail is like way built out across the country and you're right that it is starting to come back, it took a major decline, there was vacant retail all over the country. What needs to happen is retail, old school retail is not doing as well, there needs to be something else, there needs to be a component of internet, there needs to be an experience, there needs to be that a lot of things going on with your variety of things to do, so the coffee shop and the retail and the nightlife and that critical mass needs to happen in order for retail to be there, also residential being nearby. We've been doing research around transit oriented development and what kind of goes in first, is it retail, is it residential, is it commercial when you want to see that mixed use, it's really never your retail because retail needs that critical mass in order to sustain it. And so certainly retail is quite built out but once you get that critical mass of people living there, people doing activities 24 seven type of a thing, then it can be sustainable and you need to be doing something a little bit unique which is hard to do to differentiate yourself in a world of Amazon and a world of Walmart and Target coming soon, right? Apparently. So yeah, you're right, you're hitting the nail on the head that it's a challenge but I think it's a good space for Winooski to be in to do something like a little bit unique. The bird folk is, I've been there every time I've come up here to check it out, I've bought something every single time. So that type of is a perfect thing. So it's a little bit different, a little bit artsy, it's a little bit funky. I think that's a good fit. Cool. Yeah. Did you have anything to add, Alex? No, I was just gonna, I've called it, use the term like making it a sticky experience, like you wanna make people come to the area and stay for more than one reason and then that just talks to building that critical mass and if they can get one item on Amazon, they're gonna do it. So it's making the experience not only in the store but in the whole kind of area and building a quality of place and just making the big people wanna stay and play. We certainly have the people, right? I mean, we have a 1.4 square miles and 7,000 people. So I think to me it's, what did you learn from discussions with people who live in Winooski about what they see the needs being in terms of the downtown or other economic opportunities in town? Yeah, so I don't have those off the time I had. I do remember like a hardware store was one. There was a lot of still need for restaurants like limited service restaurants or kind of a place to just grab a sandwich and go. Yeah, hardware store. Grocery store. Grocery store for the services and then the couple different types of quicker piece restaurants were like by far at the top of the list. And that came out of the community survey and that's all detailed in the report. Yeah, I guess speaking to Winooski but then maybe other communities that you've worked in as well. What's the kind of health balance of, we see a lot of our economic development in the downtown. We're starting to see it out in these corridors as well but that's where it's primarily concentrated. Is that healthy for our community? Should there be more, should it be more scattered within different areas where people are living on kind of those outside areas of the community? And if so, what would be tactics to encourage business growth in that way? Yeah, absolutely, that's a great question. Alex and I were actually just talking about it right before the meeting. So that, and I don't want to call it sprawl because it's not so much sprawl because you're so, so condensed. It's not like a typical suburban sprawl situation. I do see creation of gateways and unique reasons to go out to the kind of the spurs as being something that will draw economic development throughout the community and provide services to those people that live elsewhere. Because I mean people obviously live all around there and so they want services too that are close by. You don't want to just focus on the downtown. I think having the downtown attraction is fantastic for making it a destination and that's where people want to go. And then those gateways, providing those gateways of a variety of other services will be just as important to diversify your tax base and provide support for the overall economy. And so it, it's hard to say if it's healthy or not, I would say that it's pretty typical to have that kind of sprawling situation. And I see, I know that there's been talk about creating kind of economic corridors. And I think that's a fantastic idea for Wernizky because it is so small and condensed that you could get from one area to another easy enough. And so I think that you do want to see, see development down those quarters as well and not just focus on the downtown. Any questions from council? I just, if you could expound a little bit on the art facility or whatever you were referring to at the time of earlier on in the discussion. I'm intrigued by that. Were you anticipating that being a city-owned thing or were you anticipating that being business sponsorship type thing? Yeah. So I'm talking about maybe two different things, arts district or the maker space? Art district. The art district. So that's a planning term and Paul could probably, did he disappear? He's like later, planning, planning conversation. He heard art bolted out of the background. So an arts district would be kind of a designation that you would put over a particular corridor or area of the city that that is where you really want to support things like public arts displays, shared workspaces, maybe galleries, things like that to kind of create a funky vibe and artsy vibe and really build that up. And so something else to kind of toss around a little bit on that first day in the planning commission as being an idea, but it's a way to create an identity for a particular neighborhood or area of a city or a community. And so it's a technical term actually creating that planning district. And so you would want to then have incentives and guidance about what can go there and what you want to see there and you would build that out. That's what's kind of straight. I just, I was curious about goal four that talks about initiatives of advanced quality of life, including health accessibility and equity. And what your thoughts are about what equity means because I wasn't necessarily following in the more specific, in the more detailed some of the actions. I wasn't clear the linkage between this recommended actions and equity. And equity, yeah, that's a really good. So I know that towards the, so in objective three we start talking a little bit about the broader community needs in terms of physical space and resources. So making sure that there are things is are there a need for increased shelters, large community meeting space. We heard that through some of the new American populations they would like for their types of the events that they like to hold. They could use a larger community meeting space that they could rent out as well as age friendly design. I know that's kind of more on the accessibility side, I suppose. And I don't know if we talk too too much about other equity, necessarily equity pieces. This is like the opportunities for all residents. Yes. And things that are accessible across the board. Yeah, I mean, I guess I was just, I was interested in statements around increasing housing for moderate income. I've got my things flipping. Sorry. Increasing housing for individuals in moderate high income jobs and holding a public forum to get feedback from the community to confirm demand for various housing types. I'm just interested in that linkage to the goal statement or just. Well, so quality of life, so access to, yeah, I guess there maybe needs to be some refinement there. I think we were thinking about quality of life and having access to different housing types within the city and being able to find what you need for your family and being able to stay here because you feel there's a high quality life and maybe you need, but you don't have access to the housing you need. But we can certainly, we can work on that language. I would also maybe you could share the detailed report right up as we read it with the housing commission members. Maybe you could share. There is a housing, a specific housing piece that's a separate appendix and that really speaks to the types of jobs that will be coming in in the fastest growing sectors of the demographics of the city and that tends to be younger, higher income and I'm not recalling all of it off the top of my head but Alex you wrote it, do you have more that you can add to that? Yeah, it just speaks to the growth in the local and regional jobs in the region and they are education based but also computer design, just technology related and we just wanted to capitalize on this employment base that's growing and what is the attractive kind of different place to be in Vermont in order to attract those people and those families that just the housing stock needs to reflect the regional job growth that's occurring as well. So that's kind of built up. Yeah, and there's just a tricky balance that has to work out with that goal and the goal to keep the community affordable and that works. I think it's really interesting too because one of the recommendations is opportunities to create workforce development which I see as another way of tackling like meeting the workforce needs of this growing area. To me that's an area that is worth more of a focus instead of attracting people who exist that are in this field, why don't we ensure we have workforce development programs that train our Winooski residents to kind of elevate them into the positions that fit that. So I'd be interested if there were ideas around specific ways that as a city we can support workforce development. Yeah, absolutely. So workforce development is so so connected with economic development because you need to have the workers, so many employers all around the Northeast are saying like we have job openings but we don't have anyone to fill in, we can't find X, Y, and Z. And so working with your employers to identify who those are, what are those positions? And then working with CCV, the high school, other training partners to create training programs that then you can kind of put people in to get them through and then connect with the local employers. And so we do, one of the recommendations we talk about is something called like a manufacturing meetup. And so making sure that those opportunities that exist in manufacturing and a variety of industries in current businesses here in Winooski are made clear to your students and your residents that they kind of see a pathway to employment. And so if they see that there's a number of machinists jobs available, okay, well then what does that require? What type of certification? Where do I get that certification? And so making those connections, offering those career pathways is something that the city can get actively involved with and a lot of cities do if you needed something else to add to your plate. Yeah, I do, I mean, thank you, because I think that's a rather than we need to get more people to come here, I'm interested in how the plan is gonna emphasize how we're gonna improve the quality of life and the opportunity for people who live here already who I think are our primary. I don't think we're in danger being located where we are in Chittenden County of suddenly becoming a community that people don't wanna live. You know, I just think over time, demographically, the growth in Vermont is in Chittenden County. So what we need to do is pay attention to how we're fostering that growth and opportunity for the people who live here. Yeah, and so that's a really good point and we can add some a little more language around what we're first development into that goal area for sure and recommendations about what cities can do. Yeah. Let's open up the planning commission. Yeah, so first, thank you both very much for listening to the council for starting this time or less. It's interesting, I think, to listen and hear a lot of the things that you're suggesting we're doing, which is nice to know that the city is maybe not the right path. And Eric, to your point, I was thinking close to him. Zoey, we talked about having the ability to put really long tops type commercial spaces throughout different areas of the city. So not only in the gateway, but also with the neighborhood and back to the old days. When I was a kid, there were six little grocery stores in his neighborhood, getting that kind of food. So thank you very much and it's encouraging to hear that I think we're on the right path and you're reinforcing some of the stuff that is going on that the council is doing that Heather and the staff, Jesse, I want to get you and all are doing to keep us moving. But know that there are some questions for the planning commission, so I think that was that one. Yeah, so I know early on in this process you guys were looking at some of our neighboring communities and trying to figure out what was being offered service-wise within a close proximity of Winooski where there might be market opportunities for us. You mentioned the grocery store and the entertainment options. I'm curious if you got to any higher level of specificity about given both what's offered in neighboring communities, as well as the limitations of the kind of space we have available here in Winooski, if you identify the type of grocery store, be it supermarket or low-cost, small national brand or whatever they thought could fit here, as well as with entertainment, if there are particular segments of the entertainment industry that are not being served by our neighboring communities that maybe we could specialize in or work on attracting specificity. So we didn't get into the specificity of the type of grocery store that would be a good fit. That was based more on the retail leakage analysis as well as the community survey to look at what people are saying that they need. And so we didn't necessarily get into that level of detail. I think through the focus groups and the conversations it sounds like there was, that's more of like a demand, a market supply side situation. We're trying to identify what business would want to attract here, locate here. So the demand is certainly here, but there are so many constraints here in the Winooski so attracting that grocery store has been a challenge. And so finding some other alternative or scale or product would be the key. And so we didn't get into that specifically. And on the entertainment side, I mean we do talk about having some type of major venue for events here in the city to be a main draw to then serve other entertainment establishments and retail, I'm sorry, restaurant establishments in the city. So we do offer that recommendation, but then just continuing to build off of the reputation that you've built around having just some different offerings and access and views of the waterfront and the downtown area and just being a little bit different set of offerings. You have pass an argument discussed. Okay, if you think of anything, I'm sure you can pass it along, yeah. Yeah, Jonathan, anything? Good? No, I kind of missed the presentation, but I didn't, I don't think it was out on a part of it. Sorry. No, I have any questions. I want you to have already passed. Thank you very much for coming. Yeah, thank you. So I'll open up the public. So comments, questions, concerns, any of those things? Yes, Ron. Well, for Absalomia, Dr. Ron Stoker and I serve on the Community Services Commission. The question that I have relates to one of the goals and objectives concerning the parks. We have two or three parks that have been classified as natural areas. And we've had a lot of discussion about how we were about developing use of those areas. Well, at the same time, protecting the biological diversity of those areas. Yeah. There are some unique fun and for a particular down the Laws River, and we're concerned about that. So perhaps you have some thoughts about how you would target those areas. Yeah, so that is fantastic in and of itself. And is it developed with trails already that you could use? And so you could continue along that path with interpretive signage and educational components around the really unique and important resources that you have there and focus your attention on other aspects of the city for open space. So we're certainly not suggesting you turn those into basketball courts or anything like that. But really just, you know, we do recommend a parks plan, a Parks and Recreation Plan. So I think that would certainly get into it more. Our specialty is not in Parks and Recreation Planning. But I think having a strategy about how you wanna see and serve the residents and the regional visitors will be important so that you can make sure you make people aware of these really fantastic resources that are right here in the city and use them in a conscientious way. Other questions, concerns, comments from the public? And when's the expectation that the full report will be available? Oh. I'm just kidding, everyone's looking at each other. When will it be available? Yes, soon. This is a feedback session and then this comes back. I mean, we're pretty close about the report. We're pretty much fully built out, just finalizing our findings. So we'll get it to Heather within the next couple of weeks, but then when it's done, done, I would say Heather and Jesse. Okay. Is that reasonable? Just map in next steps. So our intention when we were mapping out this timeline in the spring and summer was to have these initial recommendations to you in advance of the budget discussions because there are some items here to have budget implications. So we want you to at least have seen the initial comments or the initial framework and had an opportunity to weigh in. And then we are starting to build that into our budget proposal. And then the final document will come out in December. Great. So if I can ask the final document, is there gonna be more, what's the record? Substantial. Substantial. Yeah, so this, the action plan matrix, we provide it to Heather in actually Excel format. So she can go into it. It's a living document she can check off. You know, as you can add a status column, like in progress, whatever. So that's what this is. It's supposed to be like yours is your go-to. This should be crinkled up and earmarked and scribbled on. And then the full document will have a background of all the work that was completed with the economic base analysis and the community survey kind of summary attached as attachments with information about like funding resources. So yes, it'll be more meaty than this. But this should be kind of like that your go-to every day tool. In the next steps of implementation, do you make recommendations for implementation for each of the action items in there? Is that more up to staff? That's more up to staff. So they do have things like, well, priority level or timeframe for action is in there. And the actions really should be your implementation steps. They should be there to say like, okay, we're gonna do the first action here in order to do our objectives. So hopefully it's getting there towards detail enough for implementation. Okay, we have a full house with a full schedule. So I'm gonna add, is there anything final anyone wants to comment on? What's that? Yep. Yeah, a little bit. This is item A of J, and it's a word of honor. That's nice. That's nice. Other questions, comments though? We're incredibly appreciative of your time coming here to travel and all the work that you've done. Thank you for being on the ground, getting to know this city and community and doing that in a short period of time and coming back to where it works. So thank you. Thank you. It's really been a pleasure. Looking forward to the final. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you. It really has been a pleasure working with everyone. So thank you very much. Thank you very much. Good luck. Thank you. Just do the ending to close in. So I need to have a motion to adjourn the planning commission meeting. I don't have a second. I don't have a second. All in favor? All right. We're all set. Thank you. Thanks for, and just to say publicly, you guys are doing amazing work. We're very, very appreciative of all you're doing with the planning and all these projects. Thank you to the planning commission. You guys have just been going with your hair on fire for a few months here to get that process going. So I'm very appreciative. Thank you. Thank you. Good thing you got a fireman. Good thing you got a fireman. Yeah. Okay, so now we'll open up item B, which is discussion of the CCRPC or a Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission annual presentation. Mike stay. So my understanding is Charlie Baker, the executive director of CCRPC had another conflict tonight. So we have Elaine here and obviously Mike O'Brien and Sarah O'Brap. He really send me his regrets. He was here for half an hour, but then he was just, you know, he's double booked tonight. No, that's okay. So again, in advance of the FY19 budget, we work our key community partners who are allocated direct funds, want an opportunity to come in and speak good news. I don't know. All right, so great. So I'm going to keep it brief. I see that your agenda is very long. So just basically just a few of the things. My name is Eleni Churchill. I'm the transportation program manager with the CCRPC. As most of you know, the CCRPC basically was created back in 1966, I believe. You know, we celebrate our 50th anniversary last year. And that was created by the municipalities of Chittenden County. And our mission is to be our primary kind of forum for policy, planning and kind of development. And we do that with partnership with our communities and all our other partners, state, local and federal. I were governed by a board, 29 member board, and I know that we have representatives from each municipality, and we are very fortunate, and I believe Rimsky is very fortunate to have Michael Bryan as the representative for many years now, and he's now- It's stuck with me. No, we're not stuck, we're very happy with it. And he is now the vice chair of the board. Yeah. No, I was just going to say, you talked about the RPC with the, there was a merger of the RPC and the MPO a couple years ago. The MPO was the transportation planner in the county. So now RPC does transportation and land use. Right. So now the RPC is acting as the sole MPO in the state, which is wonderful because we get federal funding to do transportation planning in the county. And we just look to you every year for ideas about projects that we can help our municipalities. So that's a great collaboration and partnership we have with our communities. I believe that you received kind of the annual report. So you have it in front of you. I don't know how you want me. Do you want me to just basically touch upon some of the projects that we are interested? I'm going to focus on transportation only because that is very near and dear to my heart. But if you do have a question on me, how do you want to just do this? Maybe if you just want to highlight a couple for folks just to give an idea of the work that's being done. We do have a document that's available to council and it's also online if you want to see the full gamut too, if you want to do it deep down. But maybe if you do a couple that just kind of give you an idea of what kind of work. Yes, I can do that. So one of the major projects that we're doing now we're doing a scoping for the Wunuski River Bridge. And it's a very, it's a needed project we heard about. I mean, that bridge is a 90 year old bridge has some issues functionally is obsolete even though that is not the proper term anymore but it does not have proper bike and pedestrian facilities even though the sidewalks are there, they are narrow, they are high, there are a lot of issues. So we are looking into kind of a shorter, medium term and longer term solutions for that bridge. That's one project that we're doing with collaboration with the city of course and the city of Burlington. So as well as veterans, veterans is sitting with us as a partner on this project. We'll be happy to come back and give you more details in the future when we have some alternatives, preliminary alternatives so we can get your feedback back and tell us where, so we're also going to have a very extensive public process. We're going to be letting you know, you're very welcome to come to give you feedback then. Another project that we are doing is right now we're in the midst of developing and updating our Metropolitan Transportation Plan which is our transportation plan for the region, for Chinatown County and that's very important because that is a roadway in our map of how we want our country to develop, where do we want to do our investments, which modes of transportation to invest in and what projects to do. Again, we're in the midst of developing that the board will be getting a presentation, the TAC which is a Transportation Advisory Committee. We have staff participating, Ryan is on the TAC. We'll be seeing the first MTP scenario tomorrow. The Executive Committee has seen it already and you provided some comments and we're going to have a presentation to the board and that's an important, very important plan that is going to come back to you. We're going to have a very long public outreach and public hearing process starting in January. So those are two transportation related stuff as you can see from all the stuff that we're doing, a lot of stuff, not just transportation, line use, economic development, water quality. We have been doing a lot of quality, water quality projects and initiatives and we're trying to help our municipalities position themselves well so they can apply for implementation grants when the grants become available from veterans and from A&R, DEC. So we're working very closely with that. So, the energy plan, yeah. So we're actually updating our energy plan as well as our economic development plan and no question if you had these presentations on the energy plan here or not. No, I understand. But we are going to have everything, so we're slowly putting everything on our website and we're going to be sending out French Porch Forum kind of announcements of where you can actually reach out and review our documents, our draft documents and provide comments to us because we really would like to hear that from everybody. We would love to hear that. So every month we are putting more stuff in. We started with the energy. So there's going to be a lot of energy information, energy plan information on our website. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks we're going to have the economic development and lastly we're going to have the Metropolitan Transportation Plan. And I'm going to stop right there. We can't say enough about the work and the partnership and what it means to us. It's totally impossible. It would be impossible for us to come anywhere close to having the capacity to put the professional capabilities that you have in your office and the technical expertise you have on staff here. We couldn't afford it. It would not be reasonable. Things like rewriting our zoning, like mapping out the study to read you the circular, although I know you had to work really hard on that. It was good work. It was collaborative. But the transportation plan, each and every turn, and then even a broader issue like coordination around the joint dispatch study and work that's being done, those are projects that would not have moved forward without you and without your team. So we are incredibly, incredibly appreciative of the partnership we have. It means more to the city that I think people could probably ever really know. Sometimes in the background, all of those projects providing that expertise and meanings that people don't get to always see. So we are incredibly appreciative of that and for your time, and Mike, for your time to represent the city on the board and bring the value you do to them, too. Well, it's a pleasure to sit on the board. And thank you for bringing that up. I was going to mention the work that RPC did with the Planning Commission in drafting the new zoning and working through that invaluable, as you said. Absolutely. Questions, Felonie, from Council? And the good thing, one of the reasons we don't have Councils, because I think we do keep good tabs on our relationships and get a lot of updates on the work being done. So thankfully, I think for this group, especially, and hopefully for folks in the public, a lot of these projects are working together and weren't surprised to pop up. So that's great. Any questions from the public? Comments, questions? Okay, so seeing and hearing none, we are incredibly appreciative of your time. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for having us. Thank you very much. Mike, you're doing some other stuff, you want to just hang out with us. No, no, no, I'm okay. Thank you. All right, we'll move on to item C, which is Approval to the State Revolving Long Fund Application for Preliminary Engineering and Environmental Review Services for the Main Street Revitalization Project. I like that it's got a capitalized name. We've branded it. So I'm going to ask Ryan Lambert, Paul Dreher, and David Saladino to come up and join us. And just as we get there, yes, we have officially kind of branded this project, Main Street Revitalization Project. So kind of as orientation, this is Paul Dreher's first official day as our planning and zoning manager, full-time staff person. Ryan Lambert is our Public Works Project Manager, P.E. comes with Master's Degree in Engineering and a bunch of experience in a large engineering firm in New York City. We're really glad to have him. Then Dave Saladino is with BHB, who is the engineering firm we have selected to move for the P.E.R. process. So we selected them through our qualifications-based procurement process historically, and that process was approved by the state for use under this new initiative. So, and I think Ashley is here too. I'm here as a resident. A new ski resident. Thanks, no stranger to the city. So we've been talking about the Main Street Revitalization Project now for a couple of meetings. So I'll do some framing and you guys feel free to jump in. So this is our, we're approached by several funders to look at doing a transformational project along Main Street, a complete streetscape. Rebuild, revamping. We've also been experiencing some conflict as development picks up on Main Street as a result of the form-based code, and are really looking instead of doing kind of piecemeal improvements as development happens, look at doing a complete streetscape improvement project. This is a bit in the vein of a couple of meetings ago and we heard the message, we've done a lot of talking, we've done a lot of visioning, let's get to action, let's get to doing some things. So to get to doing some things along big engineering projects like this, we really need to get to designs, engineering plans that are scoped out, that are thought out and have, and therefore we can put price tags on projects. So what we're asking you to approve tonight is a loan application to the state evolving loan funds to fund the, what's called the preliminary engineering review report work for this total streetscape improvement project. You see in the memo, we're asking for up to $430,000 of, this loan application is asking for up to $430,000 to complete this engineering work, and that will include water lines, waste water lines, storm water design, streetscape improvements, pedestrian improvements, bike lane improvements, street trees, and the varying of utilities. So it's a very comprehensive engineering plan. I am going to stop talking and let the experts add what I have missed in terms of the design work or the loan application. I think you covered it. I think what I would, I, for the fun of it, pulled up this document, which some of you may remember, it's the form-based code report from our work we did several years ago that came to the kind of, the vision conclusion that this main street redo was something that the community was profoundly interested in, and it's all, the grocery stores actually talked about in this report on Main Street as well. So when we think back to the community visioning process where we had 500 people answer a survey, we had rooms full of people drawing on plans saying this is their vision of revitalized Main Street. I think at least in my remembrance, it was highly kind of desirable from the community standpoint. So to get from that vision to even be able to begin to think about asking for funding, we need to identify the project, which is where the P-E-R, the preliminary engineering report comes in. And to get there, first step is the step in front of you now, which is the application for the state revolving loan fund. Okay, so could you talk a little bit too about what the study does in terms of access to other funding mechanisms? Well, when we have identified the goal of this P-E-R is to identify the scope and the scale of the work and at which point we would be using that as a sort of a starting point for our application. And the kind of discussion we've had with the funders is that when we get to the point where we're able to describe that work and at a 30%, we've completed 30% of the documentation of that work, we would then be able to ask multiple funders, whether it be USDA, RD, the Federal Highway Administration, VTRANS, all the different entities that would be involved in completing a project such as this. So Dave, do you have any? I was gonna say that we've identified at least two grant eligible grants that come available over the next three months that is part of our scope as well to help assist with the grant applications one for stormwater, one for more infrastructure costs so it's adding on. And I think one of the things I found just in a couple of meetings, there's kind of a snowball effect, once this is an exciting big project, people wanna be involved and have dollars involved. It's like once you get that seed going, it's kind of an interesting discussion. Right, and I think the real exciting outcome of this PER is not only the ability to go to these two grant funders or three grant funders that we've identified, but to have that plan on the shelf that's ready to go. So as funding opportunities present themselves, we don't have to say, oh, that's great, let us do the engineering to see if we can use that funding for this work. That plan then is there, is ready to go, is operational, and we can go directly into applying for those funds. We know that all big transformational projects like this in the state require multiple, multiple funding sources for achievement, and we fully anticipate that that's the case on this project. We can't start applying for those dollars until we know what the breakout is between, the stormwater work's gonna cost this, the water's gonna cost this, the wastewater's gonna cost this, the street trees are gonna cost this, until David's team kind of puts together that those engineering plans and those associated costs, we don't have the foundation to go to our funders with for those grant requests. And just to be clear, this isn't to draw another picture, right? It's to really get into the guts and the small details. Absolutely, yeah. The pictures have been drawn at this point, and we are not, in a substantial way, revisiting that visioning portion of the work that work was done, and we are taking this document and using it as the basis for our design recommendations to VHB. So the questions about what that streetscape looks like are not being revisited in a way that would send us backwards, I think. And to be clear, this would be required by the funders. This is not an optional activity of additional preparation. It's required to access funds that presumably if there's grants involved, means that it pays for itself, hopefully several times over, correct? Correct. This scope of work essentially follows the outline that's provided for those funding sources. So it aligns one for one. Great. I just have a question about the timing or the time frame involved. So it's funding for the culinary engineering and review. But in the memo, it says the, you, consultant, is also moving forward with several critical half items, including a survey and a general desk study. I'm not sure what those are or how they connect with this loan application. If it is at work that is happening, that could be then funded through this loan or, and what's that work? How does it all fit together in terms of a general plan and timeframe? So we are asking the State Revolving Loan Fund to reimburse for the entire amount of the work. The survey, we do not have a survey of Main Street. We do not have a good engineering plan of where the property lines are, of where our water lines are, of where the municipal assets are. That is work that is required. We must have to maintain our infrastructure moving forward regardless of this work. We have identified two alternative funding sources, one within the city's CIP and one actually through CCRPC, that if we are not fully reimbursed for the up to 230,000 through the state, if we are not fully eligible for the SRF funds, to cover that we do have two alternative funding sources in mind that we could call on if we need to do that work. But surveys are on the ground work. It is much harder to do them once the snow flies. So given the timeframe associated with the federal grant opportunity, we really felt the need to move that as quickly as possible in the hopes of getting that work done in November in order to do the full engineering work over the course of the winter. So this project, when would you find out whether or not we received the loan? I mean, happy good to. Within 30 days of our application. Okay, and so then the work would proceed through the winter and spring and then be concluded by the spring? Is that the goal? Yes. Other questions, concerns, comments? Okay, I'm going to turn it in public. Any questions, concerns? That's what I ask about in regards to this. And then I think the other piece that's clear in this is this is the first step of it's giving staff the authorization to go out and apply. It is not acceptance of the loan. And you know, something we would cover in the next meeting, for example, would be terms. Having a full understanding of the financial impact from an overall perspective. So that's kind of next step, but this gets the ball rolling, lets them get to the point where we're set up for it. So I know you guys two are pushing this to try to stay in line with, you know, maybe potential bond opportunities in the future and moving that forward with doing a lot of work around the pool too. So that's one of the reasons why this is coming forward at this speed and with that urgency too. Any other comments or questions for the council? Okay, so seeing and hearing none, I would entertain a motion for approval for an application for the State Revolving Loan Fund regarding engineering environmental environmental review for the Main Street Vitalization Project. So moved. Second. Motion by Brian Corgan, second by Nicole. Any further discussion? Hearing is seen none. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Brian, first visit, how was it? You're gonna see him in a few minutes. All right, I'm gonna talk so much next night though. All right, let's get going. That's great. Okay, so now we'll move on to item D, which is the hearing in relation to the Marathon Health Personal Property Tax Appeals. So I'm gonna invite Ted, the city assessor, as well as Scott LePant, who's the CFO for Marathon Health, we're here. So this is a pretty unusual situation. I will be happy to give you kind of my context, but I encourage you to ask the other players as well. So as you know, we have personal property tax that is assessed in the city of Winooski. We have a form that's sent out to the businesses annually. They then declare what their assessed value, or what the value of their personal property is. They send it back to us. We assume that what they are submitting is accurate. We process it as part of the grand list. The grand list is set as of the beginning of the fiscal year, based on value as of April 1st, and then we move forward. There are two different ways that that can be amended. One is if there is an Arizona emissions intent, please feel free to jump in here when I make a mistake. If there's an Arizona emissions made on the staff's part, we have mechanisms with which to change that, or if there are very prescribed ways in which the board of, civil abatement can hear changes to values as well. In this particular case, Marathon Health received their form in the spring. It had the value from last year on it. They submitted a different value. Submitted it back to us. We sent them their tax bill in July, and they realized through their financial processes that they had recorded a software service of my understanding that should not have been captured on the form. They contacted us for a change. It's a pretty significant change. It's got to, if abated, it will have a $12,000 hit to the general fund for this fiscal year. They contacted us for a change, and really the only avenue to allow that change is for the council to allow us to accept a new personal property tax form from the business. So what's before you tonight is that consideration. In my estimation, you have two options. One, historically in the city, we have always taken it at face value, what the personal property submitted on those forms are, and it's at the tax rate accordingly. Changing that in the future creates a lot of uncertainty to us on the municipal side, because the grand list is the grand list, and it's what's used to set the tax rate, and a $12,000 hit to the general funds means we have to not spend $12,000 this year somehow. So the option is to do nothing to let it stand. It was what was submitted by the property owner or by the business owner, and then of course they would have the opportunity to submit a new form in the spring, revaluing their property. The second option is to say that you would be open to considering amended personal property tax form, the business owner would submit that, the assessor would consider that, assuming it was approved, it would come back to you for final approval. Those are really your two options. Ted and I have talked about this a couple of times. You see in the packet here the correspondence between the city and Marathon Health, and we also did get a legal opinion about those two options today. I don't mean to speak for you, Scott, if there's something you would like to or Ted, if there's something you'd like to add to that as well. I think you summed it up pretty well where we stand. I could add some color to how we got to this point, if that would be helpful. Yeah, so essentially, this is our headquarters here in Winooski. We have a number of sites around the country as well on a much smaller scale, but we have assets at those sites as well. So our staff person who handles all of our property tax filings for all of these locations is accustomed to getting the asset report from another staff person, attaching the values to our reports and filing them. And so she did the same thing with this location, but of course to this location, we have a bunch of software attached, and it just got missed. I mean, it was just our error got missed that we have these big software values attached to this location that do not qualify as personal property. So it was just an oversight by her part. And so that resulted in property values that are 10 times higher than what they should have been. So it's a significant error and caused our property tax bill from last year to go from 1,600 up to 18,000 this year. So it's not a small matter for us. And that staff person, after filing the report, just file it away. And apparently the grievance process occurs between May and June, but we didn't get our property tax bill till July and that's when the flags went up for us that we had a problem and we looked into it further and found out what happened. And so we're told we're beyond the grievance process, but we never had a chance to file a grievance before the process that the time slot had run out, which led to correspondence with each of these folks who helped us get on the agenda and here we are. So clearly our error, we do think there could have been an opportunity for the city to notice that we went up dramatically and maybe there was a problem or even that our supporting reports had software and leasehold improvements on it that shouldn't have been included. But nonetheless, it's an error and we're looking to just get it corrected because as you noted, it's I guess we've got a difference in numbers. We think it's a $16,000 difference. You're getting 12, but either way, it's a significant amount of money you won't have for your budget, but it shouldn't be there to begin with is our feeling. So that's the background that got us here. Questions? I respect and appreciate that. We also based off the numbers that we get from property owners set a budget and we turn around to the public and determined what their tax rates are based off of those numbers. So we rely on folks having the correct information in. So it does make adjustments, very challenging for us as well. And we get it, if a building changes afterwards, if a value comes back from appeal, it can make a big difference and we've got to figure that out when that occurs, it happens. Having set on the Board of Civil Authority, this isn't something that they could have abated anyway. The law doesn't allow it. It would have had to have come here because it does not fall under any of the prescribed reasonings in the statute that allow you to do an abatement. So they would have had to kick it here anyway. So I don't think you missed anything on the grievance process. And I'll start off by saying, we are thrilled to have you in town and you are a wonderful business and I know you do really great things. So this conversation will never be reflective of that. So just make sure we draw that line. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate that. Do folks have questions in regards to process? So the options on the table are it's a denial an error was made, there will be a new tax bill done at a different point in time. There's submittal of a new form. So submittal of a new form would, I would think then correct the entire issue. Right, so you can see in the packet that Scott's team provided the form they submitted for this year. So if there is openness to considering that on the council that's not a vote you need to take tonight. That's essentially a yes, go forward under this path. My understanding, what we would say to Marathon Health is resubmit this form with the accurate number. They would take out the software referred to that is not a taxable property and resubmit it, which with a value probably much closer to the 2016 assessed value indicated on the form. We would then tax, well, we would, Ted would review that as the assessor. If approved, we'll bring it back to you for final approval and then we would assess them based on that. We would all essentially give them a new tax bill based on that assessment instead. There's no in between option, right? There's no in between option. Well, the only, an in between option would imply incorrect information being submitted on form again anyway, right? And we would open ourselves up to liability at the state property valuation. Understandable. Questions, thoughts on direction from council? My thoughts personally, I think it's an unfortunate error. You know, if this was the difference between $1,500 and $2,000 or $2,500, I'd be more likely to say let's, let's hear your mistake, let's deal with it, but it's 2018,000, I think that's a significant enough difference and a significant enough impact to a local business that we should allow them to resubmit. I know it adds challenges for us, city having to worry about what to do with that money, but at the same time we've also been talking about economic development, excuse me, supporting businesses in our community. And with, you know, their strong commitment to grow their business in our community. Yeah, anyway, that's my personal thought is, you know, this is really unfortunate because we do spend a lot of time finding this budget out and I have to change it in the 11 hours, frustrating to say the least, but at the same time, it's significant and I think we should consider letting them resubmit. Please, please, please. So I'm still not clear whether it's a $12,000 or an $18,000 difference in the greatness value, is that? So it's the tax revenue. Tax revenue, so what's the implication for us next? So say we do nothing and they resubmit a form next year, then the tax revenue next year would go down to $1,000. So whether or not we deal with it right now, the fact is we don't have that $12,000 as revenue moving forward. Unless they buy a lot of new stuff the next six months. Right, so. Which they can't do because they're paying the taxes. Thanks. At one point or another, at one time or another, we're gonna have to deal with $12,000 less. Yes, revenue. So and it is an unfortunate mistake. My comment, I guess, would be that I don't think it's fair to put the responsibility on the city for reviewing with a fine tooth comb, the applications that are submitted that's really the responsibility of the property owners to make sure that the forms that are submitted are correct. We have a small team here and I think the burden is not on them to make sure people are of all the property owners that are submitting forms that they're doing so correctly. But if we are going to be dealing with a loss in that revenue and because it was a mistake, I'd be open to allowing a resubmission but I'm not open to accepting the city having to accept responsibility for the situation. Other comments, concerns, questions? Okay. Questions, concerns, comments from the public? You know, I guess so what will happen now is I'll open up for motions. I'll just make the final comment that regardless of what happens for the record, I don't view whatever action the council takes here as something that sets a policy or precedence of any kind or a sort and each individual case is to be treated very individually and looked at very individually. So how did I do, lawyer? Okay. So let's make sure that we put that on record at any rate. Because that's always gonna be a concern. And if there's a mistake made that's much larger that frankly makes operations here challenged or compromised in some way, shape or form, we would not have flexibility on that and we would not for a moment blink at saying, yeah, I wouldn't say I'm sorry that a staff member made an error at a business but I understand the arguments we made here. So at any rate with that said, with my piece said, I will entertain motions actually as a hearing. So I think actually this was my mistake. Upon further guidance from the attorney, I think what the, if you wanna make a motion tonight what the motion should be is to direct staff to work with the business owner to resubmit a personal or property tax form if that's the direction you're going. And then we would bring that back to probably on a consent agenda for approval. I would entertain a motion in, well actually I'm just gonna entertain a motion and it needs to be in the affirmative and leave it at that because I'm not clear on what motion might be made here. So just remember any motion needs to be in the affirmative of a proactive action. You heard the recommendation from the city manager in terms of what would progress us further down that road. Move that we approve staff to work with the business owner to resubmit their property, personal property report. Tax form. Tax form. Second. Motion by Brian Sweeney, second by Nicole. Any further comments or discussion? Any further additional comments? Seeing and hearing none. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. Great. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thanks for visiting. Thanks for the work you guys do. Thanks for your support. Thank you, Ted. You're welcome. Thank you. Do you like my speech? Thank you very much. You did great. Okay, so it's here where we move to E. Sorry. No. Okay, E, I didn't mean approval of the state revolving loan application for the head works project at the wastewater facility. So for this one, I'm going to call up John Chote and Ryan. Is Ryan's not there? Is he talking to Ashley? So again, in the interest of, no one's coming. That's what you get for leaving that door open. I don't remember any of that. There he is. So again, in the interest of the theme for tonight, I think is getting to action on some of these projects. So this is a project that John Chote has been working on for months and I'll let him give you an overview of it. But again, the action tonight is to allow us to apply for a state revolving loan fund loan to go through all three phases designed through construction of the head works project at the wastewater treatment plant. This is an anticipation of a potential bond vote on town meeting day. We are farther along on this effort and would use the existing debt capacity that would be retiring in 2020. So if this work is ultimately approved and goes to bond and the work is completed, there won't actually be any added impact on the rate payers since that we have debt that's retiring that this work would pick up in 2020. So John, if you could give a quick overview of what this is. So the intent is to get the engineering report done. It's a smaller amount than the last request, a $12,000 total for the engineering services agreement. That would give us the accurate design numbers to present to council for the bond vote in March. This project is about a million dollar building and head works facility, which is all the screening that needs to go on at the beginning of the plant, the wastewater treatment plant. There is none now. 1970s, they didn't put them in. So we suffer some obvious things down there to me, but might not be obvious to most folks, but when you screen wastewater, you need to take it all out, the big inorganic things. We don't have any facilities that are doing that right now, so they end up down the process. This could bear some fruit in the future for the phosphorus project that may come down the road, but I think my intention is to piecemeal upgrades down there that don't have any budgetary impact or any rate impact. So as Jesse said, we're retiring a clarifier bond in 2020. This payment would take place in 2021. If we build next spring, or depending on how quickly it's done, your loan takes a year after completion to start paying on. So it's very similar money. Right now we pay $60,000 of principal and interest annually for the clarifier. This one, depending on how many years we take it out, 20 or 30 years, which are eligible, it could be that same amount or in the $40,000 range annually. And there is some real incentive right now to do it for loan forgiveness for the engineering. So up to $400,000 is eligible at 50% rate. So the time is right right now to do this study. And again, as Jesse was saying, our intention is to have some of these projects that are shovel ready, so that when opportunities arise financially, we can take them on. So not only in storm water and wastewater and water, but other. So this is one step towards that goal. And I would just add to John, John's being very humble about the need for this project. We are the only facility of our size in the state that doesn't have an automatic head work system. Which is just from a modern infrastructure, goal of municipal infrastructure, strategic vision area, really unacceptable. And it also, I would say it does compromise our staff. Our staff is having to do a lot by hand that other public works employees in the state are not being asked to do. And even with those efforts, we're missing 75% it being the key word, I'm not gonna go into that. That's it. Can you imagine? Thank you for being deliberately vague. With a new facility like this, are there staffing implications around that? Or is it current staff just managing that as well? It actually would free up quite a bit of their time. Right now, they manually do this two or three times a day and it would be done automatically and a lot more efficiently. But it's a rated space. It's a space that needs air exchange and gas detection and you can't build just a tent over these things. So it's substantial money. But again, we'll bear some fruit down the road for us when we face other challenges for phosphorus removal. Dang is that this upgrade would come at no increased cost to the right pairs because of the timing of the retirement of the old bond. Exactly. So we could get a significant upgrade and residents will not see an impact on their... Other ways, water rate, correct. Are there substantial upgrades or needed improvements in other areas of the plant that could come down the pipe works? Yeah, Eric, I think there is. They may be lessened by this facility and that it reinstitutes phosphorus back into the waste stream because of the sludge at the bottom that we're not able to remove. So with that said, it all really hinges on our total max daily load permit, which we won't see until we wouldn't have a... I wouldn't be coming to you for an upgrade more than likely on the phosphorus until 2025. We have four or five years before we'll see our permit. We have a year of optimization and then a requirement to upgrade at that point and then you have the construction time. So it's out there in the future, but it's all relative to what happens with the whole discussion with whether it's a state or it's being contested now through the EPA program that they instituted. So having said that, I think it could go from 0.2 milligram per liter to 0.1 milligram per liter and that would have a significant effect, but as it stands right now, I don't see that on radar, but it's a number of years out yet. This is your... Thank you. I've seen a lot of legislative jockeying around potential sources for funding that kind of work too in the future. There is recognition at the state level that there needs to be some kind of support for the implementation of new regulations because the cost, I mean, but the scrubber or micro studies we've done, I mean, it's millions of dollars in terms of improvements, right, to get down to that. It could be about eight if it goes down to 0.1 milligram per liter, more than likely less. If I'm, you know, it may have a mixed use permit. So stormwater could play into the wastewater side of things. So an integrated permit. So there's a lot of ores in the water. CLF is contesting things right now, but it's looking like the wastewater plants will survive that contestation, will stay with the equivalent to 0.2. Just to remind folks where a lot of the phosphorus in the lake comes from is not from municipalities like ours that have wastewater treatment plants. So whether or not that's a great place for the state to be spending money is a different conversation. I couldn't resist. Just gonna poke that bear, huh? So again, and I just wanna compliment the thinking here because I think something that we're gonna be having conversations about from a finance perspective is the city keeping and using debt capacity that's in existence now to continue to fund projects and improvements using existing debt capacity and future debt capacity that is then just renewed consistently to ensure that we're investing properly in the city and not dropping off for taxpayers and saying, okay, well, we're retired that debt. We can fill that budget with other items and then asking them to pay for something again later on. That's not responsible finance, financial management. So working towards that, that's a good long-term goal. This is a good example of that. So I wanna compliment that. Other questions for John, Ryan or Jesse? Any questions, concerns from the public? Lots going on with infrastructure. So seeing and hearing none. This is on as an approval item. I had to entertain a motion and it just a note before we do that part of me that this is the same things and application will accept the terms later on and there's another vote. So this isn't setting the city fully down this path. It's letting us get access to the terms and funding. So moved. Motion. Second. Motion for Ryan Corrigan, second by Eric. Any further discussion? Hearing and seeing none, all those in favor please say aye. Aye. And those opposed, motion carries. Thank you very much. Thank you for the support. Thank you. John's done a huge amount of work on this. Yeah. And thank you for your help too. We really appreciate the write ups for great on all these items. Nice and concise, but informative. Appreciate that. Okay. So now we'll go off on our adjusted item and what was formerly item H will bump up and we'll have a discussion of goal update economic vitality. So this is, I'll and Heather are gonna join us. So this is our first monthly report on this strategic priority economic vitality. So there's four main strategies we're focusing on here. The municipal master plan economic development, strategic plan, the parking study and revitalization or gentrification. So you have the report in front of you. We can walk through it quickly if you'd like. Obviously you've heard already tonight about the economic development strategic plan and related master planning efforts. Would you like us to do a five minute overview or an interest of time? Happy to take questions. We don't have questions. How about a 90 second just summary statement? I think that that was good. But anything you guys want to add to that from a, I mean, this is one that we're spending a lot of time on hands on with the council. So I don't think any of this is a surprise in terms of what's been worked on and the public can also find the presentation online. Are there anything you guys want to add to it other than what's on here? I don't want to take our brief address of it to say that it's not really valuable. There's not a lot of good information here. No, I feel like we're double dipping to do this after just having had the presentation that we did. I would like to highlight one thing in 90 seconds. So I think that we had a lot of internal discussion about the master plan item and whether to say that's progressing on track or slightly behind. And I think the reason I made this decision to label it as yellow is one, we have now officially brought Paul on. So we have more hours a week now than we historically have. So we have more capacity to really focus on master planning work. And two, the planning commission has done an amazing amount of work recently, starting to tee up what the commissions will work on as part of the master plan. Ideally, we had wanted to give them direction around that in October. We have not done that yet, but we are on the cusp of doing that. So I bring that up just to say in your work with your commissions, in the next couple of weeks and months, you'll see an increased emphasis on master planning work at the commission level. Great, thank you. I feel like Michael Bryan's gonna pop out. I can hear his voice, yeah. Any questions from the Council or Heather, Paul, Jesse? I just wondered real quick, if you have any concerns with implementing the recommendations from the economic development strategy? I think that a lot of things that they are putting forth may not have the specificity that I initially expected, but I certainly have the experience in the past and know exactly what to implement. So I feel very confident taking those overall recommendations and operationalizing them. Yeah, thanks. I would say that the hard part with something like this is it's something that we probably needed that level five years ago really badly and instead kind of fumbled around and figured it out and then had the good fortune of adding you wonderful people to the mix. So it's great and it reinforces a lot, but it does seem like there's still a lot of value there, but I understand what you're saying about the level of detail. The report is more substantial. Okay. Any other questions from council for the EVF day? Questions from the public, concerns from the public? So seeing and hearing none, we're very appreciative of your time and you're working for this together. Thank you for putting out a great write up. Thank you. Okay, we will now go back online and pick up what was formerly item F and approval of request to appropriate $92,500 from FY17 fund balance to put the environmental and engineering work at Myers pool site. So this is the third in a series, a seeding request to fund engineering and environmental work. So this one's slightly different in that there isn't a way to offset these costs with another funding source. So this is a request to use $92,500 in FY17 fund balance to do this work and Ray has done the Yeoman's effort here to put together this engineering proposal and to work with the pool commission. Yeah, and I'm not sure if Ryan is still kicking around the wings here somewhere, but he maybe didn't want to come back up for a third item, but he was also super helpful in terms of working with me and discussing with the engineers what some of these next steps mean. As it turns out, I'm not an engineer. So it was so helpful to have that professional support. I think one of the nice things about the report and the bid is that it's pretty specific and pretty detailed. Ryan and I had about 45 minute phone conversation with two staff from Weston and Samson. We were able to post some questions. They were able to respond. One of the things we did ask for was actually a more detailed breakdown of the budget which we hadn't gotten in the first bid. So I think that that really helped us both to look through that and see kind of what this buys us. Again, I don't want to speak for Ryan because him not being here, but in looking at that price tag, nothing there jumped to us as being particularly concerning, I think, in terms of what we're getting back for those services. And I think too, we started to talk a little bit. Could we nickel and dime this and cut some pieces out and do them later? And I think not unlike the conversation earlier about the Main Street project, I think this is all work that we're gonna need to do if we at some point are gonna be having the pool be a shovel ready project as has been discussed with other projects tonight. So there's not fluff in here that we wouldn't have to deal with at some point down the road if we intend to rebuild the pool. So I feel pretty good about the level of detail. Certainly very excited to be at this point. I think for the pool committee, while they were not able, many of them not able to be here tonight, a lot of excitement from that group too as I communicated with them about the fact that this was on the agenda. So I guess I'll pause there and ask any questions if I'm trying to answer what I can. Are you anticipating having to come back for any other engineering fees at this point in time or is just the whole kit and caboodle for the engineering part? This should get us to a point of, and correct me if I'm wrong, this should get us to a point of being able to bid this out as a design build down the road. So any future costs would be packaged in with the build process if I'm- So what the key thing right just said was to get us ready to bid out for design build. So this is gonna get us to preliminary engineering. Oh, Ryan's back. To preliminary engineering that will allow us to do a good cost estimate so we would know what to anticipate to bond. And then we would be looking to bond that amount in a design build contract that would further those designs from 30% to final and then through construction. The advantage of a design build in that path is that you can work on value engineering and you have your engineer at the table with your contractor to have that connection be close to the life of the project. So yes, there would be engineering costs associated later on, but would be once we determine what the full cost of the project is going to be. This is really to get us to the point to understand, we were quoted a $4.4 million price tag before to understand what that is that real? Does that reflect the environmental work needed on the site? And what are the soft costs associated with that work? And I think- Does that make sense? I think it does. Yeah, and I think they expand a little bit too in that one of the things that was helpful for me as a layperson in looking at this and talking to the engineers was that in that $4.4 million price tag, there are a number of contingencies baked in. So contingencies for geotech, if we get in the soil up there and the soil is not stable and it needs to be backfilled, environmental work, if we find there's unpleasant trees subsurface there that need to be moved away. So one of the things that I think was encouraging to me is that there is a possibility that with the expenditure of this funding that $4.4 million number could come down fairly substantially before we even start doing value engineering on the slides and frankly the fun stuff that we'd like to keep as much of as we can. But again, until we get that boring tool on the ground and start to do some of that testing and work, we just don't know fully what's up there. So, and I think I would not to throw a fellow municipality under the bus, but I think Rutland didn't do this work and got to a point where they bonded at a number that was way below what the final price tag on their project was. So they are now building a pool or a pool with no pool house because that's what their bond amount allowed them to afford. So I think we sort of learned from that experience that this is good money to spend upfront again if we do intend to move this project down the road. Again, it could lower that 4.4 but it could also raise that 4.4. Correct, correct. But knowing. Right. Knowing is not the problem, right? Is the relative. Yeah, no, it's a good clarification. It's the importance of it. So we're gonna call off guard later. And did I miss a turnaround time on the engineering? Nope, so I did have a conversation with Mark Mariano who was the engineer we've worked with to date through us and in Samson. He was estimating a three to four month turnaround for this work, but basically said today that what we need to do to get prepped for a bond, they will do. He said he'll manage that team accordingly and get the work done. Like the project we mentioned earlier, I think there's definitely a strong desire to get in the ground before the snow flies and they have acknowledged that and I think are ready to roll pretty quickly if the funding is allocated and approved. So that helps get some of those pieces going and we can do some of that legwork over the course of the winter. And if you, I'm taking the fact that their names on this proposal that we're pleased with the work today. We very much are. And I think, you know, I perhaps didn't do as much buttering up in here as I should have of them. They were great to work with through the process, especially in terms of their public engagement piece. I think that was an area where they really did work with us very closely and actively to figure out how to do a good public engagement process. They met with our pool committee a bunch of times. We had a big event up at Landry. Got a lot of feedback that they incorporated. So yeah, they were very good and are one of the pre-qualified engineers, I believe through public works as well. So that's helpful. Can you guys remind us what amount we are taking this 92,500 dollars out of? Yep, so at this point, we are recommending that that come out of operating surplus fund balance from fiscal year 17. Which has a total leftover amount at the time of, at this time of? 621 to 110,000. There you go. Unhonored, but it just didn't work out. Unhonored. But yes. Correct. Yeah. You just want to remind that for folks. You chimed in almost on time too. We've talked about fund balance here a number of times, but just reminded it's coming out of that 600 and some odd thousand dollar amount that we're expecting to have for fund balance. Correct. And I just want to note, because you didn't say anything about it, but we do also appreciate starting to demonstrate what the facility's ongoing cost burden for the community is looking like. Yeah, that's a critical. On some level, I think building the thing is going to be the easier lift. I think the operating costs will be where the challenging rubber hits the road. But again, we wanted to do our best to give a snapshot of what that will be. That'll be refined as we go, but I think it does start to give a picture of what we're talking about as an add back. So then the next question too is, is it expected? I mean, I know you can answer this question, but generally we think the number based off of what the work's been. This should not, if things go reasonably well and there's nothing catastrophic found, should not drastically change the number that we've been dealing with for the proposed potential cost. The 4.4. Correct. Assuming nothing is found, correct. If anything, I think what we would see if nothing is found is that that number would come down slightly because there are some contingencies for dirty soil and for needing to do some backfill up there potentially for unstable geotech. I said, just a reminder, the council's also not voting right now to approve the construction of a pool or approve the significance of bond to the voters. Correct. We're doing what was promised, which is taking us as far as we possibly can to understand what the total price tag is in a very responsible way. Yep. And understand what the implications of the proposal are in totality. Yep. Which I feel does match the charge that we felt from the community. Yep, absolutely. In wanting to see some real movement on getting this to a place where the community can make that decision. Exactly. Yes. Other questions, comments for Ray? Jesse? I would just, I think probably the most consistent question I get from people in the community is what's happening with the pool. So, I think some sort of communication plan beyond, and I have the honor of writing the newsletter article for December. Who's just gonna suggest that we do? We may be in touch. Yes, part of that, but I do think even beyond making sure that folks are kept apprised of as we, because if we're really pointing towards a March bond vote, now's the time to get people. We're getting that out there. Engaged, and this is real. This has a price tag. This is what this means. Yep, that's great. So, I do feel the need to put out the caveat. I think it's fairly unlikely that we will be ready for a March bond vote on this project. I think that this is, as Ray said, this is three to four months worth of engineering work to understand what that price tag is, and we have to have a final, we have to have approved warning for a town meeting by the end of January. I think this is much more on track to mirror the potential bond vote for the Main Street project, which would also, which would be either a special meeting or at one of the primary meetings in 2018. So this is a meeting. Which would be November? We have a primary. Oh, I'm sorry. In August. August. Okay, so that's news, right? So that hasn't been stated before, so that would be something that we would expect is really clearly expressed both to this body and the public from a reasonability perspective, because I can tell you that's not what's been communicated previously here, and it's also not what is being repeated to members of the community. So I think we need to be really, really clear about those timelines and what's reasonable and what's possible, okay? So I'll open up any additional questions from Council. Questions, comments from the public? Yes. The fast track, wherever you need to be known to get it on March ballot? Yes, but I think still a baseline three months is probably where we are. So again, I'm not an engineer. I don't feel like I can speak to what that timeline would look like. But again, it may. I mean, I think that's a big, there's a kind of a bigger question there too of bonds. Do two bonds stack up together? Or is it better to take them separately? I think there are a lot of pieces there that would be, we would need to be thinking about internally about how we've stacked that up. Correct me if I'm wrong, but. I mean, the way I was approaching it is if it takes, if it's a three, so say it's three months. So three months from today is December, January, February 5th, so say we could get them down two weeks. That essentially has us coming to you all with a financial proposal the night you're setting the warning vote. And that does not, and that's just a, to me that is a very, very tight timeframe. So I was just trying to manage expectations of what we can expect from a good engineering product and what we can reasonably expect you all to weigh a community value of. After you've also been talking about a budget for two months that's going to have other financial impacts on the community. We're not going to know on December 4th what that number is going to be and therefore what debt capacity we'd have to be carrying for a pool. So you would be making other FY19 budget decisions without that information in place. You know what I mean? I think we understand exactly what you're saying. I don't think that's the issue at hand here. I think somewhere along this line we lost a timeline in my perspective. Like I think a lot of us sitting out here were thinking this was going to roll out as a bond issue in this particular voting cycle. So whether we lost that immediately five minutes ago, I think that look was on our face. Like, oh, did we miss a timeline? What happened? Why is that not all giant? I think it's, but we completely understand what you're saying. You don't want to make a $4.4 million decision without having all of the other things as well. We get that part of it. That's not the question. Not a plan mind anyway. No, but and we received the presentation in August and agreed with the community services commission that option B was the right approach and that we needed to move forward with engineering in order, I thought we were all pretty clear that the goal was a March bond vote. And so like I expressed last meeting, my confusion or concern that the pool project would get tied up with the Main Street revitalization project because that's not the timeline that we've been on. And so. Yeah, Sherry. That's, I think, so was the pool committee when they were excited about this engineering development? Were they informed of the timeline implications? So the pool committee know about the? I don't think we've spoken about specific deadlines for when a bond vote would go out. I think we've talked about it with that group most recently as some time in the future, but I certainly haven't committed to a March date. And again, knowing that some of these other projects may be past that. Yeah, so I think we'll just repeat that there's some real frustration, not just here. This is a demonstration, the frustration that we're also feeling from the public side of things. So I'll just leave it there. Any other questions, comments from council? We have another question in the public, yes. Again, Dr. Lone-Stolten, commissioner in the Committee Services Commission. Over the past year, I have spent about eight months or so acting as the liaison from the commission to the pool committee. And so I have quite a bit to do with their discussions in developing the design that was brought to you earlier this year. So I'd like to speak in support of this request for the $90 plus thousand dollars, which seems like a lot of money, but I think that we can and should regard it as a significant and perhaps even critical first step towards moving the pool towards completion and replacement of the currently defunct Myers pool. If we don't do it now, we're looking at probably another year's delay and an increase in public frustration. I spent quite a bit of time over at the senior center and the question of what's happening with the pool is coming up from seniors as well as other members of the public. So I think it's really quite important to do these studies. And if I understand it correctly, I think the results of these studies may help us satisfy some of the requirements of Act 250, which I'm sure is going to come in play because we're doing a fairly significant redevelopment of that particular site. So I would urge the council to agree to this. Thank you. Thank you, Rhonda. Thanks for all your time on the committee. I appreciate it. Absolutely. I appreciate the time. Yes, sir. I just go on the August bomb. Does that mean you couldn't break ground until 2019? No, I'm not a contractor. I'm not answering that one. That's a good question. Yeah, it is a good question. And again, I don't feel like I'm qualified to answer that. I would assume we would quickly be ready to go out to bid for that and get into the ground as quickly as possible, but I don't feel like I'm qualified to answer that. Well, if we, just because we went to bomb doesn't necessarily mean we have a contractor selected. Right, we'd have to go out and bid. So then it goes out to bid, which is what, 30 days to turn around, there's time to turn around on our FP and then time for people to respond and then accepting said bids. So again, I'm not a contractor either, but just looking at that timeline. So the line has to pass before you put out a bid? So why don't we do this instead of trying to answer questions like this in the fly? Next council meeting, can we please have expected project timeline with details about the steps that are gonna be taken and what the real timeline for that looks like? So I think we need to all have an understanding and an agreement about what the math looks like and what the steps are. So, and there is the possibility of doing like a special vote too, right? Well, we already have two going in that calendar year. So obviously having it rolled in is a much better option, but there is, those aren't our only options. I appreciate the timeline in our next council meeting because I think my concern or just wondering, I mean, there are a lot of factors that go into a project timeline, including as like we live in a place where you can't drill into the ground for a six months of the year. So there's seasonality, but then also all those different steps that have to be taken once a bond is approved. And so I guess the big question in my mind is if moving from a March two at the earliest August election would push back the timeline that would cause us to lose a season that the pool would otherwise be open based on when the project were to be approved and the ground were to be broken. So I guess that's kind of a big question that are concerned in my mind. I'm just curious how we can really have a sense of urgency around, I mean, we don't meet again until December now. So it's almost a full month, so. Well, we don't necessarily have to meet to get the timeline. No, we don't, but I would, I would, I mean, I don't know where folks are at here. Is it sort of, we're resigned to? Well, it is. To missing a March vote or can we send a message that? There's a, sounds to me like there's a logistical, there's logistical issues unknown to this point. That prevent that from being a reality. Is that fair from our perspective to say at this point? So I have not talked to these engineers. I think the, so you correct me if I'm wrong. I think to do that, we would have, as Ray said at the beginning, we would have to scale back what this request was. I'm not sure there's enough time to do the full engineering we would need. So the implications of that is that we would perhaps get a, you know, more uncertainty around the environmental liability we would be encountering and not as complete designs, which means our number for bonding would be looser. So what we would probably do in that case is bond for more than we thought we would need to cover that liability. And then when you bond like that, you can just not take the debt if it comes in lower. But there are implications if it comes in that high. So there would be a lot more uncertainty. If we want a full picture, the complete picture of what this would actually cost, including operational costs and construction costs and debt service costs over time. My gut right now is that that is a very difficult thing to pull off by approving the warning at the end of January. One other suggestion, if I could. Right now I believe you have on your schedule hearing the next Wednesday. We could add another agenda item to that meeting as well to present a timeline with details. That would be good. Can you pull out together in that quick of time? I think we're hearing we have to. Yeah. I think you're hearing that correctly. Okay. So back to tonight's issues. We have the $92,500 on the table for the engineering work. Other questions, concerns? Yes. I'm sorry, I have one more. That's okay. It's not understanding that the street project on the pool, does it have to be developed by May of next year, qualified for that grant? So that grant doesn't have anything to do with the pool. That's only for funding for a main street project. And we would have to commit to taking a bond boat at some point in the future. It's unclear at what point we would have to do that. They are pushing us for a May deadline, but that's not in regulation anywhere. Good questions, good questions. Any other questions or concerns? Okay. So seeing and hearing none, I'd entertain a motion for approval for request appropriate $92,500 from the FY17 fund balance for the environmental and engineering work for the minor pool site. So moved. Second. To remind Nicole, second by Brian Smith for the discussion. Hearing seen none, all those in favor please say aye. Aye. And those opposed, motion carries. We'll now take a two minute recess and reconvene at just past 8.30. Call back to order the Winooski City Council meeting and pick up where we left off. We are at FY18 quarter one report with Dr. Tysers. Thanks for your patience, Dr. Tysers. I don't know, it's always interesting to sit here and listen to what's going on. Even better when I don't have to make any decisions on it. Which is a great lead-in to the fact that you can pick up petitions starting pretty soon. They aren't available very long, they're ready. There you go. A little political moment, very well. This is the first report of the first quarter of FY18 and always keep in mind that the first quarter of any fiscal year is probably the easiest because not a lot has happened. We've come off in the summer, we haven't hit the winter season and a lot of the major expenses haven't occurred. In my report to you, I said there really wasn't much to say, well financially we're in good shape, the budgets are looking good, most everything is within. It's benchmark and the only comment that I wanted to make and I did make was that the only thing that jumps out is the administrative benefits and as I said in my report, we pay the workers comp and the unemployment benefits under the administrative budget throughout the year and then at the end of the year we go through and recalculate based on salaries of each department, their proportionate share. We allocate a portion of what we've already had posted to that administrative budget to each of the individual accounts. And there are several accounts within the budget that we do that with simply because it's easier for us to pay them out of one budget and allocate them at the end of the fiscal year. That's really the highlight, the revenues as I said, there's a little shortage in the line I didn't call intergovernmental activities. That's where we get monies transferred back and forth from the various sections of various funds back into the general fund to support some of the things that are paid out of the general fund on behalf of all the other intergovernmental funds. But again, like the benefits section, that will occur basically at the end of the fiscal year prior to audit purposes and would show up in my final report on the unaudited fiscal year activities which I do each September or October. That pretty much sums it up. It's probably the easiest of all the financial reports to give throughout the year. The next one will take place in sometime end of January 1st of February. That'll be for the six month period but will encompass the start of the seasonal occupation or seasonal portion of the year. The one that's more critical of course is that third quarter report because that then takes in the bulk of the fiscal year including the winter season, which as you know in Vermont is the most critical one in the one that costs the most and is very critical to what our operations may end up with. Are there any questions? No questions for Dr. Kicers? 25% of the year is over, 25% of the year is over, where did that go? Oh. What's that? Where did that 25% of the year go? Yeah, I can't believe it. Well, think about it this way, we're already two months beyond the 25% of the year so it's time moves on very, very quickly. But I can say as I've said before and it's always good to say and I would not like to say anything different but that the budget is being handled very, very positively, very, very, quite correctly. And so that's always a, for a financial person like me, it's always a nice feature. Thank you for your work. Thank you all. Thank you for the five minutes. Any questions from the public? To the senior hearing none, we appreciate your time, Dr. Kicers. Thank you. Thank you. Item I, Approval of UVM University of Vermont and SNAP Fitness Letters of Intent. So I guess just a table said a little about this. We had a conversation about a month ago at this point about the use given the wise leaving, you know, Bryan Community Center, the use of that space and heard some interest from you of maintaining the partnership with University of Vermont and keeping that important community partner here and having a public space option through a fitness studio. So this is the kind of execution of that interest in two letters of intent from SNAP Fitness and UVM. And we have representatives from both here tonight as well. Yep. And if I can just say quickly, first of all, thank you to them for hanging out through what was a pretty robust meeting here, but also oddly enough, I think reflective of the amount of back and forth and work that we as a group have done over the last couple of months. We did, I wanted to just acknowledge publicly, we did send council some information today about four o'clock. These negotiations were literally going on up until the end of the day, Friday. And we were working on some of those details this morning as well, just to get those to you. So Carol has that, I emailed the council earlier today. There are some changes to the, in particular, the UVM forward looking lease that I highlighted in the memo to council. But I think what this does for us is it deals with UVM's retroactive use of a portion of the YMCA space, which is great. We've been sort of holding that off because we were trying to deal with both pieces, looking back and looking forward. That's been great. They've had, I think, a good experience staying put and are certainly excited to see some company in that big empty space. So I feel pretty confident that, as I mentioned in my memo, that letter of intent, I think, reflects the intent of a retroactive lease. And then two leases for moving forward, one with SNAP Fitness and one with UVM. So, again, looking at those details, I think the SNAP letter, as you see it, is pretty reflective of where we're gonna be. UVM's, we had gotten an initial draft and that's what I included in the package for you all tonight. But we have negotiated some updates to that, which were spelled out in the memo that went out today. So, and again, those were negotiations that were going on until pretty late in the day Friday. So I don't know if it's easiest to just field questions, highlight any specifics. Certainly this budget, building budget is a complicated one overall. So there may be some questions sort of beyond the scope of just these leases that you all have, but happy to field questions as they come. Yeah, I think that's something that I had asked for an advanced disability meeting is just that we have information on hand to ensure that we're entering into an agreement without a full budget. In front of us, which understandably, I think we need to hear a little bit about the holistic impact to the community center budget and what this does in comparison to what the former rents were and what it. Yep, yep. No, and I had gotten that question in advance. I was baiting you to ask it there. So, you know, I think it's fair to say we've known straight along that we're in essence subsidizing the expenses of this building out of the building reserves. That's been the case certainly for as long as I've been here and for longer than that, really since the building opened, it is not cash flowed to a point where we've been able to get to a break even. We have definitely approached closer and I think that with these leases executed and the space fully filled, which is again how we're budgeting, we're anticipating on July one that we will be at full tenancy. We're budgeting optimistically there. There's really minimal impact to the bottom line with these arrangements as prescribed. So, currently with the vacancies that we've got, we're subsidizing that building to the tune of about $5,700 a month, which is obviously not a sustainable approach. We will have an opportunity to go back with this retro lease and capture some of that difference, but looking forward to fiscal year 19 as a comparison, again, if we're at full tenancy under the terms of this agreement, that subsidization number drops down to about $2,800 a month, which is obviously a much better number, still big, but kind of more in line with where we've been targeting to get this budget, which is about between a $20,000 and $30,000 annual operating deficit. The question is gonna come up, why didn't you charge more rent? You've got an opportunity with new leases coming in and I think that the short answer is that the market's not gonna bear that based on that building. We've retained a professional commercial real estate broker, Esther Lotz, who's been helping us out through the process and the number that we got to the $14 all in per square foot is really what I think what I would advise the market is gonna bear and probably honestly at the top end of what the market's gonna bear for what that building is at this point. I think the piece that's not necessarily gonna be captured in an operating budget that I think does help us make some strides in that building is that we are bringing two tenants to the table that are willing to make some pretty significant investments in the building and as you all know, we don't have a lot of fluid capital down there so I think this is an opportunity that we may be dealing with some operational loss but I think over time it allows us to get some work done on the facility that we've needed and then modeling out the other piece that is reflected here is some annual increases which we've not traditionally had in our arrangements down there. So it does allow us I think to keep pace in ways that we've not been able to over the last five or six years. I don't know if that answers the question if you want a more different way of quantifying that. I think it's financially we're gonna end up in a very similar place as to where we were when the why was the lease holder. Yeah, by my math and Angela is not here to correct me which is probably good but by my math it ends up being about two to $3,000 of difference at the end of the day all in on the building's budget so it's really a fairly it's about a 1% difference and it's pretty negligible. In terms of we're gonna be collecting $2,000 less in rent than we were with the why? Correct, correct. So reason being that as we've gone out to establish the market rate that is a number that is slightly less than what the why was paying all in before. And I guess another sort of argument against the wise rate is that clearly that didn't stick so maybe there were other factors but I think that tells us something about the fact that that rate was perhaps off. It was all that was pre calculated years and advanced with step desktolators with the city subsidizing several years in the beginning deeply, deeply, deeply subsidizing. So that was a complicated arrangement. Yeah, it wasn't just a straight line number. I'm appreciative of the fact that I think we put you in a very impossible situation as staff to suddenly become building managers and leasing specialists. So I wanna acknowledge and appreciate Esther for your work with Ray too because I think that's an expertise that again, it's pretty unreasonable for us to expect that to just be on staff as an innate character. Not an engineer, not a martial real estate broker. Yeah, yeah. How can you get leaves out of leaves? So I guess I would just, I wanna give other people plenty of opportunities to ask questions about the leases. I just going up 40,000 feet again. This is what we asked and it was late in the meeting in case people didn't catch it, but I know that there was a lot of back and forth and extremely appreciative all the time and energy that went in on your behalf and also on the party's behalf. So I know you guys, UVM's represented here as a snap fitness and I think this arrangement represents us really it's adding a great, continuing a great partnership with UVM with a service that is really important to a number of people that live here in the therapy realm. And that's critical, but we also retained the very public aspect of the body of the building in general and allowing for a gym, which a community as densely populated as we are with 75,000 people to not have a facility where people can go and take care of their health is totally unacceptable too. So I think this does represent and I appreciate the ability of everybody to get to that place where we're having this conversation to meet the best needs of the public while also providing a great, continuing a partnership with UVM that provides a great resource to the community too. At some point in life, we all will probably need, although if we spend enough time at the fitness gym, maybe we won't need as much of the aquatic therapy on the back end. Other questions and sorry, I didn't mean to hijack it with the higher view if people want to ask questions on the lease side or anything of the array. The journeys of review of the lease. The letters of intent, yes. I've looked at that with Bob DePama. Yep. You know, I think the terms that you've written, those are, that's a public document. Unless anybody has specific items that they're concerned about, I'll open up the opportunity. We do have it listed as a possible executive session. If there's anything that folks feel at this point in time that they would like to ask in confidence as part of a negotiation, that would be an opportunity we could explore too. I don't see the need to call for a motion on it, but if somebody wants to change minds on that, are we okay? Good. Okay. Good, we're good. Any questions, concerns from the public? Great. So with that, I would entertain, you guys got anything else we need to? No, I just, I want to echo your appreciation and I think there's an opportunity for something pretty special here. It's a really unique partnership, the three of us getting together and I'm super excited to see how this goes. I think it's going to be a really cool opportunity for us to test some waters that haven't been tested before, so very when you ski of us, I feel like. Yeah. We're excited to continue to have you and we're very excited to welcome you. Yeah. And so with that, I would entertain a motion for approval of the University of Vermont Snap Fitness Letters of Intent. Some motion by Brian Sweeney, second by Brian. Corgan, any further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. In those opposed, motion carries. Do we want to ask for lease signature authorization? That was the motion that was included there to authorize the mayor or manager. Letters. To move to a lease, because this is the letters of intent, but now to move to a lease signature. You're fine by charter if I sign it without them designating that. If you want the city manager to sign it, I think we have to do that to a vote. No, I think we just wanted to be able to move on that in between the meetings. We changed the charter last time. Yeah, great. All right, move. So anyway, thank you for being here. All right, excellent. The power. Yeah. What's that? The power. No, just the, you know. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for all your work on that. We appreciate it. Thank you all. And with that, we'll reach this evening's final item, which is item J, approval of the AFSCME contract. So we've talked about this contract a couple of times in executive session. You have the contract in front of you as well as our agenda template. So this is the, after many negotiation sessions with AFSCME, we agreed to language. It has been ratified by the union and is just awaiting your approval for full implementation. And just as a reminder, this is a three-year contract. It exists from July 1st, 2016 through June 30th, 2019. There are some significant changes included in this contract that are summarized on the front page. So more definition on overtime expectations, the creation of a safety committee that hasn't historically existed in the city, which is a huge liability for us. And the union is on board as a partner in that. The creation of a grade and pay scale, the creation of promotional opportunities based on competency, not just job vacancy, which will add value to the city as well as the employees. And then finally, of course, wage rates that we believe will be better enable us to attract and retain excellent employees. And we got permission from the union to actually advertise the current positions at this agreed to rate ahead of time. And as a result, are seeing more applications. So we believe it's already working. So the financial implications are for FY17, the retro, about $15,000. And this year in FY18, $7,000. So we believe we can find that through vacancy savings. So no additional money is needed. What do you believe the financial impact will be to the creation of promotional opportunities based on competencies and not just vacancies? And nuts, I'm sorry, can you say it again? It says in here, the creation of promotional opportunities based on competencies, not just vacancies, you said. So that bullet about the creation of promotional opportunities based on competencies. So the concept there is that right now the structures are, there's an EO1 and EO2 and an EO3. EO3 is kind of like a form and supervisor. The primary difference between an EO1 and an EO2 is that an EO2 has a commercial driver's license, a CDL license, which is needed to drive the big trucks. Historically, it has been that you could only become an EO2 if an EO2 left if there was a vacant position. What we are doing with this contract is saying any EO1 that wants to get a CDL and demonstrate capacity to use all the equipment can be promoted to an EO2 pending that demonstration. The advantage for the city is it gives us far greater ability to run crews so we can deploy staff differently. We can get more done with the staff we have because more people can operate the equipment. There may, if everyone decides to do it over time, I don't think that will happen in the next couple of years. But if over time it does happen, there would be a financial impact. I still think the product the city would get from those employees outweighs the financial impact risk. It also is a promotional, going back to workforce development, it's saying we're gonna pay you for what you're able to do, what you bring to the job, not just what bucket you happen to be in because somebody's in an EO2 position for decades. I also think it addresses that challenge we face with having a contract out for some of our plow services because we just don't have staff to run trucks. Other questions, comments, concerns? We've seen this one a few times. So does this mean you're basically gonna start negotiating the next contract because this goes through 20? This one goes through June of 2019. So we have a year off maybe on this one. FOP expires on June, but that's good. You want them a little off cycle so you're not double negotiating as we've been doing. Other questions, concerns, comments? Questions, concerns from the public? So seeing and hearing none, after a long and winding road, I've entertained a motion for approval of the AFSCME contract this morning. So moved. Second. Motion by Eric, second by Brian Corgan. Any further discussion? Hearing is saying none. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. And with that, I've entertained a motion for adjournment. So moved. Motion for adjournment. I just can't believe I'm not in the eye yet. Motion by Brian Corgan, second by the colony for the discussion. Hearing is saying none. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. I could not, the meeting is adjourned. I could not make out that verbal cue. I heard something down there. Was that it? Yeah. Yeah. Please adjourn. Yeah. I need an apple. I can't.