 Recording in progress. Little person, Tracy, Councilor Pines. We have a quorum and a lot to get through. So I'm going to go ahead and get started if you're ready, Catherine. I am ready. All right, awesome. So I will call to order the Board of Finance at 5.03 PM on Monday, May 24th. And the first item on the agenda is the agenda. I would welcome a motion to read out. So I'm ready to make a motion regarding the agenda. So moved. Thank you, Councilor Pines. Seconded by Councilor Jang. Discussion of the agenda. There's no discussion. We'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Are there any votes? We have a duly adopted agenda. Is there any member of the public that would like to speak to the Board of Finance in the public forum? I do see someone with their hand raised. Gabrielle, I will enable your microphone. Welcome. Thank you. And thanks very much. I wasn't certain how to join in in this discussion. I'm here as chair of Burlington Electric Commission and I just wanted to note that the team at BED and the commission, this is with regards to the agenda item pertaining to increasing the rates for Burlington Electric. I just wanted to give you guys a little bit of background, which is that we have been discussing this since about 2018. And we've had 12 years of no rate increase, which is both wonderful, but also not reflective of most things in life. And our team at Burlington Electric has just been incredibly strategic with the investments made over the last 12 years, as well as some luck in terms of what's gone on in the market and in terms of renewable energy policy. But as a result, we've been able to hold that steady and then with the pandemic, we've certainly seen quite a shortfall. But again, over, I think we've met, the Burlington Electric Commission has met the last three Wednesday evenings in a row. So a couple of additional special meetings as well as our typical meeting as the team has just continued to sharpen their pencils and identify where they could cut, what they could transfer for a future year in terms of expenditure. And I just, I wanted to weigh in to the Board of Finance that the commission and the department team do not propose this rate increase lightly. We do understand that this is an incredibly challenging time for so many Vermonters and so many Burlingtonians. We did hear at our public meeting last Wednesday from some of our really important key community members, UVM Medical Center, UVM Small Businesses, and we will continue to work with them throughout this whole process. But just wanted to weigh in and say, this is not done lightly. It is done with full acknowledgement of how challenging this may be for some entities and some individuals and I'll leave it to the team to present in the appropriate agenda item. But just on behalf of the commission wanted to really let this Board know how much time and effort and detailed analysis has gone into this process. So thanks very much for the opportunity to speak and I'll just remain on mute and listening and happy to answer any questions if they may come up with the appropriate agenda item. Great, Gabrielle, thank you, our representative Stevens. Thank you for your service Montpelier and thank you for a long service on the commission and coming and sharing that perspective as a chair tonight. It's very helpful. Are there any other members of the public that would like to speak to the Board of Finance about business before us from there? I'm not seeing any more hands, Jordan, we have no emails. So I'm gonna close the public forum now and move to item 3.01, which is the Consent Agenda, which is the adoption of May 10th minutes. Are we ready for a motion regarding the Consent Agenda? Councilor Pine, turn off his mic if I may. Time is short for Councilor Pine to have official actions on the Board of Finance. So would you like to make the motion? I would move to approve the Consent Agenda and take the actions in the case. Great, thank you. Is there a second? Seconded by, we'll give that to President Tracy and go to a vote. Are all those in favor of adopting the Consent Agenda? Please say aye. Aye. Aye. The motion carries unanimously and that brings us, thank you, to 4.01. We are at the deliberative part of the agenda for the section approving and recommendations to the City Council. The first item is the Rail Yard Enterprise Project authorization to execute a cooperative agreement, a significant milestone in already, in the longer than we would like history of this project, but this is a significant step towards seeing this important project built. We have Chief and Spencer and Norm Baldwin here to answer any questions. Chief, why don't you, it's been a while since we have talked at this board about this project. Please give us a short summary of where this stands and why this is such a significant action tonight. Sure, thank you, Mayor. The Rail Yard Enterprise Project really is an exciting project in the southwest corner of downtown seeking to achieve a number of goals. Its purpose and need talks about enhancing multimodal connectivity, increasing the livability of this neighborhood south of downtown, stimulating economic development and improving access to the Rail Yard, to and from the Rail Yard. And so thanks to many councils support along the way, we've done two scoping efforts, one that was completed in 2016, one in 2020 and the council has continually supported this project's advancement. At the last time the council supported it was also to direct us to find a way to have the state and federal partners contribute 90% of the project cost and to get the preliminary engineering underway as soon as possible. Because the community has very strong support for this project. And I'm pleased to say that through good conversations I've made myself with leaders of federal highway and VTRANS, their support for this project has grown and got to the point where they are ready to begin preliminary engineering. This cooperative agreement offers $10 million of state and federal funding for us to move into preliminary engineering that will allow permitting and right of way and all those subsequent phases to really kick off. So we are very excited for this and city engineer, nor Baldwin, anything you wanna add? Yeah, I just share with the members of the board and council members that the cost sharing for this is 81% federal highway, around 9% for state and 10% local match for the city itself. I would note, and it's an important element here is that under any of these cooperative agreements VTRANS is considering development soils non-participating. So there is an unknown cost here yet to be understood as we advance through design. And another piece of the puzzle is that this funding would be available July 1. There is some preliminary work we're doing right now to assuming we get a cooperative agreement that's executed in support of the council that we could put an RFP out for design consultant and possibly come back to council late summer to get this project moving forward quickly. So we're, we are actually in early stages of conversation with VTRANS staff and making this an actual real project. Great, thank you, Chief and Norm. We'll go to Councilor Pine and then President Tracy. Sorry, I didn't mean Councilor Paul, I apologize. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I guess this is my last board of finance meeting when I will get confused with Councilor Pine. I think it must be the four letter and the P at the beginning. I believe that is what it is. I'm gonna assume that. So the first thing I just wanted to say is that, when I read this over on the fact that the grant award is 81.08% federal funding and the state is 8.92%, to me sort of sounds like a negotiation. And just wanted to offer my congratulations to those who managed to do that because those two numbers equal 90%, which is pretty impressive. The other thing I just wanted to ask is that you've got in here that 500,000, 500,000 would be in the first in the FY, let's see, you've included, the local match obligation is 1 million and that is included in the FY22 budget. But it says the proposed FY22 budget includes 50,000. So I assume that it's just the 50,000 and I probably have misread this when it says we'll continue to be budgeted in future fiscal years. So you're assuming that the most that we are going. Yeah, so to simplify it. The 1 million, so the 1 million is in the FY22 budget. No. No. What we're trying to express in the memo and I'm sorry it's not clear is that you have $10 million commitment from VTrans and Federal Highway for a maximum product limiting amount. Over the life of that cooperative agreement, the city could be on an obligation of a million dollars. It's anticipated that early stages of design will not cost us a million dollars. It's gonna be spread over some period of years and that we're only gonna be spending, well, a local match obligation of $50,000, which is 10% of whatever that math is. Okay, I mean, I guess what my confusion is, it just simply says the local match obligation of 1 million of this initial 10 million is being funded, et cetera, et cetera. And is included in the FY22 budget. Yeah, so we're anticipating, we're gonna spend about 500K in the first year and we're gonna have a $50,000 local match obligation. Okay, all right, I guess I'm not sure that that's what that says, but that's fine. I mean, I just, unless I've missed something, I mean, I don't see that and I don't see that in the motion, but I think it probably, perhaps again, maybe I'm the only person who feels that way, but it seems as though that's not phenomenally clear. I just wanted to verify. So anyway, that's all I was gonna ask about. This is wonderful news that we are finally moving forward with this, particularly given the neighborhood and the desire to have more activity in that area and hopefully make it, as I say, the neighborhood that's affected by that. So anyway, thank you. Thanks very much. Thank you, Councilor Powell. President Tracy. So I'm curious as to how this timeline will, for advancing this project, will interface with Parkway construction potentially. There's been significant discussion in increasing community interest around advancing this project along the same timeframe as the, as the Champlain Parkway in order to avoid the, or at least lessen the impacts on the King Street neighborhood. And that's specifically in the context of really needing to recognize the racial justice issues that play here of diverting traffic from a largely white neighborhood and increasing traffic volumes into a neighborhood that has one of the highest concentrations of people of color in our city. And so I think it's really important that we prioritize this and I'm happy to see this moving forward, but I just would like to continue to emphasize, at least for me, the need to see this project move forward on the same timeframe, because I don't want it to be us knowing that this is an issue and saying, oh, we're just gonna let this be an issue and let people suffer these increased things for years before this other project is advanced. So I guess I'm wondering if there's an opportunity here, given that we're starting to really see some progress on this really hard enterprise to have those two projects line up because I think absent that will just be, in many ways, recreating just the long history of bad and frankly racist highway decisions that have been made over time. So I just wanted to raise that issue in the context of this and that's what I'm hoping is possible here. Great, thank you, President Tracy. Mayor, can Mayor respond? Yeah, go ahead and what you can, when you start. Great, yes. Advancing the REP and bringing this forward as quickly as possible has been an effort over the last six to nine months to really drive this forward. It led in part to the mayors and my continued conversation with V-Trans and Federal Highway to get the right funding formula and to allow the preliminary engineering to start. Thanks to our partners, they agreed to start now with preliminary engineering. In addition, we've been looking at all other ways that we can keep the Rail Yard Enterprise Project moving ahead quickly. One of the ways is by trying to figure out on the front end what permitting, federal permitting process will need to go through. And in working with Federal Highway, it appears at this point that we can advance the Rail Yard Enterprise Project with an environmental assessment and not a full-blown environmental impact statement. So that also has a potential to keep this project moving more quickly. The Parkways timeline is such that we're expecting to get the Federal Highway's response to the record of decision sometime later summer or early fall. Project is expected to be put out to bid over the course this winter with a 2022 construction. Construction would last at least two construction seasons, which would put finishing that project probably around 2024. So to your point, President Tracy, the REP, the Rail Yard Enterprise Project, it's gonna be a complex project, but there is a path to getting this under construction within four to six years. And so the two projects are independent of one another, but are gonna be relatively close in their project delivery timeline. At least that is our intent. Okay, all right, well, that's helpful like in terms of the clarification, I just would hope that we can continue to push on any annual efforts to get them to line up completely because I think that's gonna be crucial to really addressing the community concerns that we're hearing here. Yeah, President Tracy, I would add to what Chapin just said. Explicitly, we are still in a period of environmental justice review on the Champlain Parkway. It has put front and center the concerns you are raising that in some ways, our predecessors had grappled with and addressed, I mean, I'm not sure addressed is actually the right word, but had made a decision about many years ago, this environmental justice review from my perspective has caused a reopening of exactly the kind of concern that you're raising and we're making sure that that work is done very thoroughly. And we think this has put this table, this issue back on the table in a way that must be addressed and that's what we're working through. So more and more to come there. I guess in this action we're taking tonight, moving forward with our federal and state partners, the Rallyard Enterprise Project, advancing the thinking, advancing the design, advancing the engineering, hopefully moving through an efficient federal regulatory process. All that I think is all to the good of no matter kind of exactly how the decision about Champlain Parkway comes back to us. I think having this moving forward and moving forward quickly will be helpful in that. Are there any additional questions before we vote, Councillor Jang, go ahead. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I do believe that, Champlain, thank you so much. I think what you provided around answer to President Tracey's question in writing was very well, to me at least, because there are a group of people that when I send it to them, they wanna take it to the next level. Basically, this is no longer a city issue. They wanna now go to the state, and there has been, they started something. So my question is specific about the soil contamination and also the budget for this project. I just wanted to hear from you. Are you speaking from a high confidence that Burlingtonians or the city of Burlington can only take the tap around the 10% of the total cost? Will this be the same issue at the Burlington School District? We go further down the line and we find all the contamination that requires more substantial amount of funding. Do you think from your perspective? Thanks, Councillor Jang. I'll start off and ask the engineer, Baldwin, if he has any additional thoughts, but the 10% local match is for participating costs. That means that things that Federal Highway and V-Trans deemed to be eligible, get the 90% Federal and State share. Managing soils, as City Engineer Baldwin said, are not part of the participating costs. The city has long struggled with the cost of doing projects in Burlington where soil management is a major component. Right now, the roundabout has a half a million dollars of soils that we are finding out how to work with on that project and the parkway will have its own soil liability. The bike path realignment on the waterfront has its soil liability. So this project won't be any different. There will be an additional cost to the city over and above the 10%. What that is will not fully be understood until we have a design calculated quantities and then we'll have an estimate to come back to you. I feel like the given the small project area and the importance of creating this street grid system, as we've heard from counselors and members of the public, that it is a risk that we need to understand and but we need to move ahead with the project. City Engineer, Norm Baldwin, anything to add? No, I'd say that's very thoroughly explained. And the challenge is until we go to design and we start doing testing of the soils and get biometrics and we have an alignment we don't really know precisely what that cost will be. As you know, there are three alternatives being considered in this process. And until we know the alternatives, that won't be narrowed until that point in time. I would also add that we've been direct conversation with DEC about funding other sources of funds to offset some of those costs that could be potentially eligible through either federal or state dollars. Okay, are there any further questions for the team? Seeing none, I think I would welcome a motion on a parade from make a motion. Councillor Jang, Councillor Jang, but yeah. So moved, I make the motion to move this forward. Thank you, Councillor Jang. Second from President Tracy, further discussion. Okay, not seeing any hands, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Are there any opposed? Don't believe there are, the motion carries unanimously. Thank you, and thank you, Chairman Norquham. This brings us, okay, I think you're stick with us. DPW, Team DPW, next item is authorization to amend the project budget and construction contract for sidewalk reconstruction program. And this is, we talked about last week in the capital budget meeting, the need to approve soon sidewalk monies if we were gonna be able to have an extensive season and it seemed like there was likely support in the discussions last week. So we are bringing this back for action, hopefully tonight. So that's the context, Councillor Paul. Thanks, Mayor. It's a long recommended action. So I won't read it unless you'd like me to, but I would make a motion to take the recommended action. Great, thank you. Is there a second? Seconded by President Tracy. Is there any discussion? Councillor Paul, go ahead. Thank you. I would just like to thank the DPW staff that responded to me. There was a concerted effort going on as every member of the Board of Finance received these emails, a concerted effort going on on one city street to make sure that they get their sidewalks done, both sides. And I know that they have been on the list for a considerable length of time. And if were it not for these funds would not be getting the sidewalk. So that amongst the other projects, I think which are all very worthy and I'm happy to support this. Thanks very much. Okay, thank you, Councillor Paul. Are there any other discussion? Yep. Councillor Jang, go ahead. Yep, I'm sorry. I just stepped out because a constituent of mine came to my house about the same issue, sidewalk on Lorry Lane, $50,000 surgery that could happen when went very wrong. And basically I support this and I support any other additional funding as well that the DPW may require to get these type of stuff. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Jang. Any further discussion? Okay, seeing none, we will go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you, Team DPW for batting us and bringing it forward for action. I'll look forward to seeing fresh concrete in three more miles of the city this summer. Sharing President Tracey and I were recently talking about the joy that it gives us to see freshly laid sidewalks. Authorization to execute engineering on-call main agreement with Wright-Piers and another DPW water resources item. Welcome, Martin. Megan, Megan, would you like to tee this up for the brief summary? I mean, I'd be happy to hand it over to Martin. He's the one who's leading this vote, but go for it, Martin. Yeah, sure. So Wright-Piers is the wastewater engineering firm that we've been working with since the bond vote was approved in 2018. We went through a competitive EPA qualification-based selection process at that time and we selected Wright-Piers. So they've been working with us and we've received a few approvals to work with them on EPA state revolving fund projects over the last two years. Since then, we've also worked on smaller projects which are in the memo, which are less for value of less than $50,000, but now we're seeking to continue working with them so that up to a amount of $100,000 because we anticipate over the next couple of years and in the near future, we're going to be doing some more engineering planning work as we prepare for additional projects that are necessary at the wastewater plant. Thank you, Martin, for teeing that up. Floor is open for questions or a motion? Councilor Jang. I'd like to make the mission to recommend to the city council to approve the 2021 Water Resource Weight Restructions and Affordability Program Proposal. I got it right. Oh, to recommend to the city council to authorize the director of Public Works to execute the on-call main contract with Wright-Piers. The maximum of limited amount of $100,000 for engineering services related to wastewater treatment plant improvement program, subject to reviewable, up to a vote by the chief administrative officer and city director of this office. Thank you, Councilor Jang. Seconded by President Tracy. Floor is open for discussion. Okay. Seeing no hands, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. Thank you. I'm in water and we'll see you later on tonight, I think, for the rate discussion. We now go to the 4.0, sorry, I guess here we are for the rate discussion, sorry. Sorry, lost my way there for a moment. So 4.04, approval of the 2021 Water Resources Division Rate Restructuring and Affordability Program Proposal. An associated chapter of 26 and 31 ordinance changes. This is the product of a years of work and I think really good work, creative work and attempt to be responsive to past discussions council. And I'll turn it over to you, Megan, for a short overview. And then we'll hear from Board. Yes, hold on, I'm trying to, can you all hear me, there we go. Yes. I am not quite my usual perky self since I am recovering from a stomach bug that my littlest gave me over the weekend. So I've got my team here, Jess Lavalette and Dave Fox in case I completely lose my train of thought. But President Tracy, you had directed me to give a more substantial presentation but I just wanna be respectful of how much time other items may take. Would you like me to still go through my slides to make sure everybody's fully up to speed or put it into hyperdrive, whatever your pleasure. So, yeah, I think it would be good to probably hear just a quicker presentation because we do have quite a bit on this agenda and I would be concerned about getting over into the other into council agenda, recognizing all the other ones that we have going on. So, and if counselors have additional questions I can certainly ask it is also on the liberty of agenda for the full council as well. So, okay. Let me go as quickly as I can. We are super, super happy to be here with you today to present on our final proposal for our comprehensive rate restructuring and Burlington Water Resources first affordability program that's designed to protect essential access to clean safe water. And can you all see my slide just making sure because I know I've had that mistake in the past. Okay, awesome. So I think we all kind of have come to the same realization. You all as a council and administration have been extremely supportive of our march towards more sustainable funding to both fund the operations as well as the really necessary reinvestment in our capital infrastructure that really much of it has passed its useful life. But we realized that there was a tension with the incremental rate increases and potentially marching towards a place where people might actually have a hard time paying their water bill. And so what's the point of having access to clean water or having the ability to serve clean water to our residential population when they potentially are not able to afford it or start having to make really difficult choices about what they are able to use their money for. And so in 2019, again, two years ago, we did kick off this comprehensive rate evaluation and we had three objectives in mind. One prime in our minds was keeping the affordability of rates, trying to figure out ways in which we could really protect that access to clean water that essential access for our residential users. At the same time, we can't ignore that we need to improve our overall financial health and sustainability along with our revenue stability. If COVID has taught us anything is that we cannot always rely on a steady usage of the water that drives our ability to pay for the plants, pay for the pipes and all the things that we do. And then fundamentally, we wanted to make sure that rates were recouping the cost of service in an equitable manner. Now equitable doesn't necessarily mean equal. We'll talk about that in just a smidge. I wanted just to detail that we have done an extensive amount of public outreach in the first year of the study, public meetings, city council presentations. We did go on a hiatus due to COVID and then in 2021, we decided that we needed to restart the program because again with COVID, if people were barely having a hard time paying their water bills in the past, we were really concerned that this is the time that was now that people needed help in order to access, continue accessing their utility services. 2000, sorry, April, 2021, we did a huge slog of additional outreach to share the results, the latest results of our proposal with public meetings, information, postcards, ads in seven days, as well as direct communications to some of our more heavily impacted customers. We were very happy to obtain a motion of support from the Public Works Commission as well from the TUC, as well as from the TUC in late April. So going back to equity, for the longest time, all of our customers have paid the exact same rate for their volumetric water. But when we look at how different customers impact our system and the level of burden that they put on our system, some customers actually put more of a burden on our system, and so it is justified to potentially charge them more. And so for the first turn of the wheel, even before we get into specifics of affordability, we looked at realigning cost of service with what we're actually charging people. And the first piece of that is to actually charge people, charge customers a fixed charge by meter size. This is very much equivalent to what you might see on your electric or gas bill, the sort of ready to serve charge or an admin fee. It's industry best practice, strongly encouraged by our bond rating agencies. And it starts to realign the amount of fixed revenue we get closer to what our actual fixed expenses are. Our actual fixed expenses are more in the realm of about 20%, with this initiation of implementing the fixed charge, we're starting to recover about 10% of that revenue with a fixed charge. The other piece is a customer class based rates. Before I said, we're charging every single customer, whether you're a residential customer, a commercial customer, a city customer, et cetera, the exact same amount for water. With this, even though we're not fully leveraging and not really making say the commercial volumetric rate any higher than the multi-unit residential or the city customer class, we have that ability in the future to apply different affordability-based pricing for essential residential water in future turns of the wheel. The one place where we are kind of charging a different rate would be the irrigation rate. So for folks who have a water-only meter, that is irrigation meters, we charge them water only because we know that their water is not going to the wastewater system, it's actually going on dirt. And so that rate is substantially higher because while it's certainly everybody's right to irrigate their lawns and their gardens and whatnot, we don't necessarily think that clean, safe drinking water, the best use for it is not necessarily to be put on dirt. Those same meters that were labeled irrigation meter in our system, they're actually not irrigation meters. There's a handful of meters in the city which are actually used to provide the makeup water for heating and cooling. There's only a handful of customers that have that type of meter. And while we originally included them in the irrigation customer class, we realized quite recently that, you know, that water is a little bit different. It's actually less discretionary because you actually do need it for heating and cooling. One important caveat to the irrigation rate is that we are exempting the irrigation meters for the community gardens. Lastly, something that we haven't charged for in the past, but is definitely a special benefit that some buildings or subdivisions have is private fire protection. So certain buildings actually have a separate fire, separate pipe, larger pipe that goes to charge or to provide the fire flow for their sprinkler system should they have a fire. That pipe and the pumping ability that we have to maintain in order to supply that pipe is above and beyond what we would need to just provide everybody with regular tap water. And so that is a special charge that's going to be assessed. The, when we originally did the calculations, if we were to assess that charge fully, the full cost of that charge to the customers, it would have been quite a substantial rate increase on some of those customers. And so we've proposed to phase that in over five years. Getting to affordability, which is really the thing that I think we're all interested in. We've had a few assistance options to date, interest-free payment plans, stormwater credits for directly assessed properties. But it was really clear that there was more that we needed to do to assist our customers. And so the elements of the affordability options are threefold. First of all, everybody who's in either a single family duplex or triplex property is going to have a sort of first tranche of their water, which is based on, we look at the median usage for a different type of property. So for a single family, it is 400 cubic feet per month. For a duplex, it's 600 and for a triplex, it's 900. For that volume of water and below, they're actually charged at a substantially lower rate to incentivize water conservation. If they go above that amount, the first 400, for instance, with a single family would be charged at the lower rate. And then anything above that would be charged incrementally at a higher rate. The other piece, and this is the biggest piece of our affordability program is the waiver of the six monthly water and wastewater charge for income constrained customers. So this is going to be designed to provide relief to households who meet either income or age eligibility requirements, as well as nonprofit affordable or senior housing developments. The income eligibility, we don't have enough staff on hand to be looking at people's incomes. So our proposal is that we would be determining income eligibility through a customer submission of proof of being eligible for some other income-based programs such as LIHEAP, Lifeline, if they received assistance from Vermont Gas, so on and so forth. The senior discount is going to require an application with the proof of age and happy to talk about it further. I know there've been some questions or concerns that folks don't think that being a senior necessarily equates to being on a fixed income. We think that having the application process is gonna, for the most part, weed out somebody who would get this discount and not really necessarily need it. And the last one is flexible payment terms. In the past, we have had payment plan options, but this is actually going to add a budget billing option, which will allow people to kind of lock in at what a monthly rate is, even though for months to months, their bill might otherwise go up and down. A couple of other cool things that I think I mentioned during our budget presentations were super excited about our first infrastructure assistance program, which is going to be providing up to $250 in rebates for residential customers to cover the cost of filming their private sewer lateral. Someday, somehow, we would love to be able to establish grant programs or loan programs so that folks would be able to replace this piece of infrastructure. The sewer lateral from the home to the main is actually entirely owned by that property owner and not by the city. But we think it makes a lot of sense for folks to hopefully get access to filming this pipe, understanding what its condition is and planning for those long-term costs. On the water side, we're going to be providing $75 rebates for residential customers towards the purchase of a water since plumbing fixture. One of the best things you can do to conserve water and bring down your bill is to actually sort of engineer in through either low flow fixtures or a dual flush toilet that really helps folks reduce their water because you can ask your kids to turn off the faucet or ask them to, you know, if it's yellow, leave it mellow but that doesn't always work. And so making it really easy for people. And then by 2022, we're going to be fully implementing our Blue BTV residential stormwater grant program where folks can get their house assessed. And if the Blue BTV consultants identify that there's some easy things you can do on your property, we would be covering a portion of those costs. Now, one thing that came up in the past was our affordability programs are admittedly not really addressing the needs of renters. In most cases, these fixed fee waivers are only going to be applying to single-family properties and other individually metered residential units. An example of that would be a lot of duplexes might have one meter and in that case, it might be hard to apply the fixed fee waiver, but in the case of duplexes where, for whatever reason when the property was constructed, they have individual meters, we would be able to apply that. So multi-family rentals aren't gonna have access in this phase and why is that? I think some of our concerns and concerns that other cities have shared is that if the city provides a fixed fee waiver to a landlord, we have no way of guaranteeing that that landlord is gonna pass that affordability measure on the tenants. So that doesn't quite sit with us quite right right now. The other piece, as I mentioned, is that multi-family units often share a meter. So if you have a four or five unit building, just doing a fixed fee waiver structure isn't necessarily gonna benefit an individual rental unit and so we need to figure out a way to do that. We are not alone, most water utilities across the country are really struggling to address this renter gap. DC water and New York City water in particular and we're really closely watching DC waters program have only recently launched programs this year. And so our promise to you because we recognize that in a place like Burlington with over 60% of the properties being rental properties is this is something that we really need to tackle. And so we're gonna continue to evaluate these options and bring something back to you by April 2023. So lots of talking, what are the numbers mean? Tonight you're not being asked to approve these rates, should you approve our proposal? This is the rate fee schedule that we would bring back to you. On the upper tier, you're seeing our new proposed fixed charge per month. And now a really great question a counselor had posed to me was why are we seeing the fixed charges actually go down for some of the larger meter sizes and I think it's two reasons and Dave can correct me if I'm wrong, but one of them is that they're also seeing that fixed fire charge come in but the other really important piece is right now the larger meters who currently have a charge each month, they're actually getting them a minimum amount of water. So they're getting an initial chunk of water for free or with that charge and with this proposal, they will no longer be getting that allowance. So they're gonna be treated just the same as the five eighths and three quarter inch customers which are your typical residential meter size. And everybody has to pay this regardless of whether you use zero or 100 or 400 cubic feet a month, you're gonna be paying this charge because it's that readiness to serve fee. On the lower tier is the volumetric rate. And you can see those, the two tiered systems for the single family duplex and triplex systems. As I said again, the tiers aren't such that if you go over the 400 cubic feet that then all of your water is charged at that $6.19 cent rate. It's that the first 400 would be charged at that $2.48 and then anything above the 400 would be charged at that higher rate. And then for the most part, you can see that all of the other classes are getting charged the same with the exception of the heating and cooling makeup water which is a slightly higher charge and then the irrigation charge which is a substantially higher charge. What does this do for the customers? Well, had we not been pursuing this rate restructuring, the typical single family home using about 400 cubic feet a month would be seeing a bill increase of about 5.9%. And with this rate restructuring, you're actually seeing, I don't know if you can see my cursor, that that same customer, even though we are generating more funds, the funds we need to run our system to sort of backfill the fact that we didn't have a rate increase last year are actually going to be seeing, no impact or even a slight decrease. If you're a customer that actually qualifies for our wrap or our fixed fee waiver, they're actually going to be seeing a substantial decrease. And the same goes for the duplex and triplex customers. The one caveat to that that certainly has drawn a lot of people's attention is the low volume customer. Why are they seeing an increase? And the simple answer is that it's because of that fixed fee charge. The proportionality of that charge compared to how much water they use ends up showing them having what looks to be a substantial increase on a dollar value. It is about $51 a year or I think about $4.25 a month. It's just, it is just an outcome of how the rate restructuring works. It's one of the reasons why we decided to implement the senior discount because we wanna make sure that if there's a customer, say a senior customer who perhaps hasn't necessarily gone through the exercise of qualifying for one of the income-based programs, perhaps they're proud and they think that they can just manage it on their own. We want them to have the ability to have a relatively easy way to perhaps get a little bit of a discount on their bill and bring them more into that row too. On the flip side, I mentioned that the commercial customers on average are seeing about a 9% increase and that is one of the reasons why with this turn of the wheel we aren't necessarily adjusting that volumetric rate on these particular customers and also why we're phasing in the fire protection charge over five years. And I think with that there's a number of different ways for people to reduce their bills but they could certainly contact our office if anybody has concerns. We also have made available a form where people can request an account impact summary. So if folks are worried about what's gonna happen to their bill, we're able to prepare an estimate of what that looks like and then talk people through the various things that they could do to reduce that charge. And overall, we were very happy to be able to propose a FY22 budget that's built to ensure proper operation and sustainable stewardship of infrastructure with that targeted funding for the customer assistance programs. As I mentioned before, if we weren't doing this rate restructuring, all residential rate payers were gonna be seeing a definite increase on their bills but with the proposed changes, income qualified rate payers and seniors are gonna actually see a decrease on their overall water resources bills. The majority of single family residential rate payers are gonna see a benefit and various median single family users duplex and triplexes are either gonna see no increase or a decrease. Most importantly, perhaps, by establishing that customer class-based rate structure, it's gonna allow for specific affordability-based pricing of essential residential water usage as we march on into the future. And with that, I think I will stop my show. Great. Thank you, Megan. Really a lot of detail and strategy that you've pulled together here. The floor is open for questions for Megan and the team or a motion when the board is ready. Councilor Pine. Thank you. Megan, the work that you've done is pretty incredible here and I'm really just wanna acknowledge and thank you and your team and the consultants. I'm just really impressed as when we were discussing the $30 million bond a couple of years ago and the fact that rates would have to go up both for that and for future capital improvements that are going to be necessary. We made it, I think we had consensus that the impact on rate payers was something we were very concerned about. And so I just wanna thank you and say that we really appreciate what you've done here. And I just wanna ask you, is there anything that you feel like you couldn't achieve in this restructuring that you wish you could have done? I mean, I think the only, there's always rocks left unturned and I think if you've attended all of our various presentations, generally the iterations between the presentations was because of some comments and we would flip a rock over and take a look at what was underneath and see if we could do something which is why the duplex and the triplex rates changed and so on and so forth. I think it's the renter piece. I think we're really curious to see how DC Waters program goes and whether something like that could work in Burlington. I think it's gonna be interesting to see what the uptake rate is of our currently proposed program and then figuring out what we can do for renters and the relatively the near term. I think our consultant looked at our current affordability and it's not terrible, right? We don't have extremely burdened customers when it comes to our water resources rates, but as you mentioned, as we look at the trajectory of what we have to do to reinvest in our existing infrastructure as well as build new infrastructure to further protect the lake, I think it really could become a concern and I wanna make sure that all of the customer classes that we can protect are protected. And so we're excited to see what the next few years hold and be able to bring something back to you guys that we can work on, on how to help those folks. Great, and thanks so much. I wanna just point out that I think it was 91 or 92% of the voters on that question said, please, please, please charge us more to fix what we're doing to our lake to help to reduce the pollution of our lake. So I hope your division will be looking for other ways to do more because there's still way more to do and you've made that clear to us. Thanks. Welcome, thank you for your support. Thanks, Kessar Pine, Kessar Paul. Thank you. So, yes, Megan, let me join the chorus of people who have complimented you and your colleagues on the incredible amount of work that has gone into this. This was a pre COVID initiative, obviously a little, in an ideal world, it probably would have happened a lot sooner, but you have done, it's unfortunate that the public doesn't always know the things that we know as city counselors about the enormous amount of work that has gone into crafting a rate structure that is respectful and fair. And as you say, equitable doesn't always mean equal. Hopefully it means equitable. The only question that I had or two questions, I guess, is that as I had communicated to you, I had a constituent who was concerned about seniors and the discount that they would receive and just wanted to, I think it is true and sort of I think human nature that people don't apply for a discount unless they really need it. I think it would be good for everyone, anyone who isn't on some sort of an assistance program to at least be able to verify for the record every couple of years that in fact, they're on a fixed income and this is something that they need in order to be able to manage their finances. And I'm wondering if that is something that can be extended to landlords, whether or not there is something that, and I don't know if this is even workable, but something that would say sort of like the way that we did during the early days of COVID in terms of giving people a break on the not having to pay interest and penalties on property taxes. Is there something that can say that, yes, we are doing this, but we do something that says that in fact that this would be passed on to tenants. I don't know if that's something that's even workable, but if it is, it's just a suggestion. I'm happy to make a motion to recommend that the council authorize the general, I'm sorry, I think I've got the wrong one up here. It sounded really good, but I realized that I've got the wrong one here. That recommend that the city council approve and adopt the 2021 water resources, rate restructuring and affordability program proposal conditional upon the adoption of the necessary amendments to be made to the Burlington's code of ordinances to recommend also that the city council votes to suspend the rules and place the attached amendments to the Burlington code of ordinances, chapters 26 and 31 in all stages of passage. Thank you, Councilor Powell. Do we have a second for that motion? Motion is seconded by Councilor Pine. I see Councilor Carpenter has her hand up. And we will go to Councilor Carpenter. Thanks, I'm Kieran Megan. Years ago when I was doing housing development, we, on a number of projects, we actually built in sub-meetering for the apartments and we kind of moved away from it and it's a little complicated, but I'm just wondering if you've looked at that and in particular, as we build new multifamily units, whether essentially requiring sub-meetering is something we should look at. So good question. We, I can't remember, Jess, we certainly don't, people could sub-meeter on their own, but we don't participate in the reading of those meters. So it would be a way to sort of cost allocate out the specific water usage and frankly also to know, A, if you have a particular unit that has a leak going on, right, because if it's kind of buried in the noise of a multi-unit building, you might not know who specifically could have a leaky toilet that could be increasing the water bill for everyone. So I don't, I don't think it's a bad idea, but it's not something we've necessarily gotten involved in per se. Jess, I don't know if you have any other comments on that. I concur with that. We used to provide, we used to sell sub-meeters to customers who wanted them prior to the change in the lead law in Vermont. So now anything we take out, we can't actually do that with, but yes, there are a number of properties who do sub-meter, but it's nothing that we actively participated in other than selling old stock, to my knowledge. Okay, it just may be something worthy of consideration as we go down the path of trying to be fair to rental properties. And I don't have any experience with this, but pushing sub-meetering in that way, you could be sure perhaps that some savings got passed on to tenants. That's an interesting point, Councillor Carter. Thank you. It's something that we can think about in this, in this next stage, it can all sorts of questions, I think that that we'll have to look into, but I appreciate the point that we're going to address. It's definitely easier to put them in when you're building something than after the fact, because we have people come to us and say, oh, I want to split these all up. And it's like, it doesn't really work that way. So definitely something for consideration. Thank you for bringing that up. Okay, we have a motion on the floor. Any more comments? Presentation. Just also wanted to call out, I thought the public process around this was excellent. I really appreciated you going and setting up tables at the MPAs. I also saw you on Church Street one of the days doing that and just getting feedback. I thought that that was really just a unique thing to see. And I just really, from a department for a process that is in some ways pretty wonky. And so to bring it to the public like that was really impressive and just want to compliment the team for your work on that. One of the things I wanted to just get a sense of is what, if any, conservation, you feel like we'll see coming from this. Do you think that this is going to impact behavior in any way? Or do you think that people are going to continue to kind of just use the water that they use? I mean, it's a good question. I think folks who are particularly around that 400, the median mark are probably going to be a little bit more compelled to try to get to that cheaper water because they will notice a bit of a jump when they cross that threshold. I think one thing that our division is looking into and with the possible pilot project up at the hospital that I mentioned during our budget presentation, looking at the possibility of doing AMI or advanced metering which would give people real-time access to what their water usage is, right? Which would enable them within the month to potentially dial back on how much water they're using versus waiting for their bill to come. I think until we get to that point, it is going to be a little bit hard. There are devices out there that you can purchase to sort of put on the outside of your meter and it will report to your smart device, but that's something that we're looking at for the next turn of the wheel. It doesn't really help us from an efficiency standpoint because it doesn't take us that long to read, but from a conservation and from an affordability having control over how much water you're using, knowing when you might have a leak. I think that's kind of probably affordability 3.0. And also we have to figure out how to pay for that type of infrastructure as well. Thank you. I think it's going to help with the irrigation though. Folks who have irrigation meters are definitely going to probably notice that they're going to have to be a lot more careful about when they're putting the water on and maybe not sprinkling quite so much. Okay, I'm not seeing more hands or questions. So I think we're ready to go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. Congratulations to the water team. Thank you for your hard work and we're a long period of time to get here and we will see you back later tonight. Thank you. Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. Okay, 4.05 key bank lease purchase finance agreement. It's a BED item. Welcome team BED. And the floor is open for a motion or questions. Councilor Paul. Thank you. I just have one quick question. And that is, I was looking at the term sheet and there are two options. Option number one, which is a term of 48 months. Option number two, which is 60 months. It's a slight difference in the rates. And either I missed it and please tell me where it is on the memo that you've attached. I don't think it says which option you chose to go with. And so did I miss that or did you not say that in the memo? I'm not sure. Sorry, Councilor Paul. We may not have mentioned that in the memo. I believe it's 48 months that we were looking at the shorter term. My colleague, Emily is on with us and can confirm that. Yes, that's correct. And it's the lower interest rate as well. Okay, so I think that in the interest of, being perhaps a little bit more complete since there were two options that if that could be just put into a final something or other so that people know what the term was. I mean, I personally, I'm all for paying things off quicker than as quickly as you can, given that it's low interest rates, but I think it probably would be good to include that. Good, Councilor Pines. Thank you. I'm a huge fan of the lease purchase approach. It's really, I think one of the best ways for municipal government to finance, especially these types of transactions. I did see that the term sheet expired according to the term sheet I read on the 21st. So I just wanna make sure that's not real. Hopefully they'll extend it. It is, okay. And I have the sense that it's just checking because I think the rate increase and the term sheet don't appear to be related, but yet they really are in a sense because one of the conditions is that we need to maintain our current financial ratios that we have. And if we don't do that, our debt service coverage ratio will slip. And therefore it looks like this financing would probably not be available to us is how I read that. Emily, is that you? Would you speak to that or is that Darren? I was gonna offer, Emily should jump in on that. I was gonna offer that the lease financing is part of a strategy that we have to maintain a above 90 days cash on hand for the FY22 budget, which is one of our critical ratings metrics. But Emily should jump in with more detail. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. The connection between this item and the rate case and our budget is that your approval of this item is assumed or incorporated in our budget proposal as well as the rate case is incorporated and assumed in our budget proposal. And so our ability to sort of construct a budget for FY22 includes this loan and the additional liquidity and cash that it provides in FY22, which in part helped mitigate the rate increase we're seeking by providing additional cash in FY22. Great. And then the rate is pretty remarkable how low the rate is. And I'm just wondering if staff time, if the transaction cost, if you're paying some attorney to put this deal together or is it fairly straightforward for you to do this? We have not yet reviewed the detailed lease purchase agreement. We have a boilerplate from key government finance that we are reviewing, but that is not gonna be the final, they're still finishing credit review on BED this week. And then we expect a final set of agreements. So, and we would consult with the city attorney's office to review those as needed before executing. But all said, it's a relatively modest administrative burden for, as you said, such a good interest rate for our customers. Great. Thanks for this and really appreciate your work. Okay. Are we ready for a motion? Don't think we still need one. Councilor Powell, is that a hand? Sorry. Sure. Sure, I'll make a motion to recommend that the council authorize the general manager of the Burlington Electric Department to enter into a tax exemplary purchase financing agreement with key government finance incorporated for an amount not to exceed $800,000 for information technology investments subject to the final review of agreement terms by the city attorney. And also noting that this is a 48 month lease purchase agreement. Second. Thank you, Councilor Powell. Thank you, Councilor Pine for seconding it. Any further discussion on this? Seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. All right. Motion carries unanimously. And that brings us to the other VED item, 4.06. This is the VED FY22 rate changes. Thank you, Darren for and your team for I know many months of hard work on this. In other words, a considerable discussion about it. Last week, I know you've done a lot of follow up with counselors in the day since. Floor is open. Well, if the board would like to summarize again, I feel like we sort of started this conversation last week. So happy to have Darren kick it off at the summary or dive right into any detailed questions regarding Councilor Pine. I was going to move that we recommend the city council authorize the general manager of Burlington Electric Department or his designated file tariff amendments with the Vermont Public Utility Commission to increase Burlington Electric Department rates by 7.5% beginning in fiscal year 2022 as proposed. Great, thank you, Councilor Pine. Is there a second? Thank you, Councilor Pau for seconding the item. Floor is open for questions or discussion. Councilor Pine. I would like, Darren, if you could talk to us a little bit and for the benefit of the public and other counselors who may not have this information, what would be the downside of either not doing this rate increase, but perhaps more importantly, if we were to phase it over perhaps a one-third, one-third, one-third over this next fiscal year, what that would do to BED? Thank you, Councilor Pine and appreciate the opportunity to speak to that. We in coming up with this proposal vetted a number of different options. We certainly, our first preferred option would be not to be here at all with a rate change, understanding it's a challenging moment for the community coming out of the pandemic. It was clear to us based on the impacts on BED that we had to propose a rate increase in order to maintain healthy finances. The 7.5% is as low as we were able to bring it, assuming an August phase in of the surcharge as we've proposed, as low as we were able to bring it while maintaining reasonably healthy financial metrics for the organization. I mentioned the 90 days cash on hand, that's the target, the minimum target for maintaining our A rating. This budget with the rate case would deliver a 97 days cash on hand, still lower than our three-year average of about 113, but above the A rating metric and it gives us a little bit of cushion in case things don't go quite as well during the year given that we will see continued COVID impacts on our sales to customers. The bigger concern is the adjusted debt coverage ratio, which for us is a metric that Moody's uses to look at the health of our operating revenues relative to our operating expenses and includes things like the city pilot payment that we make and other adjustments that may not be considered in the traditional debt to income ratio that's used. We're currently projecting a 1.06 for FY22. We really wanna be between a 125 and a 15 long-term to maintain the A rating. So we're still a little lower than we'd like to be but we've understood that there's a balance to be had between the impacts on our customers from going with a higher increase and the need to maintain these healthy metrics. We looked at even if we were to delay the rate proposal just by a couple of months even if we were to phase it in October instead of August we would see that ratio drop below 1.0 which to me would be a very much a red flag for us and not something that we wanna propose. And the other point I would make is our budget assumes that we'll be able to bring forward a proposal to the council and ultimately to the voters for a revenue bond later this year that would help support more moderate rate impacts going forward, help mitigate upward rate pressure through that revenue bond. And so having a strong credit rating as we go into that process is something we're very conscious of wanting to maintain. And private utility would have retained earnings that they could dip into and there's other sources. So you don't be doesn't maintain a significant fund balance of unassigned fund balance, do you? No, we really don't. We have a cash on hand kind of we have accounts and we have a credit line that's been approved continuously by the council, a $5 million line of credit that counts towards our days cash on hand that's sort of our cushion. We try to never draw on it. We try to reserve it in the event of an emergency or just to help with our credit rating but we really don't have much cushion beyond that. Well, I was definitely hesitant at first because of the size given that inflation is, well, this year it's actually, it's up quite a bit from last year but the rate increase is significantly higher than the rate of inflation but I think you've all done your diligence, you've done your homework and I think you've convinced at least this counselor that the rate payers are actually there's some, there's some safety, some guardrails or some safety mechanisms here with the creation of a low income rate and aggressive efficiency incentives and efficiency investments. People can actually lower their usage and maybe be cash flow neutral or perhaps better. So thanks a lot for what you've done here. Thank you, appreciate it. Good, I'm Councillor Jen. And then presentation. Thank you, Darren, for being in front of the council again to have this discussion and I personally value the conversation we had this morning. Thank you so much. And I think, you know, we had a great conversation and I recognize also that you have done substantial amount of work including the commission, right? And you guys have been having great discussion but I don't feel as if the community or the city council itself was really included in this discussion. This from my perspective seemed very sudden and it seems new. And I think we discussed, you've been mentioning for quite some time, BED hasn't received any increase over 12 years now, right? But I don't think that necessarily means you included us in this conversation or you included our constituents into this discussion. And also another element of all of this, you have one chance contrary to many other city department which means that you reach all customers directly in their mailbox through the bills. And I think you had an opportunity to engage them in this conversation. And also you mentioned it here in this conversation that yes, basically what I'm saying is I'm not saying no to the rate increase but I'm saying when. I think this is critical and I think many people have many other concerns in front of them, right? And I think we mentioned all of that. So I don't feel that I'm very comfortable in saying yes today, right now or this fiscal year about rate increase right now. And but I just recognize your work and the work of everyone is asking you for next time, we can do much better because time has changed and we have to be at the forefront including the people that we serve every single day. Just wanted to add that into the mix but thank you for all you have done. Thank you, Councilor Grail. Are there any further discussions? Further comments? Sorry, President Tracy. Thanks, Mayor. I was just, so to Councilor James' point I'm just wondering what the process has been to this point if you could just clarify that and then what it'll be going forward just so that folks are clear on what steps have happened now and then what other steps because I'm just wanting to understand that because we have heard that feedback from like some of the larger institutions. And so just wanting to get your take on that and what you're gonna be doing coming out of this as well. Thank you, Council President Tracy and thank you, Councilor Jang for the questions as well. Yeah, let me speak to the process. We've been signaling certainly previous Board of Finance budget presentations from prior fiscal years and as our Chair Gabrielle Stebbins mentioned at our Electric Commission, which are public meetings although I recognize that are not always well attended. We've been talking about the need after a period of 12 years now and even after a decade previously of adjusting rates at some point in the future. We have tried to keep customers who budget well in advance customers like University of Vermont, University of Vermont Medical Center updated that we were uncertain about our FY22 rates. In fact, we did that last August with UVM and in January with UVM Medical Center we get regular inquiries from them about are you planning to have any kind of a rate change going forward? We indicated we were not certain about FY22. Our budget process, this is my fifth budget with Burlington Electric. We start our budget process in December and January with division by division approach everybody bringing forward the projects that they need for their area. By the first or second week of March, it gets to me and I'm able to review it with our executive team and we begin the process of adjustment. In a typical year, we have a roughly 60 million some odd dollar budget. In a typical year, we may be looking at particularly over these last few having to find a way to cut or defer a million or perhaps two million in order to make the budget balance out correctly. This year we were staring at a $10 million gap from where we were to get to 90 days cash on hand. So it was an extraordinary challenge brought on by the pandemic in large part and we were uncertain at that point what resources might be available to us from state of rearage assistance. There was discussion at that point around the ARPA funds coming to the city. We weren't certain what of those BED might qualify for. So we started our work at that point of cutting, deferring or making alternative assumptions around the $10 million gap that we were facing. During that period of time, we said very much to the commission and to customers like UVM and UVM medical, we believe we may need a rate increase. We started that work, we were able to get about seven million of either cuts, deferrals or alternative revenue assumptions such as the revenue bond that we're proposing. The remaining three million that we couldn't otherwise address is what is made up for with the rate case. And our process is actually a multi-step and very unique process nationally for going through a rate case. There's only I think five states in the country that require a municipal utility to go through a local and a state regulation process. Vermont is one of them. So for us to propose this and bring it to fruition, we started with a public meeting of our electric commission which we had as Chair Stebbins mentioned, we actually had three of them over the course of three weeks. Members of the public could come and speak to this. We had UVM and UVM Medical Center and the Burlington Business Association joined us for one of those meetings to comment. The commission votes to recommend to the Board of Finance and City Council. So we came to present on our budget to the Board of Finance last Thursday. Again, a public meeting, we had public participation, I know from some of those same customers. And then we come tonight to seek approval to advance this to the Public Utility Commission. If you grant us that ability, that starts a whole new public process at the Public Utility Commission that will last months and months and will include a public forum, public hearing essentially on the rate case from the Public Utility Commission and members of the public are able to participate in that and weigh in at that point. But we're anticipating probably through the end of the year a fully litigated rate case with the Department of Public Service advocating on behalf of ratepayers for any steps that they can take to examine what we're proposing and make sure that it's just and reasonable under Vermont law. And ultimately it's up to the Public Utility Commission to decide to approve the rate or to change it or alter it in some way. But so we really have, we're really just at the beginning in some ways of a very much a month-long process that will include additional opportunity for public comment beyond the commission meetings, the council and Board of Finance meetings that we've already had. All right, thank you, Darren. Are you satisfied, President Tracy? Okay, Councilor Powell. Thanks very much. So I'm also very sympathetic and an understanding of Councilor Jang's comment. I think that the more advanced notice that we can give people, particularly in a difficult time for not only for the institutions, but for everyone, the better. And I think it seems as though, Darren, that to some degree we might have been really, over the last maybe one or two years, sort of been living on borrowed time. 10 million dollars of a funding gap is a lot. And yes, I think it's great that you were able to manage to close that gap by a significant amount, seven million dollars. But I do sort of question on what some of those deferrals were. We all know what happens when in, and we've seen this in government when we start deferring things on and not that I'm dying to go and see a rate increase, but it seems as though perhaps this rate increase might probably should have come sooner and for less so that we didn't find ourselves in a situation where we have a 10 million dollar gap. And so the only thing that I would say, I mean, I will support this because I think that the downside of not supporting it is much, much more significant than, I mean, it's just not a place that we can go to for a variety of reasons. And certainly the economic metrics would not be, would not be at all favorable to anyone, our rate payers included. The only thing that I would ask going forward is that I think there has been some discussion with the institutions, particularly about having a semi-annual meetings. I think that those should be semi-annual and meetings that are, that perhaps even the commission or the council receives updates on and that going into FY23, should there be a need for another rate increase that we hear about that in much more definitive terms, not just simply we're uncertain, but a little bit more definitively than that. That's the impression that I got from the institutions that I, the people that I spoke with at UVMMC and UVM was that, yes, they were aware that these were uncertain times, but I don't think that anyone really focuses on those things until it's much more concrete. And the sooner we can do that, I think the better for everyone, including BED. So as I say, I made the, I seconded the motion. I'm happy to support it. I don't know if I'm happy, but I mean, I'm certainly willing to support it. I just think that the more we can learn from this experience, the better. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Powell. In the interest of time, I'm hoping we are ready to go to a vote. There are no more pressing questions. Looks like we can do that. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Are there any post? Okay, so we do need to do a roll call. I think under current rules. So I'll just call the roll. President Tracy. Yes. Councilor Powell. Yes. Councilor Jang. No. Councilor Pine. Yes. And I am a yes. So that passes by a recommended council by a vote of four to one. Thank you, Garen and the team for all your efforts around this. Thank you. Sorry, I just lost my agenda for a moment. One second. The next item is 4.07. This is, hopefully this is something that we can deal with quickly. This is a, we're coming back to the shiflility park, shared use path approval to change. The only thing changing here is who is able to sign on behalf of the city because to avoid any appearance of any conflict because director Cindy White lives right next to this entrance, although she has recused herself from everything about the planning up until now. So that is what this change is. Are we ready for a motion on this item? Councilor Jang. So moved. Thank you. Is there a second? Second by President Tracy discussion. We will go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. And are opposed. The motion carries unanimously. Great. We have now just three more items before the police department presentation, which is, I know we have Chief Mirad ready to start with that as soon as possible. The next item is 4.08, the creation of the early learning initiative manager position. So thank you, Brian Lowe for joining us and the floor is open. Thank you Danielle. Councilor Pine. I am going to move to move to approve and recommend the city council authorized the creation of a regular full-time exempt non-union grade 19 position early learning initiative manager reporting to the director of economic recovery. Thank you, Councilor Pine. Is there a second? Second by Councilor Jang. Thank you. Discussion. Go ahead, Councilor Jang. Quick discussion. And I think thank you again for doing this. Now, one element I think we have been discussing for this for quite some time now and was just wondering if the city is contemplating the idea of creating childcare programs itself and not like slots with the partner organizations. And where are you with that? And who's the next person that we need to talk to about this as we move forward? Hey, thank you very much, Councilor Jang. Yes, so far the program has increased by 38% the number of childcare spaces available, high quality childcare spaces available for zero to three-year-olds in Burlington plus an additional 15 spots for three to five-year-olds. So about 91 new spots total. Another thing that you have raised in the past has been is there a way the city could look at reviewing other ways we could provide childcare for employees, whether that's creating running a center or contracting out or something else. And so that is something that if this position were created is something that we would review as a city. What are other ways we could look at supporting city employees? I can't commit to what exactly that will look like but it's definitely something that we can review this coming year if we have this new position. I would just add to that I think this would be a good time for that review with the potential certainly if the Biden infrastructure plan passes and it's current in its initial proposal which would have substantial dollars for expansion of high quality childcare. I think that would really create a moment where perhaps everything's sort of on the table and maybe some dramatic change to this program would be well-timed. So more to come on that. Thank you. President Tracey, did you have a question or go ahead? Yeah, so I guess I was curious because within this if there was a discussion of not having this as a position but really providing more direct subsidy towards creating those positions and if there was a debate around that and if you feel like you're gonna be able to by creating this position leverage more resources as opposed to just giving this money to providers. And part of my question is also just in recognition of the significant challenges that we faced in terms of creating additional spaces. In engaging with providers myself, one of the things that I think was really challenging there is that there's just the economics of operating in childcare are really particularly challenging. And so I guess in particular the wages that our early childhood educators make make it particularly difficult also for early childhood educators. So I guess with those dynamics at play I'm just wondering how this position is gonna address some of those dynamics and interface those and if there's a way like if there's that if you've weighed out sort of the subsidy versus putting in there I guess that's multiple questions at once but just wanted to- Tracey, go ahead, Brian. No, thanks very much, Council President Tracey. Great questions. And yes, there's as the mayor alluded to this is I think the right time to build this position and create this position. We've long thought that we would need a position at some point and there's a number of factors inspiring to make it the right time to do this. The first is that we've got a working model we've tested it. We've seen capacity expand 38% in that hardest to reach range that zero to three age range for high quality care. And we've also seen 57 families placed into scholarship programs over the last two years and been able to expand that even during the pandemic. So there's good evidence that we can build on this program. At the same time, a kind of critical partner that we've had in Let's Grow Kids who's really been an outstanding partner is as planned pulling back. And they provided some of the kind of people power to help us connect with different families and enroll them in spots. Because as you say, Council President Tracey, it's not just the money, it's finding the spot, right? Like those are the two services that are being connected here. And that is very time consuming work that needs to occur. It needs to be really down at a granular level with the families. Where do they need to go? What kind of spot works for them? Where do the parents work? And can we make it a spot nearby where their work is, et cetera? So that the partner that's been helping us do that is as planned pulling back and the city's taking over some of those functions. Then in a way that we couldn't have predicted, all these new federal supports are kind of coming into focus. And exactly what happens at the federal level I can't predict. So I wanna be careful about that. But it looks like there may be significant new childcare programs that really hit on key components of this program. For example, there may be at the federal level new regulation that means that families only pay up to 7% of their income for childcare in certain brackets. And that could really help revolutionize what our program is trying to do or galvanize really what our program is trying to do. Those same federal bills also speak to some of what you're talking about Council President Tracy around or federal bills around the costs for or the salaries paid to childcare providers which are just way too low and are a product of a really broken market and ecosystem. So, and then you also have the city trying to do whatever it can to incentivize a strong economic recovery. And there's a real nexus between childcare and economic opportunity coming out of the pandemic. So I think it is absolutely the right time to build a position like this and have sustained focus on this in the city to capture those federal resources, make those connections for families and help support Carl Nistrowi and the team leading the economic recovery. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very well. Okay. Oh, sorry, I should just call it for the council. We do explicitly say in the memo that we'll reevaluate the reporting structure a year from now once we're a year into the recovery. Okay. Councilor Jang. It will be very quick. And I was just wondering why especially going to why not CEDO to be managing this position but the recovery? Hey, it's a great question. And that's what I was looting to with the we think the nexus between the economic recovery and the provision of childcare in Burlington is really strong. And we think especially in this year when there's all these new federal programs coming down that Cara is the director of the economic recovery is the right person to oversee this position. And part of the positions time would also be supporting Cara on the broader economic recovery issues. In a year's time, it may make sense to reevaluate that and change the reporting structure as you allude to councilor Jang. But right here right now, I think I'm in car. I don't want to speak over you here. I'm sorry. Just it felt like this was something that was a strong nexus for us and a great opportunity. Thank you. Okay. Seeing no more hands, we're going to go to vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? I don't believe there are any opposed. The motion carries unanimously. Thank you, Brian. That brings us now to 4.09. The approving, the pledging of the credit of the city in anticipation of the receipt of revenue from airport department. Revenue anticipation note, see which is here. And anything, we've approved many revenue anticipation notes for enterprise funds in the past, including the airport. Is this anything unusual about this item? No, there is nothing in the item. Okay. Councilor Powell. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'll make a motion to recommend the city council to approve the attached resolution. Thank you. Is there a second? Seconded by Councilor Pine. Discussion? All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you, Rich. And finally, before going to the police budget, we have the early learning initiative contract amendment with the child care resources and other IT item. Okay, Brian's still there. If there are questions on this, are we ready for a motion on this? Councilor Pine. Move to approve the child care resources contract amendment described above as recommended and authorized the chief innovation officer to execute any and all documents necessary to fulfill the contract subject to final review by the city attorney's office. Thank you, Councilor Pine. Is there a second? Thank you, Councilor Paul. Discussion? All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. Thank you. All right, this brings us now to item 6.01. And we've gotten through the deliberative portion, no more approvals or recommendations will be needed from the board tonight. We do now have the final of the departmental budget presentations. This is the one that certainly there's the most going on with because of the transformation that we were going through and the changes from last year. And I'll take Chief Murad is see him with us. Chief, if you could turn on your camera, there we go. And I thank you, Lisa, for joining us as well. I know the chief has a PowerPoint to share and why don't we hand it over to you now, Chief. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. And thank you city council members for having me with you tonight and allowing me to present this budget to you. If I may, I'd like to share my screen. I think I've just enabled that if you can check Chief Murad. We can see it. Thank you. Thank you. So this is our fiscal year 2022 budget presentation. And it is, I hope a picture of an agency that is dealing with our diminution with regard to the resolution that was passed last year, addressing those headcount issues and deficits and also building from that in ways that as comports with the public safety continuity plan that this body approved earlier this year, allow us to find new ways to address public safety in the Queen city. This is our mission statement. I know that this is available online, this presentation and that the council was sent it earlier. So I hope that you've had time to look through it. I certainly don't want to read every slide. I don't think that's necessary, but I do want to point out that the reason the police exists and the parts of the police that are not necessarily sworn as well, the reason the function of the police exists is to keep people safe by preventing and responding to crime and disorder with and for our neighbors. And that really is the key component that it is with and for our neighbors. This is our current org chart. This depicts what we have, not what we are allotted. So there are a couple of spots in there that are vacant that are not counted in the totals with regard to non-sworn full-time employees. And the 82 are what we have on the books as of April 1st. This is the organizational chart as of April 1st. And if I assess our effective officer headcount and I've talked about that previously with regard to officers who are on military deployment, officers who are on long-term injury, we dropped from 82 to about 77. The staffing, I'm sorry, excuse me. The staffing explanation is this, we have 82 sworn officers on staff as of April 1st. And that's down from our total headcount in the past. About 15 down from our historical average and down 10 from the number at which we were when we began this process last year. We made plans last year to winnow the department on purpose owing to revenue issues and concerns about where COVID would take us. And then of course we were further affected by the decisions made through the racial justice resolution with regard to headcount. But as I look at our 82 again, this describes the fact that some of those 82 are on long-term military leave or administrative duty owing to long-term injuries. Some are already on terminal leave using accrued time and the effective number is approximately 77. That decrease from a normal historical average of about 96 to 97 to 82 means that we've lost a number of things. We've lost our swing shift, which is a shift that normally covers the gap or not the gap, there is no gap, but it covers additionally between what is our day shift and what is our evening shift. And that swing shift works therefore in the late afternoon and into the early night and provides augmented services, particularly in our downtown core, it was used to great effect on North Street for foot patrols, that is no longer available to us. Our street crime unit is not available to us any longer. That is a unit that generally took on cases that exceeded the investigatory capacity of patrol in that patrol has to be able to continue to service calls for service that come in as those incidents keep rolling in, patrol has to respond to those, but some incidents require a little bit more time to look into, that would include pattern crimes, that would include specific kinds of crime conditions in a specific location. And those may not rise to the level of being investigated by our detective services bureau, but they do exceed what patrol can do owing to the needs that patrol has. And so the crime team served as a way to deal with those kinds of situations, we don't have that crime team. Furthermore, we had a number of specialized officers who were in specialized roles, our community affairs officer integral in taking part in the city's concerted efforts with a lot of different entities to tackle graffiti. And that community affairs officer has been reassigned to patrol. Our emergency response officer or ERO has been reassigned to patrol. That was an officer who was dedicated to using the ERV that was built in order for us to really hone the ICAT process, which is a national standard for de-escalation and addressing barricaded persons that this agency helped create. That officer has been reassigned patrol. Our school resource officers are reassigned to patrol. One is on military leave and one is a sergeant, actually. We have calculated attrition in the coming fiscal year at seven officers. This is a picture of the FY22 budget and it is the work of a lot, this is the result, excuse me, the result of a lot of hard work. I cannot thank CAO Shad enough for the work that she has done. Bob Rustin, huge amounts of work and most importantly here at the BPD, Lisa Verano, tremendous amounts of work at putting these things together and really digging into the numbers that we have. As you see, our budget is decreasing. And I think that that is in keeping with the desires of the city council as expressed during this budget process last year. It's dropped quite a bit, particularly with regard to salary and benefits. One thing I'm very happy about, and I'll explain a little bit about that later, is the fact that our training has returned. Our training budget was diminished last year, not because of anything from the city council, but because we tackled that as a savings location during our internal assessments owing to anticipated revenue decreases because of COVID-19. And I'm really happy to get that back. It's incredibly important to making certain that the men and women inside feel fulfilled, that they have avenues of career path and career growth, that they are learning the most recent kinds of best practices and then sharing that with the community that we serve. Because ultimately the work that we do for the community is what matters. We are also talking about bringing forward community service officers, CSOs, they are unarmed, non-sworn officers. They are part of the public safety continuity plan that we outlined in very late January and again in February. We are talking about hiring a public records request specialist or a redaction specialist. This is a component of being able to follow up with, excuse me, and actually being able to fulfill desires of our Burlington Police Commission. The Independent Burlington Police Commission has formulated a new release proposal for body-worn camera footage. The only way that we will be able to meet that request and fulfill those obligations from the Burlington Police Commission is to have a dedicated person who is capable of doing that redaction work. Every time we release a piece of footage, we actually have to watch it three times. We have to watch it once to get the sense of it and we have to watch it again to determine if there are audio redactions that need to be made in comportment with Vermont state law about privacy and ongoing investigations protections and then we have to watch it again to determine whether or not there's visual redactions that need to be made. So that adds up a lot of time. This is a picture of our fiscal year 22 budget versus the fiscal year 20 budget. We're obviously taking the 21 budget out because again, it was affected by drastic cuts that the entire city made in an effort to maintain a budget. The mayor directed us to make certain that we were able to keep ourselves afloat without harming Burlington residents. That was his primary goal and primary directive but we did have to find deep cuts and we made deep cuts even before the issues with headcount were derived from the resolution. And so we're very happy to be able to return a little bit to a normal annual budget that really allows this agency to function on all the cylinders that it's got. But there are a lot of savings involved. There are a lot of savings involved because of that decrease from a 105 authorized of sworn officers to the 82 at which we find ourselves right now as of April 1st. And some of those savings are anticipated to be used with regard to park rangers, with regard to expanded mental health services and a reserve for those kinds of expansions and a reserve for implementing that BPD assessment that is ongoing right now being conducted by CNA, a company that's looking at our full operational and functional manners of policing that was described in the racial justice resolution last June. We are working diligently to get CSOs on board. That is a component of the public safety continuity plan that I presented to the council in conjunction with the mayor, worked on that plan, have been thinking about that plan for well over a year and we're able to present it in the very beginning of this calendar year in a way that thankfully convinced the council that it was something that we needed to do and was worthwhile. I think this is an exploration that's very exciting for this city because it represents a shift of public safety responsibilities to an unarmed, non-sworn, essentially non-police function that nevertheless retains the ability to share information with police, to have rapid response with police when necessary, but not when it's not necessary. And it's an expansion of the kind of public safety paradigm that I think our community really wants. Now, the Talitha consultancy that is ongoing is going to help us determine what it is that our community wants. The CNA assessment is going to help us determine what our community wants, but it's been clear at times and their members of our community, a very vocal portion of our community was very clear about what they want. I think the CSO plan is a way of reaching that. I'm very excited about this as a potential for us to be able to take what are currently police jobs and turn them into jobs that are responded to by these unsworn, unarmed officers. Getting them on board, however, is going to take some time. We want the right people in these seats and making certain that we vet the right people, that we attract the right candidates, that we assess them properly and then train them once we have hired them so that they're able to do more work than our current CSOs do is really important. Our current CSOs are incredibly valuable members of our team. They perform a lot of work as it shows here. They each do approximately 620 incidents a year. And so they perform about 1,200 jobs, 1,200 incidents a year out of a total universe of about 2,600 incidents to which they could respond. Merely bringing aboard new CSOs is going to dig deeper into that total universe, but expanding the role that they play and the kinds of incidents to which they respond with new training is going to allow us to go even further than that and actually get closer, I believe, to 15 to 20, maybe more percent of our total incident volume. That's something that we really anticipate happening in the hiring process, in the early stages of FY22. We're in the process right now. We have interested parties, but administering tests, et cetera. The best bet is that we're going to be able to do that in early FY22. And then we'll have an onboarding and training process that hopefully gets them deployed in FY22. The resolution from the city council allowed us six of these positions and then to be followed by in the first half of the fiscal year to be followed by four in the second half of the fiscal year. Here's some of that training that I was talking about. I'm really excited about some of this training. We are returning to previous levels of funding and we're going to be able to do some things that we had on the ready back in the spring of 2020 before the pandemic hit. And of course the pandemic not only shut down our budget but frankly it shut down a lot of training that was being offered elsewhere. So nobody could travel. Nobody could go to training units or modules in other states, et cetera. But those are the kinds of places where officers are able to mingle, share best practices, really establish the cutting edge of the profession and what's out there with regard to de-escalation tools like ICAP and deceleration tools and communication and negotiation tools like our crisis negotiation training. So getting all of those for our officers is going to be very important. Particularly as our headcount falls, we need tools to make certain that the officers we have are A, sharp and remain some of the best officers in the state at what they do and B, things that incentivize them to stay here in this department as we go through some uncertainties about where the future is heading. But I think it's a real path forward and this kind of training actually gets officers on board for those kinds of movements. We recently finished, excuse me, we were in the course of finishing a six unit iterative implicit bias and anti-racism training with a woman named trusty loving of the Institute for Racial Equity. That's something that we worked on and assessed with the former director of police transformation, brought her aboard and have done that training. We're in the final stage of that six unit session. Much more effective than doing a one and done where somebody comes in for a day and teaches, this has been something that's grown. We've allowed units to do it together so that an entire shift takes that shift off and actually goes through the training together. The detective unit went through the training together. It's been a really effective and useful two-way conversation between the officers and the trainer. These are just some pictures of incident volume trends. I think that this year we're really focusing on the budgetary numbers and so I'll try to move through these quickly, but in past years, this presentation has been an opportunity to share with the council where we are with regard to the parts of our city business that we deal with. We deal with incoming incidents, crime, but also disorder. And so our trends are what we see here on this slide. Over the past several years, we have purposefully engaged in more hands-off policing. We have seen our overall incidents drop, but if you look at that image in the upper right-hand corner as I look at it, you'll see that there's a purple line under the blue line. That purple line represents where our incident volume would be if I removed only traffic stops. Traffic stops are primarily driven by officer discretion. It is an officer seeing a condition and addressing it. It is something that's not a call for service from the public. And if we remove those alone and take a look at the vast decrease that's happened in traffic stops over the past several years, we have a much flatter trend about incident volume until we get to that 2020 year where it falls just like everything else rather precipitously. 2020 is gonna be an anomaly in stats across every sector and across every state and city in the US. But I think that it's instructive that we are still hearing from the public at a not that diminished rate. Chief, it's important we were about halfway through the 30 minutes and I wanna make sure this time for councillor questions. So if you can try to wrap up. Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. So this makes the same point that when we measure external versus internal, that is incidents that are driven by internal discretion of officers versus external, we don't see the same kinds of decreases that we've seen in the other categories. It's indicative of the fact that the public is still calling for services. Here are some pictures of our serious violent incidents, the most important kinds of calls to which we respond and the directions that those have taken over the past several years. Here's a discussion of incidents with partners which I think plays a lot into our discussion of both the CSOs as a new position, the CSL that we've been allotted and are working to hire and the possibility of having other CSLs in other city departments or of working with partners to create models that talk about co-response for certain kinds of incidents. Finally, we've got a number of projects that we're looking at right now. There was a project that I created called Vision 2020. I created it back in 2019 and administered it beginning in that autumn. We were prepared in early 2020 to implement the recommendations that had come from this employee led CAT scan of the Burlington Police Department. But the budget crisis interrupted, we're hopeful to begin to explore some of those recommendations and see what we can get now. Project Reset is something that Interim Chief Jennifer Morrison created. It was about getting a new system for evidence collection and also certain training initiatives. Again, those are things that we're really eager to revisit now that we have funding returned. Benchmark, a system that we've brought in, that we're still working with and getting our data into, but it's going to consolidate and collate data in brilliant new ways. The city council approved it, we're really eager to that because it's going to meet some of the things that come up in the bottom project, which is the CNA assessment. Some of the things they're asking for with regard to data are things that we're not being able to provide as well as we would like only to a combination of resources and the way we track them. We're hopeful the benchmark system is going to address that, but we're really hopeful also to be able to work with CNA in order to get their understanding of where we are as an agency and then hear from the community through the other Talitha consultancy as well. And I will open it up now for questions and discussions. Thank you. Thank you, Chief. And I'll stop the screen share or shall I? Well, before you do that, can you go back quickly to the page with the savings, which I think may be a slide of significant interest. I just want to quickly add before letting in any, I see President Tracy has his hand up and we'll go from there. I want to just, the expanded mental health services reserve want to be clear what this is. This is a potential in, the council is supportive of this direction. This would be funding municipal funding for what would be a dramatically expanded public response, emergency response to acute mental health episodes by adults and children. The hope would be that this is something that has come out of discussions we've been having with council for some time and it's also come out of conversations I've been having with community leaders who have been pushing for, if you will, cahoots like reform or addition, cahoots like program here in Burlington. It is, I just want to, as councilors look at that number, it is my hope that that is not the entire investment. I am optimistic that if we go in this direction that we will be able to secure substantial funding from the state and potentially other community partners as well to make it potentially on the order of magnitude of something approaching a million dollars a year is the kind of model that we've been looking at and exploring. So with that, President Tracy, the floor is over. Thanks, Mayor. Thank you. Looking at the itemized budget, there were a couple of items that I just wasn't clear on what they were because they're kind of more general descriptors attached to them. Line item 6211, specialized equipment, $46,000. Line item 6208, special supplies, $40,000. And then 6292, other charges for $24,000. Just curious as to what each of those items are representing. Chief, I can speak to that if you'd like. Thank you. Okay. So that is all our equipment for like bodycams and firearms. It is for vests. It includes, I mean, throughout those three accounts. So all of those major equipment, another issue to officers. Okay. Chief, can you clarify, because I did not think you were purchasing firearms this year. No, but for training, we have to have training, seminations and the equipment that they do the training with the supplies, part of the, when they do training exercises, Chief can speak to that. He just went through it. Yeah. A lot of that is ammunition cost. Ammunition has, the cost of ammunition has skyrocketed and there have been extreme shortages of it. You're correct, Mr. Mayor. We're not purchasing firearms. We, I'll be more specific about that. When an officer retires after 20 years, the department works out an arrangement whereby that officer essentially can purchase his or her own firearm and then we replace that firearm. We did that with a couple in this fiscal year, in the coming fiscal year, I do not intend on replacing the firearms that are sold to retiring officers because we don't have the headcount of armed individuals who need all of those firearms. And we have a certain surplus of them right now that allows us not to do that but that has been the practice in the past and was the practice this spring. So no, we're not making additional firearms purchases but we have purchases of taser devices, of the cartridges that go into the training. We have purchases as the CSOs are going to wear body armor and ballistic vests. And so those are gonna be purchases that we have and there's other equipment as well. Oleo resin capiscum spray or pepper spray is also something that CSOs do carry, mostly for animals, they do a lot of work with animals. And so all those equipment costs do continue to turn through even as we don't have new police officers coming in until hopefully the later part of the fiscal year. Okay, would it be possible to just get a breakdown of those items just so that we're clear on exactly what we're voting on here with regards to your budget? Sure, I can send that out to you. Thank you so much. Can I get that to you later? Or are you waiting for it right now? I'm not waiting for it right now. Sorry, I apologize. I was muted, I was talking, sorry at least. I was just saying please send it around to the full council when you distribute it. Like that's what we do with all budget requests. I was also trying to say we're gonna go for another seven minutes here until 7.15 before we go to the BHS presentation. Are there further council questions? And maybe Chief, yeah, you can take down the screen share at this point. Absolutely. And tomorrow would be fine, please. Thank you. Councilor Paul. Councilor Paul, you're on mute. Sorry, my apologies. Thanks so much. There's no need to go to the slide, but I wrote down on one of the slides that you talked about the use of force tactics that the state requires four hours and that BPD does 10 hours. So I guess I'm trying to understand if you can explain how doing 10 hours of use of force tactics is a, how you view that and why you do 10 hours when only four is required. Sure. Frankly, because we want to go further with use of force because use of force training is about not using force. And one of the things that we're exploring right now is a terrific new program that surrounds jujitsu and the use of jujitsu as opposed to striking techniques. We want our officers to be competent and confident when they have to use force. We don't want them to use it when they don't have to and our policy makes it clear that it is something that is a last resort when we are dealing with situations. We want deceleration, we want de-escalation first, but there are times where the use of force is unavoidable. And when that happens, we want the officers to be good at it. We want the officers to be competent at it and confident at it. The new jujitsu program that we've been working on is one that really talks about grappling, about contain holds, about ways to take a subject into custody that don't involve strikes, use a lot less physical kinds of violence and are more about containing that individual. I think that's a good use of the time and it's also something that keeps the officers sharp and has them work together in teams so that we're not just talking about use of force with regard to working on a heavy bag. We're talking about the ways in which people approach a situation and the ways in which they can use different kinds of de-escalatory techniques to avoid that use of force. Okay, I think that, and maybe I'm the only person who feels this way but I think that saying use of force tactics doesn't tend to evoke the thought of less use of force. That just wasn't how I read that. And then the only other thing I would just mention is that in your presentation, you put the Burlington International Airport underneath other, you put it, I can't remember exactly on your chart but you put that in a way that does not evoke the fact that it is a separate division as per a city council resolution. So I would prefer that when you, I would ask that you when you, when you are doing that, that you put that out as its own division, which is what it is. Thanks very much. Councilor Jiang. Thank you, Mayor. I mean, I think I will start with that comment right now. I don't think that I have voted or anyone here at the council voted to say the police officers at the airport are in a different department. I think there was a resolution to explore but to date, they are still members of our police department based on my understanding. And the other option is about, I wanted to also ask exactly the fee for service. Does it represent, you know, the fee for service to the airport? I see two components of it on the needy greedy of the budget. I'm sorry, councilor, could you repeat that question, sir? So the fee for service, if you go to the number, I believe it's around, yeah, fee for service, number 25, item number 4600-105. Lise, would you be able to touch on that? You're muted, Lise. Special duty is outside contract jobs. So I'm not sure that's, is that really your question? I mean, it's not specific to the airport or anyone else. It's the whole sworn personnel working outside jobs for that account. Right. So I wanted to understand where is a fee for, basically I believe that the airport will need to reimburse the Burlington Police Department for the services provided there at the airport. So that's not separated in the budget document you're looking at. Okay. Okay, not yet anyway. However, the way the calculation is done for what the airport contributes to the city is based on fully trained, equipped officers being deployed there, which is the eight, the seven, seven and a half. And that's how that number is calculated, but it's not represented specifically in any line item. All right, and that is broken out in the org chart as a separate line. It comes down, they do ultimate, the sergeant at the airport ultimately reports to the same chain of command as the, as others in the department to an area lieutenant, and then up to the deputy chief of operations, but it is separated from our patrol units. Thank you for clarifying this. And this is the last question for both the mayor and Patrick Chad. Now, what is the representation of the total budget of the police department with the overall general fund budget of the city of Burlington? Is it now 17% of the budget or less than now? I am happy to get that information for you tomorrow, Councillor Cheng. I actually haven't finalized those percentages because as a result of this process of gathering information, we knew we would be tweaking some of these budgets, but I'll send that around to the whole council. Thank you. Yeah, I think, can you also speak to how you're going to, which I know you've been working on meet the council resolution, which require discrete accounting for the airport division? Of course. That is actually not difficult because it is my understanding that used to be done and it just requires adding a new code into new world. And then we have the officers as they work at the airport, charge their time. So I describe it as lawyers, like we think of lawyers just the charging their 15 minutes of time. Thankfully they won't have to do that, but as we have different officers working at the airport or working not at the airport, the time that they work at the airport, they'll have a special code. Everything else will be charged to BPD. And so we will be able to run reports and accurately charge that. Which is there anything you would like to add? Yeah, I was going to make a note that in the presentation that was done by the Burlington International Airport, they actually are showing this as a credit that they get back for that service that provided. So it's $1,270,000 is the cost for the police that are providing service at the airport. So I just wanted to make that note. So it is called out in the airport budget and we can do a better job identifying that within the police budget. Hope that's helpful. So it shows up as revenue. It shows up as revenue in the police budget for the exact same amount and as the expense shows up in the airport budget for that $1,002,000. Okay. I had committed President Tracy who would be turning over the gavel to him for the council meeting three minutes ago. So I will just say before doing that, I think we, if there are more questions about the police budget, we can handle that in a couple of ways. First of all, please feel free to send them in writing or reach out to Chief Mirad with additional questions, written questions. Make it clear, bring questions, have the benefit of then written responses. We'll get to the full council. If the interest in more information from the police is so great that we need to bring them back sometime between now and June 10th when we were shooting to finalize the budget and submit it, we can do that. And you can either let me, Jordan or President Tracy know their interest in further discussion like that. Okay. Or if you hear our chat and we'll be coordinated. With that, if there's no objection, I'm going to adjourn the Board of Finance at 7.19 p.m. and hand the gavel over to President Tracy and welcome our guests from the Berlin School District. Certainly. And if I could please be given hosting responsibilities. I know that I believe Councillor Mason is on as an attendee. So we do need to make, okay. Great. All right. Perfect. I'll call to order the city council meeting for Monday, May 24th at 7.19. Before we go to a motion on the agenda, we'll do the pledge. So before we get to our colleagues from the school district and school board, I, we do need a motion on the agenda. So Councillor Stromberg may please have a motion on the agenda. Sure thing. I move to adopt the agenda as follows. Note presentation slides for agenda item 2.01, communication superintendent Flanagan and BSD chair wool regarding update on Burlington High School per Russ Elick. Add to the consent agenda item 5.28, communication Richard H. Kate, vice president for finance and administration UVM regarding proposed 7.5% electric rate increase with the motion to waive the reading except the communication and place it on file. Add councillors Hightower, Hanson and Paul as co-sponsors to agenda item 6.04, resolution expanding youth representation on city boards, councillors Pine and Tracy per council Tracy, note revised version of this agenda item per city attorney's office. Add councillor Stromberg as a co-sponsor to this agenda item per councillor Stromberg, add to the agenda item 6.11, presentation Eileen Blackwood city attorney regarding redistricting per city attorney Blackwood, removed from the consent agenda item 5.27, resolution approving the pledging of the credit of the city in anticipation of the receipt of revenue from the airport department board of finance and place it on the deliberative agenda item, I'm sorry, as item 6.12 per councillor Freeman, removed from agenda item 6.10, communication Catherine Shad, CAO, regarding administration response to council resolution regarding police services at the airport. Okay, we have a motion on the agenda. Is there a second? Second. Seconded by councillor Hightower. Any discussion? Councilor Shannon. Thank you, President Tracy. If there is an objection, I was hoping that we could start our public forum at times certain 750 to allow the school board time to make their presentations since we're starting that late. Sure, yeah, we have a relatively light public forum this evening, I mean, the light in terms of numbers. So I'm fine to push that back. And if we end up having councillor questions, I would hope that we could get to those on the other end if we still have further questions because I do want people to be able to have a full discussion recognizing that board of finance did go over. So you'll just recognize that I don't need to make a motion. That's fine, yeah. Okay, thank you. Yep. Any further discussion on the agenda? Okay, hearing none, all those in favor adopting your agenda, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion carries. Thank you all. I will now look to our colleagues again at the school board and school district. Thank you for being here and for providing us with an update as to just what's happening with BHS and the reimagining process. There's been some significant decision points that you all have made in recent weeks. And I think it's important that we continue a sense of collaboration between the district and the board and the council and the administration. So really just appreciate you being here and being willing to share that with us and engage with us and appreciate your patience and just sticking with us given that we did go over on board of finance. So thank you so much again for being here. Thank you, President Tracy. We really appreciate the opportunity and thank you to the whole city council, all of the city council, all of you for having us here and Mayor Weinberger also, we've been working closely together throughout the course of the year and we've made some, needed to make some quick decisions and we'll need to do some quick work to make sure that we have a high school that really meets the needs of our community. And so we're looking forward to the opportunity to give you an update. I have six or seven. Well, you've seen the slides. I have a few slides that we'll go through and then we'll open it up for questions and answers after that. So I will share my screen. Let's see if I can make this happen. So everybody's seeing that. Okay. And I'm gonna do, I'm not gonna, I'll do this view just to, so that I can still see you all. So this update is, again, to give you all an update on where we are with Burlington High School and Burlington Technical Center. And so I wanted to start with where what landed us in this position. And so, so first of all, we were in a re-envisioning project that was essentially a major renovation of the current or the existing high school site on Institute Road. And as a part of the re-envisioning project, we had to do testing of hazardous materials. And so when we started testing the building, we found that there were, in the caulking around the windows, there were PCBs in that caulking. And that led to a series of tests, environmental tests to assess the extent of the PCBs at the site. That ultimately led to, in August 2020, air testing that found really high levels of PCBs in building F. So we tested the whole building and we got the results back from building F first. And that was the first day of school this school year. Students actually didn't spend the day in the building because they were doing an orientation. And that was mostly on the soccer field, some in, some out of the building or on the turf. But we got really high levels in some rooms in the F building between, I have 3,000 nanograms per cubic meters here. It was between, there were some rooms that were 1,000, some rooms that were 6,000. And that was the amount of nanograms per cubic meter of PCBs in the air. So at that moment, we had to make a decision to close the building and wait for the testing to come back from buildings A through E. That testing came back, the built the testing from buildings A through E. And what that showed was that there were higher levels of PCBs in the air than were acceptable based on the Vermont Department of Health screening values. They were still in A through E, pretty much across the board, below the EPA screening values, but above the Vermont screening values. So I actually thought that there was a possibility that we would be able to, you know, figure it out with the EPA and the Department of Health and get back in to that building. But it turns out that we pulled together with our consultants, the EPA, the Vermont Department of Health, and everybody said that it was, they did not think it was safe. No one on the call felt it was safe for us to return to the building until we did further testing, both the EPA and the Vermont Department of Health recommended that to us. And so the next step was to really understand the extent of continue to understand the extent of the PCB contamination at the high school. And as we continued to test different materials in the building, we found that PCBs were pervasive in the building. They are everywhere. We found them in the caulking next to the window. They have seeped into the walls. So they're in the walls of the building adjacent to the caulking. They're in the soil. So they've dripped down into the soil right next to the building, just right around the perimeter. Important to note not underneath the ground and there's no plumes or nothing under the ground and no spread beyond the area right around the high school. So that site is still, could still be a site for a high school. And they were, and then most recently, right before we made this decision, we found that they were also in the glue mastic, the glue underneath the floor tiles and that the PCBs in the glue had actually seeped into the concrete flooring. So they're everywhere. They're in the floor, they're in the ceiling, they're in the walls, they're in the air, they're in the soil. And it was just clear that we were not gonna be able to deliver a safe building and ultimately even at this point be able to deliver the original building that we envisioned when the taxpayers voted to approve our bond for $70 million to do this re-envisioning. And so we estimate for remediation that it would have been $12 million. That's a rough estimate, but that's the estimate for remediation. But the issue is that that, as kind of related to what I just said, that may not bring us under the Vermont standard. So we will always need to do mitigation there. But we also are not, no one feels confident that we will get the numbers under the Vermont Department of Health's screening values of 15 nanograms per cubic meter. And so ongoing monitoring is costly. We may not get under those numbers. BTC was also not a part of the re-envisioning project as it was in the state it was, the project was. And we were gonna have to figure out our next step for BTC and have them stay in F-building. But F-building, well, we did that. F-building no longer is viable. And so we also need to find a space for BTC, which has about 288 students from our, half from our regional schools in the region and half from Burlington High School. So that led us to the decision. And I apologize that I forgot to mention who I'm here with. So I'm here with our chair, our school board chair, Claire Wall, you all know Claire, thanks. And we're all here to answer questions. I'm just gonna lead on the presentation. And then we also have our executive director of finance and operations, Nathan Lavery, who you also know. So that's the sort of how we got here. And this kind of speaks to that. So in the end, it ends up, the renovation project would result in an $88 million project, which is a $70 million bond plus the $12 million in remediation plus two million year over year while the project is going on, that will not meet the, doesn't get BTC back in the building and doesn't meet the full scope of the original plan and could end up with, we could end up building a building we couldn't use. So we decide, so the school board voted to, I recommend to the school board that we end the project after chair Will and I and the facilities and finance committee and executive director Lavery have been working closely on this. And we, the school board ultimately voted to end the project recently after the last finding around the concrete. And the, we originally thought that we would need to make a hard decision in August, but we felt like we had enough information and that making this decision in May allows us, could save us a year in the end. And we felt like we had enough information to make a decision. And so we need to try to save as much time as possible in the project. So we're moving aggressively and we are first, this is this work around phase one has already begun. And that is a high level site search and evaluation. We are working with White and Burke to identify options that can hold both BHS and BTC. They're telling, we're probably gonna get to a handful of five to 10 sites. I don't have an exact number in the next six to eight weeks that then we can move into phase two on those sites. And that'll allow, that phase two is where we do our due diligence assessment, conceptual design and narrow the recommendations to two to three for consideration. We would do environmental testing as a part of this. And we also, and I'll speak to this later, we also are gonna use, we're gonna engage and get feedback from the community and also use feedback from prior engagements from the re-envisioning project to inform this project as well because we really are gonna need to move pretty quickly in order to get a high school for our students after our lease ends at downtown BHS in three and a half years. So that's, this is phase one and two, then phase three and we still need to build a timeline for this. So we know the timeline for phase one, we, I was able to divert and shift the resources that were going toward the re-envisioning project to working full speed ahead on this project. And so we're able to continue to really put our energy toward this project. Phase three would be the acquisition, design and permitting of the priority site. And then we would move into bidding, construction and building occupancy. And as I said briefly, a second ago, our goal is to not have students move, have to find a place between downtown BHS and a new high school. And so our goal is really to complete these phases as soon as possible. We have a three and a half year lease, we will be able to extend that lease but we don't wanna extend it very far. And I'm reluctant to give a timeline but really I've been telling my team and the folks we're working with, we really need to get a high school into a new high school in four years. And that is a really aggressive timeline and probably faster than most people are telling me that we can get this done. And so we'll just really need to work hard to get to a place where we're in a high school in that general timeline. And we'll give more detail on timeline as this project evolves. We really wanted to get to you early and we appreciate the invite from President Tracy to be able to get to you early, make sure it's clear, make sure we have, answer any questions early on and we start to really engage with you and with our community as quickly as possible. In terms of funding, we're gonna explore a number of funding options. And so we'll look for regional support for the technical center. I think there is opportunity for regional support there. We'll look for state and federal school construction aid, state and federal cleanup aid and philanthropy. We did have some success with this with downtown VHS where we worked with the governor who put 3.5, 3.5 million in his budget adjustment and then our local, our legislators supported pushing that through and getting that to support downtown VHS. So this is, we are serious about seeking funding for this project. And then we also know that in addition to external funding, we will need to go to bond. We'll need to ask citizens to support a bond. And we are thinking about, in terms of timeline, again, we will get more detail on a timeline in the next few weeks as we start this phase one. But we think that we may need to go to bond in November and it sounds like that could be a possibility. So more to come on that. So in terms of sort of high level questions, we don't know the cost of these two school programs and what that will be, but we will know a lot more and we're happy to come back after we learn more, after we start the site assessment process and start moving into that site assessment. We did spend about, we spent about 3.5 million of bond money at this point and half a million of local budget. We're predicting we'll probably spend about 4 million of bond money overall. We borrowed 20 million this year and we have 46 million of bonding authority left of that $70 million bond. And so we're weighing at this point using this authority or starting over with a new ask. And that's a question that we'll have to wrestle with and we'll be open to feedback as well. And then we're looking all over the city. So as I mentioned earlier, Institute Road, where the old Burlington High School sits is still a viable piece of land for us to build a high school on. There are also other places we're really excited to be downtown right now and downtown BHS offers a lot of opportunities for students to learn in their community for internships and connections to partners at the Echo, at Flynn, all around town. And I think there are great opportunities there. And we know that Institute Road has a big space for us to have our fields and spread out and have a nice high school there too. So there are a number of different sites in play at this point. But again, the goal is gonna be to get to the most viable sites quickly and then to do those site assessment, that phase two of the site assessment after that. And then what we're gonna need to do is really make sure that we're utilizing the engagement processes and the information that we learned from our community when we engage with our community through the re-envisioning process. And then be really specific about getting feedback on this new project. So a little bit of taking the feedback that we got back with re-envisioning and then a little bit and another piece of the work is getting feedback from our community on this current project. But one of the things we know is we'll have to set clear timelines, be intentional about how we're engaging, making sure that we are and really hearing feedback from our community and then making sure that we're making quick, we're making decisions and continuing to move forward. Otherwise, each delay will set us back significantly and we just don't have time for setbacks. So at that point, at this point, that's the overview. We wanted to give you a broad overview of where we were and let you know really that we're at the very beginning phase of this. We genuinely care about our partnership with you and our partnership with our city. We have three priorities we're working on as a district, equity, engagement and deep learning. We wanna apply those, we will apply those principles to this work. The engagement pieces is really critical as is the equity work that we're doing to make sure that we are hearing all voices in this process. And then again, we look forward to doing this work with you and ultimately having a high school that meets the needs of our community and a place that we can be proud of that will reflect our commitment to our students and families. So with that, I'll close and open up for questions. Excellent, thank you so much. And yep, great, awesome. So there are questions from counselors. Counselor Jay. Thank you, President Tracy. Thank you, Tom and Tim, Nathan, Claire, all for being here. I like the presentation and I think, you know, maybe something that I'm not in agreement with is the concept of working smart and also working hard. I think if we are to where we are, people have worked extremely hard, but did they take all the ramification into hand? Right, I think it's a good question, Mark. And one concrete example is people banded with 70 million and then we were told it's not enough. And now we work back to the browning board. I am not sure if we wanna rush this and meaning that we need a return of investment for the Burlington High School downtown to me two to three years is possibly maybe wasting money. Let's take the time, five years. It seems it's only $100,000 a year for the rent based on my understanding. But now in terms of working smart, have we looked outside of the box? How we've thought about this, you know, from a bigger concept and try to find the land and maybe in coordination with South Burlington? That's my first question. Have you tried to work with them since they also would like to find a physical location that we can share? I have spoke with the superintendent in South Burlington and I know that they also need to build a high school. I also though, I believe that we have 1,000 students at our high school, 1,100 students. I do not think that that is the size of a high school that you would consider sort of merging, right? If we were a smaller high school, not utilizing our space, but we're a thriving big high school. And I think there's, I think Burlington personally, I think Burlington deserves a high school. And I think I worry about high schools that are too big because I worry about us losing students and losing our sort of priorities for our students. And so my strong recommendation moving forward is that we have our own high school in Burlington and that this project move us in that direction. And I agree that we need to work smart and we need to be careful not to work so fast that we make mistakes, right? So we have to really take time to listen and to understand where we are and where people want to be and what they want their children's high school experience to be and what we'll need to do is have a really strong project plan that highlights timelines that we need to meet and that we work toward those timelines so that we have the end goal in mind. As a teacher, you always sort of design from the end, right? What do you want students to learn and be able to do and then plan back? And so that's the strategy that we will take with this project. And I'll say this too, I've said this at a couple of board meetings, no one predicted the PCBs would be this much of an issue. And it's no one's fault that we're here. Certainly no one who is working on this project or has worked on this project in the last five to seven years because we did, there were assessments on other schools. There was an assessment at Champlain and that school is built in the same time period. And it is okay, it went through the PCB assessment and with a number of other schools in the region and the Vermont Department of Health said it's fine to use that school. So I think that we didn't have indications that this was going to become such a problem. I hadn't heard of it before, we've learned that it is an issue in some other places in Worcester, Mass in particular, where we've been kind of learning from their experience with this. But it's not something that's widely known in our country around how we're looking at school buildings. We've been looking at lead, asbestos, but PCBs are a new hazardous material that we're finding in our buildings. And so we need to pay attention to it and we need to be smart and we need to make sure that we're taking our time and really listening and not moving too fast but also moving intentionally so that we do get the high school that our community has told us so far that they want. Thank you, I know councils have questions leaving to wait for now, thank you. Thank you. Councilor Hightower to be followed by Councillor Stromberg. Great, so I have two questions and I'll ask them both so that we don't do it back and forth, which is the first one is just how many preliminary sites are you ready looking at? Just trying to understand the scope of how many you're narrowing down from. And then the second one is, what is the criteria for selection? And it sounds like that could still be a little bit in flux kind of as you review some of the things. So I guess, what at least like to know like when you say you design with the vision in mind of like what we want for our students, what that vision is. Yeah, so those are two important questions that I don't have straight answers for yet because we don't know exactly how many sites. So we know that there are at least five or six sites that are viable in this phase one. It could be seven or eight different sites in this first phase. But then we will after six to eight weeks get that site assessment down after that first identification of those sites, then we'll start narrowing down to two to three sites that are viable. And as we're looking for sites, we wanna look for accessibility. Accessibility has been a major consideration and something that I've heard loud and clear both accessibility in terms of multimodal transportation and also in terms of accessibility within the building. The old high school was very inaccessible and part of what was contemplated in this design was more accessibility. But I think we have an opportunity to build something that is truly accessible in multiple ways. And then I also think we need to, our buildings were built for an industrial model. They were built to prepare young people to work in factories. That's not what we're doing anymore. So we need to look at spaces that have flexibility. I wanna look, we need to look at spaces that have connection, connectivity to resources in the city. We need to look at sites that have, all those other access to learning, which I think you can get in multiple places because our city is not that big. But I think that those are gonna be where there are some really big decisions. Does it make sense to have a high school downtown where there's connection to resources that exist downtown? And is that something that's even possible? I think that's an exciting idea, as we think about experiential learning and we call it deep learning, but it's just opportunities for students to really apply their learning and to think critically. And then I also see the value in Institute Road where we have a space that is wide open for us to build. But I know those are gonna be big decisions that we'll have to make and we'll wanna hear what you all think and what others think about that. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for those questions and for the questions already. I'm gonna go to Councillor Schrumberg. I know you're in the queue and I'm sure others might have questions. We did say that we would go to public forum at times certain 750 having pushed that back. So if I could just ask our colleagues to stay on for a bit longer, I am gonna go to that public forum so we get to those who have signed up for that public forum. As I did say before, I'm not seeing too many signups this evening so we should be able to get back to you relatively quickly and get back to any questions. And again, apologize for going over the timeframe there. With the public forum, if we could please get the timer up and set it to three minutes for this evening, recognizing the limited signups that we do have. The other piece is if you are a member of the public who has yet to sign up, you may do so by going to burlingtonvt.gov slash city council slash public forum, that's burlingtonvt.gov slash city council slash public forum. I'll take you to the forum that will then feed into the spreadsheet from which I call folks. We do prioritize Burlington residents in these forums. We should be able to get to everybody this evening. Again, just please ask that folks direct comments to the chair and focus on issues and try to refrain from personal attacks in any comments that you're making. All right, our first commenter for this evening will be Susan Sugar to be followed by Gabrielle Stebbins. And Veronica Lindstrom, Gary Scott, Kelly Devine, Jeff Nick and Bruce Wilson. So, Suzanne, I'm gonna locate you. Suzanne, I've located you and enabled your microphone so you should be able to go. Great, can you hear me? Yep, go ahead. Perfect, good evening. Thank you so much for having a public forum this evening. My name is Suzanne Sugar. I'm a resident of Bayview Street. Just wanted to say thank you very much to the finance committee board as well as representatives of board six for hearing our blocks concerns about our sidewalks. We are excited to hear that the board of finance approved an additional three miles of repaired and replaced sidewalks in our town for all of our families to enjoy. So, a short and sweet comment to say thank you and keep up the great work. Thank you. All right, Gabrielle Stebbins is our next commenter and I've enabled Gabrielle, I've enabled your microphone. Excellent, thank you, counselor. I just wanted to speak on behalf of the Burlington Electric Commission. I'm chair of that commission. And I just wanted to share that later this evening you will hear from General Manager Springer about a proposed rate increase. And I wanted to personally touch base with you all about the fact that the commission and the team at BED have worked quite, quite hard. The first time we first discussed this was in 2018. And we've been going back and forth about when is the right time? When must we do this? How can we do it in the most fair, equitable, affordable fashion possible? And just in the last month the commission has met the last three Wednesdays in a row as the team at BED have repeatedly refined their math and checking to see under every rock, every carpet everywhere where we could cut any potential costs that could be deferred and where we might be able to find additional savings. And I just wanted to say that we do take it very seriously that we're proposing a rate increase at a time when many folks are struggling to come out of the pandemic that is why there are proposals about additional assistance for our low and moderate income Burlington neighbors. And I just wanted to say hats off to the team at Burlington Electric. We do recognize, the commission recognizes that we took 12 years of no rate increase and pretty much nothing else in life doesn't increase over 12 years. And that has been a strategic and a very calculated move on behalf of our sturdy team at Burlington Electric Department. But at this point with the pandemic and the losses that we've seen, we do need to make this critical move. And I request on behalf of the commission and the team at Burlington Electric that the council support the proposal before you. And I appreciate everybody from the finance board hearing this two times in one night. Thanks very much for all the work that you do. Thank you. Our next speaker will be Veronica Lindstrom. I think Veronica, I've located you and have enabled your microphone. Great, thank you. I believe that I think my Zoom name is incorrect. My name is Veronica Lindstrom and I'm a student at Burlington High School. And in addition to Bruce Wilson, who I believe will speak later in the public forum, I've been working on the agenda item, resolution 6.04, expanding youth representation on city boards. And so I think I just like to briefly talk about why I think it's so important and why I really value the existence of the preexisting ability for youth members of the community to be on city committees and expanding this to include more. And I think that the young people are growing up in incredibly confusing and impactful times. And for many, including myself, I think this has led to genuine concern for a variety of aspects of our features. And I think that there's very little that's like, that is more powerful than giving youth the opportunity to fight for a future that they can be proud of and looking forward to and that they can feel happy and content that they and their peers will live in that world. And so I'm just super excited to be able to offer that opportunity to more young people in Burlington. And I think that that's a very powerful thing to be able to take control of what your future will look like. And yeah. So I'm saying, I think that, yeah, I very much value that we're able to do this. And I look forward to what we'll be able to do. Great, thank you. Our next speaker is Gary Scott to be followed by Kelly Devine. Gary, I've enabled your microphone. All right, good evening. My name is Gary Scott. In November, I assumed the role of Vice President of Hospital Services at the UVM Medical Center. I wanna take a moment to appreciate the tough 18 months we as a community have experienced through strong collaboration and leadership at the Medical Center and partnership with the city, state of Vermont and our numerous community partners has made a difference and has saved people's lives. Like the city of Burlington and so many others, the pandemic has caused significant financial uncertainty for the medical center. And we too are working hard to have a balance this school year 22 budget for our long-term sustainability. I'm here today because 7.5% rate increase posed by the electric department represents an unanticipated but significant added cost. Although we were informed early in the process that this could happen, we did not know until last week the exact figure which we estimate to represent a cost increase of greater than $400,000 per year. We're asking the city, we're asking that the city find a way to use other funding sources to make the electric department hold so that a smaller, more manageable increase can be considered instead. We're in the same boat as the city, the state and other community partners and businesses. We too are willing from this last year and the uncertainty that lies ahead for us financially. We only just experienced a positive quarter which in part was due to a one-time receipt of relief funds. We appreciate the partnership with the city and the strong communication we have in place. However, by not receiving a specific number until last week, there is insufficient time for us to plan such a cost increase in next year's budget. We ask this board and this committee to look at relief funding or other sources to offset the cost of the increase. This 7.5% increase is across the board and we are confident that other institutions, businesses and customers are experiencing the same hardships. Thank you for your consideration of our request. Thank you. I am not able to locate Kelly Devine. I can come and take another look for Kelly at the end if we don't have Kelly located. I do, however, have Jeff Nick on the line. So, Jeff, I'm gonna come to you one moment. Jeff, I've enabled your microphone so you should be able to speak now. Great, can you hear me, Max? Yep, go on. All right, all right, thank you. Good evening, everybody. Most of you know I'm Jeff Nick. I'm chair of the Marketplace Commission. And I really feel it's my job to speak out on an issue that's very important to the marketplace. And I wanna press upon the city council how important law enforcement presence is to the marketplace district. Our commission's goal is to maintain a clean, safe and fun environment for all to enjoy. Residents, visitors and shoppers alike. And we do that with a dedicated staff and many great retailers and local restaurateurs. We also do that with a presence of law enforcement. And for years, we've enjoyed working with the police. And for years, we actually had a dedicated officer downtown in the downtown district. 20 years ago, Mayor Covell convinced restaurants and hotels to increase the grocery cease tax by 1% to increase law enforcement's presence. And we all agree that that was a good idea. And that tax remains in place, but we've lost the 30% of our law enforcement budget. So as we come out of this pandemic, we wanna make sure that we come out successfully and strong. And so far, we're looking very good. However, we constantly battle. And this is where it gets a little uncomfortable for me, but we're constantly battling public intoxication, public urination and worse. We've got drug dealing and fighting, sexual harassment, mainly from the drunken intoxicated people. A graffiti is rampant throughout downtown. We've got pedestrians blocking the right of way at certain times of the summer. We've got now speeding bicycles and electric skateboards up and down the street. And I gotta tell you, one of these days, somebody's gonna hit a stroller with a baby in it. It's getting pretty bad out there. So what we really need, of course, we've got shoplifting. We've got bricks now thrown through windows. I don't know how you do this without a robust law force and presence. And now I see where Chief Mirad is talking about a priority plan. And most of the items that I just listed are down the list of priorities, mainly due to a loss of police coverage. So I really wanna impress upon the city council to think really hard and long about increasing the budget this coming year. And maybe we changed practices. And I think that's what everybody's talking about. That's the dialogue that's going on. But we really need a greater police presence downtown to deal with all of these quality of life issues that I just listed. So I wanted to thank you. And hopefully if you'd always reach out to me to have further discussion about this, thank you. Thank you. I am now able to locate, to get located Kelly Devine under a different name. So Kelly, I've enabled what I think is your microphone. So you should be able to go ahead. Thank you, Council President Tracy. And I apologize for that mix up. I don't know how to fix it. So anyway, to those of you on the Board of Finance who heard me last week and basically apologize for having to repeat, but while I'm sure that the electric rate is well justified and a lot of work went into it, it really could not be coming at a worse time for our community. We still have a 10 o'clock curfew and most of our downtown businesses, at least in the restaurant, retail, hospitality haven't been able to fully reopen. We have many, many landlords, both commercial and residential, who were not able to collect rents for part of last year. We have people that aren't able to pay rent. Folks are really trying to get back on their feet. And it seems to me that we should be very thoughtful before we approve a both water rate increase, a electric rate increase of seven and a half percent and also some people are going to be impacted by the reappraisal because some taxes will go up because even though it's level funded, it's not level funded for everybody. And just a reminder to folks that those costs get passed along to tenants and renters, they get passed along to store leaseholders. We have a lot of small businesses in Burlington and they have had the most challenging year imaginable. We've seen a tremendous shift to online shopping, not shopping locally because of and in response to the pandemic, that's a national number. So I really do urge the city, if possible, to see if there's some way they can mitigate the electric rate increase, maybe postpone it, give people a little bit of time to get on their feet. Again, I think we'll know a lot better what kind of shape our community is in when we get to around the September timeframe. But right now, people really have barely been in business, if at all, the summer is just starting and to let them know that as of July one, they're gonna be paying more for their utilities as well as maybe taxes is gonna make it really hard. We already expect businesses to barely make it through this summer because they don't have any money in the bank, most of them are working on borrowed time. So I think for our community, come back strong, we really need to consider maybe a postponement or some other alternative to meet the need of BED. Thank you. Thank you, Kelly, Director Devine, I'm sorry. And our next speaker is Bruce Wilson. Bruce, I'm not seeing you on the attendees list. If you are under another name, if you could use the raise hand function, okay. Just check one more time to see if we have other signups. Not seeing Bruce on the column list. So I'm gonna go ahead and close the public forum. So we will now return to the school board presentation. And I will go to Councilor Stromberg. Thanks, President Tracy, and thanks to everyone who called in for the public forum. Yeah, so from an environmental perspective, what has taken place and has been found at high school is to me really, really, I mean, that's incredibly concerning no matter what, but I think it's also just like maybe the year that that building was built, like maybe we need to be looking at all buildings throughout the city, because that's just, it's really terrifying to find out after the fact after people have been in the building for years. So that's probably obviously another conversation we need to have, I actually came from pretty large high school, definitely double the size at least of the amount of students at this high school is well funded and everything. So I think, I don't know what the, what difference it, from my perspective of what a smaller high school is like, but I would imagine it's better. My experience is okay, but I would think that it is a little bit more better. But one thing that Councilor Jang brought up that I thought was notable was putting the high schools together. I don't think that that's necessarily a good idea. I think that there should be separate high schools for accessibility purposes. Some people walk to school, bike to school, and it just makes it further for more people, I feel like to have it in one area between two large cities and a span of distance. So I very much think South Burlington should have theirs and Burlington should have their own. And then let's see, I had some notes here. I'm wondering if there is a public survey that we could maybe administer at a certain phase that would be appropriate for maybe the placement or what have your timeline. I kind of feel like I want more public input. I don't have children. I don't have people in the high school system. And I just feel like there's a lot of voices in the community. I know that that does take time to compile that data and set that up and the whole thing. So I understand that there is a timeline to be working with here, but if there is that potential opportunity for more public input, that would be the choice I would make, but I don't know what that would look like and what the bandwidth is. But yeah, just curious on that front, if that's in the plans or if that hasn't been talked about yet or anything. I'm just curious. I mean, we haven't gotten into too much detail on that, but we will want public input and that's going to be something that we build into our plan. And may I ask a follow-up? Yeah, sorry, I stopped there. My internet said it was unstable. Yeah, all good. You're fine. I can hear you now and I could hear you before. It was just the video and the audio wasn't lining up. So is that in the form of a public form or would that be like, I'm not a public form of a public survey or is that something like a hearing or a form that people would have to attend? Or is that just not, we're not there yet? Yeah, I would say we're just not there yet, but we're up for ideas, definitely. I mean, if what we really want to do is be efficient. We want to get feedback and we want to be efficient about how we do that. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, that's all I had for you. And there will be multiple. I mean, we also know that surveys are sort of probably the easiest to administer, but not always, they don't always give you the most rich kind of and full information. We'll be balancing that. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Councillor Stromberg, Councillor Pine. Thank you. A parent of two who graduated from Burlington High School, proud to say. And obviously the PCB issue was there when they were there, a little disconcerting, but I'm thinking ahead and thinking back a little bit and trying to reconcile the fact that, and I wasn't here when that high school was planned, but I think in some ways it was pretty actually visionary in the sense that what the leaders at the time were trying to do was to knit together the new North end, which was a really, really distinct neighborhood and the rest of the city. And that location serves that purpose, both in a real geographic way. And it's also very symbolic in that it's a meeting place. It's a place where people can come from different areas of the city, kind of leave behind the notions of, perhaps neighborhood that can be a little turfy or we are this and you are that. And it's sort of like a neutral setting for people. So I'm a real believer in that location, but also because of its proximity to the lake, its accessibility to forest, to the woods behind it. And the playing fields, I think, you can't replace those. And so the idea that we will ship our kids in vehicles to get them to those amenities is just not, to me, it's not a good place to go. I think our community, I think there's so many benefits of having that campus remain the high school. And I know the building itself needs to be replaced, but I think our focus should really, really be on Institute Road. And that's just, I feel very strongly about that. And I hope that you'll take into consideration the idea that it is in some ways a great sort of meeting place, neutral ground, common ground for both students and families and for people to not feel like sort of their neighborhood is being left sort of out on the outskirts because it does serve to bring people together in that place. Thank you. That's helpful for me to hear as someone who's new to the community that perspective. I have heard the concerns about accessibility, but the fields will remain, like we will always need those fields in some capacity. And so there is that reality and it's interesting to hear about sort of the kind of essentially located space. But I don't know, Chair Will or Executive Director Lever, if you all want to weigh in, I've been talking a lot. I know our goal is the property that we own. So the Institute Road will be to characterize all of it. The irony is, unless you have a bond or money to be able to do that, that's where we need to do those testing and see the entire footprint of 52 Institute Road from North Avenue to the front door and then the arms woods. And BTC is an integral part of Burlington High School. So the tech center is renowned. We've had incredible capacity to be able to locate them outside and throughout the community with our team and our new BTC director. So we hear you loud and clear, Council President. Thank you. I got Councilor Barlow to be followed by Councilor Shannon. Councilor Barlow. Thank you, President Tracy. I've been a huge supporter of this high school renovation project and I was involved with it when I was on the board. It's a long overdue and we deserve a first rate flagship high school. When we looked at this project originally, we had three different scenarios and the partial renovation with partial new construction, which is the one that has just been suspended was the most affordable way to achieve all the project objectives and it helped us to coordinate with the city who had just implemented a city debt management policy. So that we wouldn't exceed the debt limits that were set forth in that policy. So now with the cost being likely double, I'm guessing for an entirely new school, I have concerns about taxpayer affordability and about the district's portion of the overall city debt limit under that debt management policy. So I'm just sort of saying that, but I also view this as a community problem, not solely a school district problem. So I think we need to think about ways the city can collaborate with the district to help navigate these challenges. And with that, I have maybe just a couple of quick questions. The first is, is the Institute Road Campus, are all the buildings there uninhabitable or would there be a way to incorporate any of the existing building into a new project if that site was selected? And secondly, is it the intention, current intention anyways or plan to pay for all the increased costs of a new school with sources other than increased borrowing? Or do you need to move forward with the assumption that we're gonna have to bond for more than the $70 million that we bonded for in 2018? Yeah. There are a couple of spaces in the current high school that we are able to use and we are using now. And those are in a building. That's the gym, the auditorium, and the kitchen. Those numbers met the screening threshold for the Department of Health. The problem with those spaces is there's time limit on which people can be in the spaces and those spaces are connected within that spaces that are not below the screening threshold. So what we've decided here is we just have to start project. We will have to demo the building. So it's also the cost of the demolition and we're thinking that could be a place where there may be federal aid or state aid for demolition of a site that's contaminated. Really hope to do everything we can are pretty sure that we will need to go out to bond, that the cost will be over the $70 million. It's important to note the costs are already over the $70 million with the project as it currently stands. The cost is at $88 million and we don't have BTC contemplated. So we're already $50 million away from where we need to be to build a new high school for BHS and BTC as it currently stands. So that was part of the problem. That's not the case when the decision was made to move forward with re-envisioning because the idea was we could still use the F building. We won't renovate that yet, but the F building had the high levels between 1,000 and 6,000 nanograms per cubic meter and that building is definitely no longer viable. And the entire building we've heard repeatedly from consultants and the experts that we're using in the EPA and the Department of Health that the building's just not viable anymore. I'll say Council Member. I was just wondering maybe a director or a lab where you could speak to my questions around the city debt limit and the school district's portion of the overall city debt limit under this debt management policy. Would it be if we bonded for more than the $70 million additional money over the $70 million, would we be pushing in the upper threshold on the school districts and will you with the city on under that 2018 agreement? Oh, I mean, in simple terms, I think we would need to revisit that kind of the plan that was put in place then because the 70 million was incorporated as part of that process. And if we're looking at borrowing more than that, significantly more than that in particular then obviously that would disrupt that plan to a degree. And that's probably a question better addressed by the city's financial leadership given the that it is their debt limit policy and so forth. But obviously we would be in a position where we would need to utilize more of the city's general obligation capacity in order to bond for more money. Thank you. Okay, Councilor Shannon. Actually Mayor, did you have something you wanted to say on the debt policy? Is that? Yeah, I thought I would just, sorry for the background noise for a second. Okay, why don't we go to Councilor Shannon for a second and then I'll come back to you. Councilor Shannon. All right, thank you President Tracy. I just, I thought that Councilor Pine's comments were interesting and appreciate the kind of historical perspective and think it's important that we remember why we did something in the first place. But I also really appreciate that you, we have new information that we didn't have before. And potentially it's going to open up some opportunities that weren't considered before. And while I actually kind of like the idea of the students going to different locations for different things, they kind of do that anyway. They have to go someplace for a job after school. And one of the places a lot of them have to go is up to UVM. And for a lot of students, dual enrollment right now with the current location of the high school isn't possible because of the logistics of getting from school up to UVM, making the schedules work, getting back in time. And that's a really important program for, you know, it's very important for kids that are, you know, which is virtually everybody struggling to afford college, which is completely unaffordable in the dual enrollment program really helps that affordability aspect of college helps kids, helps kids get ahead. I think that you have so many things to weigh. So I'm just throwing that out as one thing that might, you know, give more weight and consideration to other sites. I think that the approach that you're taking is exactly right. And it comforts me to hear the approach that you're taking that everything is on the table. I think when we have a crisis like what we have, everything has to be on the table. And we can't really look at what our favorite thing is. We have to look at the reality of what our options are, the pluses and minuses for each. And I think that that's exactly what you're doing. So thank you for being up to this task because it's monumental. And I am just really grateful to hear the sound reasoning that's going into your process at this point. So thanks a lot. Thank you, councilor Shannon mayor, I'll come to you now. Great. Thanks, president Tracy. Sorry for the noise before the Burlington downtown is definitely coming back to life, which is good. First of all, let me echo a couple of points made by councilor Shannon there. First of all, I want to thank the district and superintendent blanket for moving decisively as the situation, the information regarding the PCBs emerged and taking the step of recognizing that a new plan needs to be advised. I think that certainly that had the potential to drag on much longer. And I think you put the community in good position by taking the action you have also appreciate as a mayor and as the dad of a ninth grader, the steps that you've taken to move quickly to get an interim facility in place in the downtown. The reports I hear from both students and staff about that downtown experience are very positive so far. And I think that that validates looking not just at the existing site, but at all options. And I think this step of doing a professional site selection study to weigh the positive negatives of a variety of sites is gonna be very helpful exercise and I support that fully. The city is gonna be as supportive as we can through this process. I've had meetings with the superintendent and the board leaders to make that clear. We have a mutual challenge ahead for sure. We were already before this setback looking at a situation where a size well more than 50% of the total kind of combined debt capacity was going to be dedicated to the district for a long period of time because of the need to make the investments in the high school that thought that that challenges gotten even greater is definitely a sobering one. And we don't really have all the answers to here at this point. I have asked the chief administrative officer and the financial team to rerun the numbers it's been some time before we, since we have sure not dated exactly where we are with respect to debt and we have that analysis and we'll be meeting with the district shortly to kind of show where that projection stands. And we're gonna have to look for creative solutions and I appreciate the part of the superintendent's presentation tonight was that clear articulation of the variety of other potential sources that may be brought to bear here that could be budget relieving on the local debt funding and perhaps there are some creative solutions between the district and the city itself, some shared resources that might be another potential answer to this shared challenge. So this is gonna be a major conversation in the months ahead and something that needs to be sorted out. We definitely have other capital needs as a community for sure beyond just the high school and that can't be ignored or forgotten. But certainly I recognize we're in a different situation than we thought we were when this project began and we're gonna have to find a way through that. Thank you mayor. Any further comments or questions from counselors? Okay, seeing none, I'll go ahead and close that item. I just wanna thank Superintendent Flanagan, Chair Wol and Executive Director Lavery for joining us this evening and sharing such a detailed presentation and taking all the questions. We'll look forward to continued collaboration as this process plays out and please, if you'd like to come back and further update us, please let us know certainly more than willing to welcome you back to have further conversation on this item. Thank you President Tracy, we appreciate it. Thank you very much. Appreciate your partnership and the opportunity to be here and we definitely take the feedback and we're open to all thoughts and ideas really at this point, so thank you. Well, thank you so much and have a wonderful night. Thank you, good night. Okay, so we will now move into back into our agenda having already completed our public forum we will go into item number four which are the climate emergency reports. Does any counselor have a climate emergency report that they'd like to offer? Councilor Stromberg. Yeah, this is a quick thing and it's based on something I saw on the news but it's kind of terrifying and I saw that recently so I wanted to share it but earlier this month, our whole lives we've classified Alaska as a sub-arctic area and now it's reclassified and like they do tests every 10 years to kind of see if things change and it was reclassified as a warm summer continental area which is like kind of baffling to me so just based on kind of the rate of heating up in that region so yeah, it was just kind of not to like be alarmist but it's just a very sobering fact and same thing with like the mountains in Colorado is sub-arctic and now they're being reclassified because of the rate of snowmelt and how little there is now. So yeah, just something to think about. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Stromberg. Any further climate emergency reports? Okay, hearing none, we'll go to the next item which is the Consent Agenda. Councilor Stromberg, may I please have a motion on the Consent Agenda? I move to adopt the Consent Agenda and take the actions indicated. Okay, we have a motion from Councilor Stromberg. Is there a second? Seconded by Councilor Hanson. Any discussion? Okay, hearing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of adopting our Consent Agenda, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That carries unanimously. Brings us into our deliberative agenda. However, before we get into the items on that deliberative agenda, I will go ahead and recess the full city council meeting because we do have a local control commission meeting. So I'll recess the city council meeting at 830 and call to order the local control commission meeting at 830 so that we can deal with the items on that prior to proceeding with our deliberative agenda. The first item on that agenda is the agenda. Councilor Mason, may I please have a motion on the agenda? Thank you, President Tracy. I'd like to make a motion to adopt the agenda as presented. Okay, we have a motion from Councilor Mason from Commissioner Mason on the agenda, seconded by Commissioner Hanson. Any discussion of the agenda? Okay, hearing none, let's go to a vote. All those in favor of adopting the local control commission agenda, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That carries unanimously. We'll now move to item number two, which is the Consent Agenda. Councilor Mason, may I please have a motion on the Consent Agenda? Make a motion to adopt the Consent Agenda and take the actions indicated. Okay, is there a second? Seconded by Commissioner Hanson. Any discussion on the Consent Agenda? Okay, hearing none, let's go to a vote. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That carries unanimously. We will now move into our deliberative agenda. We have as item 3.01, a first and third class liquor license application for Chile Collective. Councilor Mason, or Commissioner Mason, may I please have a motion on that? I would move that we approve the 2021-2022 first and third class liquor license application for Radical Bean LLP DBA Chile Collective located at 1127 North Avenue, Suite 20 with a following conditions, contingent upon fire marshal approval and with all standard conditions. And note that there is coding address goal on behalf of the applicant is here for questions further. Thank you, Commissioner Mason. We have a motion from Commissioner Mason. Is there a second? Seconded by Commissioner Carpenter. Any discussion of this item? Okay, hearing none, let's go to a vote. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. Brings us to item 3.02, an outside consumption permit application for the same applicant Chile Collective. Commissioner Mason, may I please have a motion on this? Thank you. I would move to approve the 2021-2022 outside consumption permit application for Radical Bean LLP DBA Chile Collective 1127 North Avenue, Suite 20. Thank you, Commissioner Mason. Is there a second? Commissioner Carpenter with a second. Any discussion? Okay, seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of adopting the outside consumption permit for Chile Collective, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That carries unanimously. Brings us to item 3.03, a first class liquor license application from Pingola Cafe, Commissioner Mason. I would move that we approve the 2021-2022 first class liquor license application for Pingola Cafe Holdings, LLC, DBA Pingola Cafe, and eatery with all standard commissions. Okay, we have a motion from Commissioner Mason. Is there a second? Commissioner Carpenter with a second. Any further discussion of this item? Okay, seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That carries unanimously. Brings us to our final item on this particular meetings agenda, which is the outside consumption permit application for the same applicant, Pingola Cafe, Commissioner Mason. I would move that we approve the 2021-2022 outside consumption permit application for Pingola Cafe Holdings, LLC, DBA, Pingola Cafe, and eatery. Okay, we have a motion as our second. Seconded by Commissioner Stromberg. Any discussion? Okay, hearing none, we will go to a vote. All those in favor of the outside consumption permit for Pingola Cafe, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? That too carries unanimously. And a motion to adjourn as in order of Commissioner Mason. So moved. We have a motion to adjourn seconded by Commissioner Hansen. All those in favor of adjournment, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? None opposed, that's unanimous. And we are adjourned with the Local Control Commission at 835. I will reconvene the regular meeting of the Burlington City Council meeting at 835. And we will pick up right where we left off with our deliberative agenda and continue with some of the other items that have to do with the License Committee but that don't fall under the Local Control Commission, those items being things having to do with the entertainment permit. And if you're wondering why I'm going to Commissioner Mason or Councilor Mason in this case, so many times it's because Councilor Mason chairs that committee. So that's the practice. Councilor Mason may please have a motion on 6.01. Thank you, President Frasier. I would move that we approve the 2021-2022 indoor entertainment permit application for radical being LLP, DBA truly collective with all standard conditions. Okay, we have a motion on the entertainment permit seconded by Councilor Hansen. Any discussion of that item? Okay, seeing none. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? That carries unanimously. Councilor Mason, may please have a motion on 6.02. Thank you, President Frasier. I would move that we approve the 2021-2022 outdoor entertainment permit application for Halverson's 16th Shirt Street on the Shirt Street Marketplace Saturdays, 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. with all standard conditions. Okay, we have a motion and a second from Councilor Hansen. Any discussion? Seeing none, we will go to a vote. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That carries unanimously. And final item having to do with licensed committee is item 6.03, Councilor Mason. Thank you, President Frasier. I would move that we approve the 2021-2022 outdoor entertainment permit application for Pingola Cafe Holdings, LLC, DBA, Pingola Cafe, and Erie, 1 Mill Street, Suite 138 with all standard conditions. Thank you for that. Councilor Hansen with a second. Any discussion on that? Okay, with that, we will go to a vote. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That carries unanimously. Brings us into the rest of the agenda where we have first a resolution on expanding youth representation on city boards. Councilor Pine. Thank you, President Tracy. I would move to waive the reading and adopt the resolution and request the floor back after a second. Okay, so we have a motion from Councilor Pine. Is there a second? Seconded by Councilor Kerrbender. Councilor Pine, you have the floor. Thank you. I'll be brief on the resolution in front of us tonight. Bruce Wilson and Veronica Lindstrom were the organizers, the impetus for sort of coming back to the issue of how do we engage young people in the governance of our community and do we, how do we open up more opportunities for young people to bring their voices to the table? And we just wanna give them full credit for doing the work on this with us and say that I think we probably all can agree that our youth have both so much to offer us. And I believe there are discussions and decisions that boards and commissions engage in that will benefit greatly from having the voice of young people involved. And it'll be exciting if we get to a time where we also include them in the ranks of our voters in Burlington. And I think that Brattleboro has already paved the way for that by approving the right of 16 and 17 year olds to vote in local elections on school matters and civic matters, municipal matters. So I think we should be breaking down barriers to involvement everywhere we can. And this is just one of them. But I wanna say that we benefit from the voice of youth but also I think young people benefit greatly from the opportunity to participate in civic, in local government. I think that it is a sure way to bring young people to the table that says we want your voice, we need your voice, we need your input and gives them an investment in what we're doing. So I'm really excited to be able to hopefully have this be my final vote on the council. Thank you, Councillor Pine. Any other councillors wishing to address this item? Councillor Stromberg. Yeah, thank you so much. I don't have any fancy remarks prepared but I'm feeling a little emotional in this moment because this is Councillor Pine's last resolution and I've really gotten to know Councillor Pine quite well over my term. I feel like this is a really fitting resolution and I personally wanna thank you for bringing it forward because I was pretty young when I ran for council. I'm still pretty young and it's because of people like you that believe in the younger generation and folks and really kind of trust that we care and that we understand and that we're going to learn more and more and that society depends on how well we're doing and how we progress and can give back and be a part of the community. So I personally am just so deeply thankful to be able to work with you and also just, this resolution is something that I really think you worked a lot on and I just, I appreciate that this is something we get to vote on tonight and I hope that everyone supports this because this is something that really is the beginning of integrating younger voices and to pave the way here in Burlington and we should be really proud of that. So thank you, Councillor Pine and thank you to everyone who kind of voiced support or worked on this in any way. Thanks. Thank you, Councillor Stromberg, Councillor Jang to be followed by Councillor Carpenter. Thank you, President Tracy and I echo the sentiments that Councillor Pine and soon to be Director Pine. But I was wondering as part of this resolution, it was clearly written that there was a pilot program about youth on board for the city of Burlington. I was not a city councilor back then but I do know that any pilot, if you pilot it for a couple of years or at least a year, there should be an evaluation before we move forward before we add or strike it down. But I was just wondering, has it been the case in this situation? Have we received any report about how it is going? Are we actually even seeing youth applying to those jobs and how many youth, et cetera? Or if it needs to be strengthened, how do we do it? I mean, I think I've been in discussion with both Councillor Pine and Tracy and maybe the city attorney about this and just was wondering who can answer that question. Has there been any evaluation of the pilot program youth on board for the city of Burlington? Councillor Pine? Yeah, sure. I have only a little bit of information. I would just say that the expansion of what boards and commissions young people were eligible to serve on was actually an expansion of an earlier pilot. So it actually was a pilot that was then followed by an expansion. So what we have today is sort of the expansion on the original pilot program. I think Councillor Jang's point is a really good one about how's it working? What are the challenges that the young people face? What can we do to give them more support? Part of the idea around this, which this resolution, which was an idea from talking with Veronica and her peers was really the, if a chair of a board and commission, appoints, finds another member to serve as a sort of a buddy or a person who is available to assist another, a young person who's serving, it gives them more of an idea of what's going on. They're not gonna be lost perhaps for the first few meetings or many people would, whether they're youth or not. And it gives us, I think, that connection that is really important to give young people the sense that not only are we asking for their voice, but we really value it. So no, there hasn't been, that I know of a recent report on this, but that wouldn't mean that the council can't ask for that type of information to come forward. We just thought it was important now to expand the opportunities and to sort of revive and breathe new life into this effort. So we thought that that was, the time had come for that. Thank you, Councillor Pine. Councillor Jane, you have the floor. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Councillor Pine, for that explanation. I think it would be important, maybe, you know, I wanted to postpone action for tonight until we get that report. But it doesn't, I know that you will commit to maybe helping the council to access that information down in the road. But this is definitely very important. And I think when we get that report, I believe that we need to strengthen supporting youth to be successful, not only by giving them the seat or giving them stipend, but also what does it mean in their learning? And what does it mean also for the next generation of leader of the city, you know, in terms of their credits? And I think it would be important if you can commit to that, Councillor Pine, or the council in the future. It doesn't necessarily mean we need a resolution to do so, but we know that you are proactive and you smart guy. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Chang. Councillor Carpenter. Thanks. I was gonna piggyback on Councillor Stromberg and say, unlike her is still really young, I am still really old. And I need to hear from the youth. And I just think this is exciting to bring them into the committee. This will only be as successful as we welcome it. If we welcome the new members to our committees, it will work well. And I am so excited about trying to interest young people in government. Government has kind of a bad rap these days. And I think it's pretty important for folks, particularly as they're entering then from high school to college, just to see how it all works, how does it all get together? So I just see this as very exciting. Thank you, Councillor Carpenter. Councillor Paul. Thanks, President Tracy. So I do agree with Councillor Jang that we probably should have done, in the past, some sort of study to see what the strengths of the pilot, how we can attract more students to serve. There have been times where the student seat or the youth seat has been unfilled. So I think we do need to work a little bit harder to make sure that we are attracting a number of students. And I think to some degree, it's a reflection of perhaps not knowing. So two other things I just wanted to mention, a couple of months ago, we had the city and lake semester folks here. And a number of us, perhaps not everyone who's on the council now, because it was a couple of years ago, so not everyone was here, but we were all invited to participate in a forum that was done by the city and lake semester. And then the students reached out to different counselors with questions. And the questions that we got from the students were of an amazing caliber. There are plenty of constituents, so to speak, grownups, that don't ask the kind of questions that show the tremendous amount of research that some of these students had done. And then I just wanted to mention just the interest of full disclosure that one of our sons was on the planning commission as a student when he was at BHS. And if you ask him, Councillor Pine, other than baseball, if you ask him what one of the highlights was of his high school career, it was serving on the planning commission. He learned a lot and felt valued by the other commissioners and just also wanted to mention that about probably about a year after he had started serving on the planning commission, I was having lunch with one of the members of the planning commission. And my son and I do not have the same last name. The commissioner was talking about other members of the commission and what they had contributed and said, we have a student on the commission and was talking about him clearly because they assumed that I didn't know this person. And I think, yes, he is my son, but I think also that there is a tremendous value in going out into the community and having students on these boards, whether they're the son or daughter of a city counselor or not, or someone who is just simply doing this out of interest in Parks and Rec or just simply doing it out of interest in public service. Everyone can do this and the more opportunities that we give students, the greater the chances are that they will be the leaders of tomorrow and today. So thank you very much. Thank you, councilor Paul. I don't have anyone else in the queue. Councilor Hansen. Yeah, I would echo a lot of what others have said and I think it's great that we're doing this kind of on the heels of creating the council on aging and yeah, shout out to councilor Pine for leading on both of those efforts. And I also wanted to shout out to Bruce Wilson. It looks like he wasn't able to give public comment but I've gotten to see a number of times just firsthand the work that Bruce does with Arts So Wonderful and specifically the way in which he gives leadership opportunities to youth and allows them to lead and to public speak and to organize events and just do all of these things. And I think it's an important reminder of the fact that when you give people responsibility and you trust them with something, usually people step up and people go beyond what you would even expect. So I'm really excited for this. I do agree with councilor Jang and others that we're gonna have to do more work beyond this resolution to make this actually work but I'm really glad that we're revitalizing it. Thank you, councilor Hanson. Any further comments? Okay, seeing none, let's go to a vote. All those in favor of adopting the resolution, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Resolution carries unanimously. Brings us to our next item which is the appointment of a new CEDO director. Will the floor is open for nominations? Councilor Hightower. Yes, I'd like to nominate Brian Pine and I don't think I need a second, do I? No. Great. Go ahead. Could I say a few words? Sure. Great. So I'll refer to him as Brian now. Brian was elected the first time to the council when I was too young to understand what the city council really was. And although he took a break for quite a few years in over 30 years, he never took a break from service, leadership or economic justice. And so outside of his council role, he has worked as Burlington's housing director as VA at BAC and efficiency Vermont. He also worked to house a lot of our houseless neighbors during COVID. And when I first met Brian, we sat down together, it was while I was campaigning. And we very quickly pivoted from talking about my campaign to just talking about the nitty gritty details of affordable housing. And that's one of the things I love about Brian is he really, he loves those nitty gritty details. And on just cause eviction, he not only had that high arching overview of vision, both in decades past and over the previous year, but also wasn't afraid to dig into the nitty gritty details. And so I'm really excited and grateful that to be able to nominate him and that the city will get to benefit not just from Brian's kind of high level vision and understanding of what housing in Burlington could be and what community and economic development could be, but also someone who's not afraid to dig deep and go into the details and figure out the exactly right solution. And so with that, I'm happy to nominate Brian Pine for the position of CEDAW director. Thank you for that, Councilor Hightower. Point of order. Yes, Attorney Black, well, Attorney Black with it. I suspect it's the same issue that the Councilor Shannon is raising, which is that what you're being asked to do here is to confirm the appointment that has been made by the mayor. You're not nominating someone for a position. So the motion should be to confirm the mayor's appointment of the new director of CEDAW. Okay, thank you. Councilor Shannon, is that your issue as well? Yes, I didn't wanna interrupt Councilor Hightower saying all those nice things, but... Okay, thank you, yep. So Councilor Hightower, we'll give you this offer. Yes, I would like to move to confirm the appointment of Brian Pine as director of CEDAW. Okay, thank you for that correction. Okay, then we don't need a second. Now I'll go to Mayor Weinberger. Thank you, President Tracy. I am excited to be bringing forward Councilor Pines Councilor Pines appointment tonight for confirmation. I believe that Councilor Pines is the right person to lead CEDAW at this time, at this critical time in the city's history. And I will just share a few remarks about that. First of all, as Councilor Hightower just alluded to, Councilor Pines understanding and commitment to this community is without equal. Pick something good about Burlington, whether it's Youth Build or Center City Little League or Youth On Board or preservation of jeopardized affordable housing units. And there's a good chance that Brian Pine has been at the center of the effort to make that progress and movement happen. He also brings extensive experience with CEDAW. This is a moment where having someone at the head of that department, I think it's critically important. We are in this really interesting time where there are both unprecedented opportunities for cities to collaborate, to use federal resources, as well as an understanding that for CEDAW to continue to thrive, it needs to continue to innovate and evolve. And there's significant unfinished work from reorganizations that have begun in recent years that I think Councilor Pine is the right person to finish. And then finally, something I look for in all department heads, I think it's particularly important with the head, with the CEDAW appointment, is someone who will be a good collaborator. With CEDAW, it is critical that the director collaborate with the collaborating and often lead the department head team. CEDAW has a big role working with many outside partners. And I also think having a collaborator like Councilor Pine in this role will support and add capacity to the efforts of the administration to collaborate with this council. So I'm very excited that Councilor Pine has agreed to step into this role. Can't wait for him to be confirmed and begin his work, start in just a couple of weeks. And I'm very much looking forward to having him here. Last thing I'd like to say is I do want to just say special thanks to Katie Kinstead, who despite only being with the city for about a year, all of that marked by these pandemic times was able to step up and really do a great job as the acting director of CEDAW over the last couple of months when Luke McGowan unexpectedly had this opportunity with the federal government. And I really appreciated that Katie served and served so capably in this role. Thank you President Tracy for the opportunity to key that up. Thank you Mayor. I will now go to Councilor Pine for any prepared remarks. Thank you President Tracy and thank you for those words Mayor Weinberger. I've said this before, but I really want to say it again and I really mean it that serving the community that has been my home for the past 40 years is a true honor. And for me, there's really no higher calling than public service in terms of making a positive difference in the lives of those who are often marginalized by our society. My love for Burlington made the decision pretty easy when the mayor asked if I would consider taking on the role of CEDAW director. But honestly, I have mixed emotions about stepping down from the council partway through this term. My fourth term, when you count the terms I served in the 90s, I have mixed feelings because I represent my neighbors and my constituents in a way that I feel a connection to them and I really value that. And I feel it's a trust and it's a trusting relationship where I try and meet their needs and serve their best interests in my role in the council both through what we do on Monday nights but also what we do as city councilors to make our local government work for people. And there's nothing really very glamorous about serving as a local elected official. I know that may not seem obvious to folks but you basically get a parking pass if you drive a car and a small stipend and those are appreciated but nobody serves in this role to increase their personal fortunes. But we're really rewarded and I'm personally rewarded by the satisfaction of knowing that we're serving our neighbors and our community and others who simply just ask and need local government to provide basic services. They're really part of being a civilized society and I firmly believe that the role of government is to tilt the scales of justice towards those who have less power and privilege and for whom the system hasn't really worked and it needs, they need advocates within this system and I think that's a key part of our role. We don't always have obvious ways at the local level to address the most pressing issues like growing income inequality, climate change or racism that has denied so many from achieving their full potential and living their lives with dignity. But our duty as local elected officials is to seek out every possible opportunity to bring about the lasting systemic changes that are needed to address these and other pressing issues facing our community and our country really. And counselors, we make local government work for ordinary people but our enduring challenge is to open up both ourselves, our thinking and the process that we're part of and all of our deliberations to bring in voices that are too often left out. Last year we did that and it was a remarkable experience. I know it was challenging, I know it was stressful but it was a remarkable transformative experience I think for this city. It takes extra efforts to ensure that the voices of BIPOC community members, seniors, youth, people with disabilities and low income folks are not just welcomed alongside the more vocal and empowered members of our community. But that we take affirmative and proactive steps to center their voices and their needs. The council has taken some key steps over the last year and I look forward to the council continuing to provide ways for deeper citizen engagement, meaningful engagement that really builds a sense of shared purpose and a sense of belonging. Really that's what we're trying to do. I'm grateful for the opportunity to rejoin the CEDO team in support of our mission or the mission to engage the community in finding solutions to achieve our collective vision for an equitable, safe and truly inclusive city with real opportunities for all. Let me close by thanking the people of Ward 3 for this opportunity personally to serve them on the council. You provided me with the challenge, the challenging and deeply rewarding opportunity to give back to the community that has provided so much such a wonderful place for me to set down roots and to raise our family. As counselors, we give generously of our time but the real reward for us is knowing that we've made a positive difference in the lives of our neighbors. To the mayor and city council colleagues, thank you for your support, your vote of confidence tonight and your camaraderie, your collegiality working together to do what's best for this city. I just wanna close and share my favorite quote from Buddha that captures my feeling so well about this next chapter of my life. Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it. I promise to devote my heart and my soul to the public's work for this community and so grateful to have this opportunity for deeper service to this great city. Thank you very much. Thank you, Councillor Pine. Are there any comments? I'm seeing some applause. Are there any comments from counselors on this appointment? Councillor Jang. Thank you, President Tracy but I also wanted to echo the mayor about Katie Kempstad for just thanking her for stepping up and also for leading this way. And also for the mayor also, thank you for reaching across the aisle, across the party division and I think this is truly a commitment that you have shown that you wanna work with the council, you wanna work with the people in order to get the city to the next level of excellence. And when Councillor Pine or Brian Pine told me a couple of weeks ago that you reached out, I mean, I really deep down in my heart, appreciate that. Thank you. Councillor Pine, I am confident that you will do amazing. You'll do great, you'll do well. But I wanted to also ask you just one question. Knowing that you came from, you wanted to run for mayor and as a progressive because maybe you did not understand or agree with the direction the city is going. Now you are in this new capacity, not a city council, but an appointed leader in the community. What do you anticipate to be basically a challenge in this work, if any? That'd be great if you can and also if you can maybe outline a little bit of your vision out of supporting just by park and people of color to be successful in the community. Sure, thank you, Councillor Chang. I think right off the bat, I think our biggest challenge is to take this moment, this inflection point of the pandemic and the opportunity, the pain that people are feeling to feel that pain, to understand the pain, to hear it and to make our decisions about how collectively we're going to build back from this pandemic or how we're going to support our families, support our small businesses, support everyone who's been suffering from the pandemic to move forward stronger as a community and to ensure that we don't sort of just rely on the old ways that we've done everything and to find new ways forward that ensure that we have lasting, durable change that actually builds opportunity for people to achieve their full potential, to achieve their dreams, to be able to have aspirations that in this community, we can achieve them. And I think that's our real challenge. And I think that CEDO's role in that process, it's not up to CEDO to do it, but CEDO's role is to be the convener, the connector, the entity that ensures that federal resources are allocated in the most equitable way in reaching the folks, reaching people in this community who really are dependent on and are reliant on the collective support they need to do that. So I think that's our biggest challenge. Maybe let me ask you the question differently then. The question is, we have a democratic mayor and you are a die-hard progressive leader. Do you see any type of challenge in those two dynamics now working together under the same roof and under the same leadership? I don't actually. I think just to be clear, I served two times in a row as elected, the top elected Democratic member of the Democratic National Convention to two presidential campaigns. I just want to say that I work within party structures to ensure that the values that I believe are the values that we share and the mayor and I share a love for this city and a commitment to making sure that we are the best small city in America. And together, I think with your support and with the council's work, that's what we will be doing. A small city of America, I love that line. Thank you. Any other comments from counselors? Counselor Paul. Thanks President Tracy. Just wanted to say, first of all, Brian, I am so glad that this day has come for as long as I've known you, pretty much as long as I've known you, this was a position that I've always felt you were destined to have. And I'm glad that that has happened for you and for the city. And I think unfortunately the council's loss is the city's gain. So I guess we win because the city wins. The council, I think there will be a void left by your leaving us in a way, but again, the city wins. So we all win in the end. I think one thing that is wonderful is I'm hoping that you'll sort of have your Monday evenings back at least a little bit. And I just wanted to say that I, as a city counselor will, as city counselors together, will miss your wisdom and collaboration, particularly in the last year or so. And for many reasons that you and I have talked about, I know that you're not going far and we'll look to that wisdom and collaboration as we move on. And just wanted to also mention that, no one does the work that they do, have the accomplishments that they have without the people who love them. And just wanted to also express to Liz and to your family, congratulations. And I know you will do great things at CEDAW. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Paul. Further remarks from councillors? Councillor Carpenter. I don't wanna repeat what all of my colleagues have said as someone who's probably worked the longest with Brian over multiple projects, years, venues. I'm just so excited that you're gonna be there and we'll still be able to pick your brain and actually we'll probably be able to pick it more freely now that you're the CEDAW director and you can give us your great strategies, give all of us your great strategy. So I too am so pleased you're in this office. Thank you, Councillor Carpenter. Any further comments from councillors? Are we gonna vote? Councilor Hanson, go ahead. Yeah, I'm really excited. I think there's just really no one that we could imagine that would be better for this role than Brian, period. And I'm really looking forward to working with you in this new capacity, Brian. It's really exciting I think for the whole city and I can't wait to work with you in this new role and echo what everyone else has said as well. Thanks. Thank you, Councillor Hanson. Any further comments? Okay, let's go to a vote. All those in favor of confirming Brian Pine is the next CEDAW director. Please say aye. Any opposed? That carries unanimously. Congratulations, Director Pine. With one abstention. With one abstention. Thank you for that clarification. And now I will just go to Councillor Pine just for a procedural move that we need to make now as a result of us having confirmed now Director Pine. Yes, I would formally tender my resignation from the seat of ward three city councilor and we'll be sharing that letter with the city attorney and council president Tracy tomorrow. Thank you, Councillor Pine. Appreciate your service. And when I congratulate you on this new role certainly look forward to working with you as a department head going forward. Thank you. Thank you everyone for your support and look forward to working with you in a different role. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you. All right. So having completed that item we will now move into the item having to do with water rate restructuring. We did hear a more, a bigger presentation at Board of Finance. I've asked maybe Director Moyer to give a more, an overview of this presentation and then open it up to councilor comments. So I'll go turn the team, turn it over to Team Water right now. Thanks president Tracy. And we here at water are also very excited to be ready to join councilor Pine in his new role at CEDO. Can everybody see my slides? Yes, okay. So tonight we seek your support, the council support on a comprehensive water restructuring effort and Burlington Water Resources first affordability program. These changes are designed to ensure that we are charging customers equitably for the service we provide. And most importantly that we ensure that all Burlingtonians have access to clean, safe water, regardless of their income status. Slides are not working. There we go. As councilor president Tracy mentioned we greatly enjoyed the opportunity earlier this evening to deliver a full presentation on this item to the Board of Finance and a few members of council who are able to join us. We really appreciated the engagement of the community members, the commission, the Duke and many of you in one-on-one conversations with a VR multiple public outreach opportunities over the past two years. Copy of the full presentation is in your packet. And I do also have those slides here in case you have questions on some of the tables with lots of the numbers in them. But as council president said I am just gonna try to cover the major themes. So this first table details the rate restructuring components related to realigning what we charge ratepayers at the cost of providing those water and wastewater services. The first one up is the fixed charge by meter size. This is very similar to the admin charge or the ready to serve charge that you might see on your electric or your gas bill in a really industry best practice. Many of our expenses in the water world are fixed. That is we still have to maintain the pipes, the pumps, the staffing, regardless of whether people decide to turn the tap on or off. And so previously residential customers were not charged any sort of monthly minimum charge and larger meter customers were. However, the larger meter customers were charged that fee and they were given an initial allowance. With this turn of the wheel we are charging all customers this ready to serve charge but it's just a base charge and doesn't have any sort of usage allowance. All of that is going to be on the volume metric side. The next piece is really looking at how different customer classes, so say residential single family, duplex, triplex, multi-unit residential, commercial, et cetera, how those different types of customer classes place different types of strain on our utilities infrastructure. And while we aren't doing too much with the different volume metric rates at this point if you look more closely at the table, having this framework enables us to use specific affordability based pricing to make sure that essential residential water usage is protected into the future. The one place where we are really using the customer class based rates is on the irrigation rate and the cooling and heating makeup rate. Specifically on the irrigation rate in order to kind of disincentivize people putting clean drinking water on dirt that is being charged a substantially higher rate. It is more discretionary water than the water that you may need to clean, cook and so on and so forth in your home. The cooling and heating makeup rate is charged a slightly higher than potable water rate but isn't necessarily a discretionary irrigation which is why that cost is brought down a little bit. The other fixed fee that we are proposing for the first time is a private fire protection charge. So certain customers actually get a sort of how I say it, certain customers have additional services that we provide and that not only do we provide them potable drinking water for their taps, their showers and so on and so forth but they also have a separate pipe that services their building that is there and can provide the adequate fire flow should that building catch on fire and that sprinkler system activate. Similarly, some subdivisions have private fire hydrants. So these are fire hydrants that are outside the city right of way that are also there for the customer's benefit. The most critical piece of the changes that we're making and the ones that we are most excited about are the ones that are really centered on affordability. The first piece of this is the lifeline rate tier. So for single family duplex and triplexes we looked at the median usage of those particular properties and set that as sort of the cutoff of the threshold under which that initial amount of water will actually be charged at a significantly lower rate. So we associate this lower amount of water, this first tranche of water with sort of the essential water that a unit or a property would need for those essential services such as sanitation, cooking and cleaning. Get into more details because we got a couple of questions about this on the why the threshold are set at four, six and 900 and why not four, eight and 1,200. And that is largely because duplexes and triplexes are usually smaller units than they have sort of shared lawns. So we don't usually see as much water for those types of properties as we do for a single family. The other piece, and this is where we really are trying to support any customers that may be income constrained and making sure that they're not having a hard time taking their water bills is that customers that are able to show eligibility are customers who are able to show proof of being eligible for some other income-based assistance program like LIHEAP or Vermont Gas Assistance or Lifeline Program. We're actually gonna waive that 60 waiver charge that base charge that everybody else is getting assessed. We are also proposing to do this for seniors above age 65. Now this isn't just a blanket. We don't know who 65 and everybody's gonna get it. Folks actually do have to come in and fill out an application and do that on some regular basis. And so while there is some concern that maybe not all seniors are on a fixed income, not all seniors are income constrained, we believe that human nature is such that the application process will only bring us folks who really need that assistance. The last piece is adding a couple of other flexible payment terms. We do have some existing payment plan options, but we're going to go ahead and add a budget billing option to make sure that people can kind of lock in at a sort of average water bill that they use over the course of the year. And the last piece are some proposed assistance programs, which we spoke to many of you about during our budget presentations. The first piece is infrastructure assistance. We're going to provide as a pilot up to $250 rebates for residential customers to cover the cost of filming their private sewer laterals. As many of you may know, the sewer lateral from the house to the main and the city street is actually entirely on the private property's financial responsibility. And we do hear from folks from time to time of the really large costs that are involved when they have an emergency and they need to repair their sewer line. And we're really hoping with this program that folks will take advantage and will understand what the current condition is of their lateral and be able to plan for those costs. Ultimately, we're also hoping to collect data and work with you all to maybe develop possible loan or grant programs that could help people actually replace those sewer laterals in advance of emergencies. The other piece of assistance is conservation assistance. And we're looking to provide up to $75 rebates for residential customers towards the purchase of a water sense plumbing fixture. While we all know that we can try to get our family members to reduce water usage and therefore decrease our water bills, sometimes you really have to take action and actually put in something that uses less water or that enables people to, you know, push one for certain types of toilet activity and two for another and use the appropriate amount of water. Lastly, the stormwater management assistance. We're a little bit delayed in rolling this out, but by 2022 we are going to be bringing back the fully implemented BlueBTV residential stormwater management grant program. Some of you may have participated in the pilot earlier on where we worked with a consultant who did Lake Friendly Home Evaluation, visited residential properties, talked to them about how they could reduce their stormwater runoff and decrease pollution. And with those evaluations often found easy ways for a particular property to physically reduce the amount of stormwater that's running off their properties and then we would pay for those in the form of grants or rebates. And with that, just to highlight, you know, with the rate tweaks that we're, or with the rate restructuring that we're making, we're able to have a fully funded FY22 budget, which can ensure proper operation and sustainable stewardship of our infrastructure and also has that targeted funding for those customer assistance programs. If we weren't doing the rate restructuring and the affordability changes, all residential ratepayers would have seen an approximate 5.9% increase in their bill. With the proposed changes that we're asking you to approve, the framework today, and then ultimately in June when we bring a rate schedule for your approval, income qualified ratepayers and seniors will actually see a decrease in their overall water resources bill on average about a hundred bucks per year for someone who uses around that 400 cubic foot a month target amount. And then over 63% of single family residential ratepayers are gonna see some sort of benefit on their water resources bill. Many, the ones who use the median of 400 cubic feet a month are actually gonna see no increase. And on the duplex and the triplex sides, those folks will actually see decreases if they are a typical user. And as I said before, most importantly, we're going to have established a customer class based rate structure, which is gonna allow for water resources to work with council in the future to keep potentially moving around those volumetric rates so that commercial customers, perhaps compared to multi-unit residential customers, might be charged a slightly different rate, recognizing that the ultimate use of that water is going for different types of purposes. And with that, I'll probably just stop and take some questions. Thanks for that great presentation and come back for round two after having already done this at Board of Finance. If you could just go out of share mode, I'll open the floor up to counselors. Counselor Shannon, go ahead. Thank you for all of your work on restructuring this and kind of rethinking how we charge for water. I think that that's great. I do have some specific concerns. The way, I'm concerned about multi-unit buildings and the fairness and equity of how they're going to be billed for water. I think about many families that I know living in multi-unit buildings who have, they might have a higher occupancy level than the usage is related to occupancy. And it seems like families who have large families could be severely penalized in this system. And I know many of our immigrant families have very large families. How is that accounted for because, and it may be that I just missed it because you're very efficient in moving through your presentation and it's a little bit hard for me to keep up. So that's one question is how are we sure that large families or high occupancy units are going to be billed fairly? They're going to, even if they're conserving water on a per person basis, by having more people, they're using more water per unit and I fear that they're going to be penalized for that. The other question I had was about your incentives to replace laterals. That is, can you remind me what the cost, like typical replacing a lateral, I think it's thousands of dollars, correct? Yeah, I mean, we, because we don't do it, I've just heard anecdotally that it can be between five and $10,000 and it's often an emergency and you're not planning for it, which is why we're trying to at least give people some information about the fact that if you can do a filming and actually see that your lateral is broken in multiple places, that hopefully you'll have the ability to start saving or understanding what those costs are. We don't currently have enough funds to have a grant program, which is ultimately what I would like to develop. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. The numbers that I have typically heard are like $7,000, $8,000 for placing a lateral. And so when we're talking about rebates of $200, $250, it just doesn't seem like that would incentivize someone to replace something that's working, honestly. And I wonder if we might get more bang for the buck, I know that the city really tries to get people to replace those laterals, really look at those laterals when we're doing street work. And if it might be better to focus a larger sum of money on those areas where street work is being done to provide a greater incentive, because I don't know, I just do have any indication that on a $7,000, $8,000 expenditure, the $200 or $250 is going to provide incentive. I guess our intent with this round of the program is not for it to go towards the cost of replacement, it is for people to have basically a free filming of their line so that they even know what the condition of their line is. Because I think even though we put out promotions about the fact that this is a good time to replace your lateral, nobody, your average person doesn't know what the condition of their lateral is and doesn't even think that it might be something that they need to do or should do until it literally stops working. And so this particular piece of the program, I spoke with a couple of filming companies and the cost of filming is $250 in most cases. And so our intent was to cover the full cost for income constrained customers and potentially $200 of the $250 for non-income constrained customers. It's about a $40,000 line item in our proposed budget that I suppose you could repurpose it to go and cover some portion of people's sewer replacements, but I guess our intent at this point is really just to get people to have more information and also to collect our own data. And like if you're a participant in this program, we would also get information about your lateral, not to use against a private individual, but to understand, okay, of the 200 that we funded, 90% of them came back with some sort of defect and then that gives us data to actually come back to you guys and promote or figure out that it is in the city's best interest to figure out how to fund these because people are gonna have to rip up the roads. I think we'll probably get there, but that was sort of our thinking was to kind of start small. So you might find certain areas have a lot of problems and you could target as certain that. Could be. That is an interesting approach. And can you also respond to the occupancy element of usage and how this might, to me, it seems like it might not, it might be a real disadvantage to larger families. Yeah, and I'll probably also have Dave Fox our consultant chime in. It is something that we've thought about. And one thing that I did not mention in this version of the presentation that I did in the full presentation was our current affordability programs. We do not, and I'm not suggesting that those large occupancy households are always renters, but to the extent that they are, we do not currently have a good way to reach renters and most water utilities across the country also do not have a good way. And the reason for that is if we were to provide some sort of assistance to a landlord we have no way of guaranteeing that that landlord is going to pass it onto the unit. We also don't know or our current waiver waives the fixed fee on that meter. And usually in a multi-unit building it's that one meter is shared by multiple units. And so I think, and we've promised in our memo to come back to you guys by April of 2023, once we've had a chance to take a look particularly at DC water, DC water just in the last few months rolled out a more renter focused water assistance program. And we think that their model could work for us but we wanna give it some time to see how it kind of shakes out down there. And with that, I think I will pass it on to Dave. It is one of the reasons that for multifamily residential, so not single family duplexes and triplexes, multifamily residential, we didn't put them into the two tier category. And I fire a call that one of the reasons was because we didn't know how to deal with this potential occupancy issue. That's exactly right, Megan. When you look at the distribution of consumption for your single family residential homes, your duplexes and your triplexes, then the consumption is fairly homogeneous. Most customers are using about the same amount. Distribution curve is pretty narrow, if you will. When you start looking at the multifamily properties and other non-residential properties, that's where you see that distribution curve really flatten out. It's a very non-homogenous group. And so when you look at the distribution for, again, those single family residential homes, your duplexes, your triplexes, we know every consumption amount for the average consumption amount for every customer in the system within those groupings. And even the high volume customers in most of those instances, although they may not be necessarily benefiting as much as some of the median volume homes, either single family or duplexed or triplexes, they're still better off than they would have been under the across the board 5.9% increase that would have occurred if these structural changes are not approved. And then to just expound upon a little bit what Megan was talking about with regard to the multi-unit properties, providing income assistance or some sort of a customer assistance program for multifamily properties has been, in my world of re-consulting, the hard problem, if you will, for the last several years as affordability programs to become more and more ubiquitous across the industry, be able to provide direct assistance to multifamily properties where most of the tenants aren't individual, they're not paying their bills directly, they're just paying their rent and it's not necessarily being passed through. Like Megan mentioned, there have been some programs implemented recently, DC Water being one of them, they are providing a discount to directly to the landlord, assuming that some of that discount, 90% of that discount is passed along to the tenant with a 10% of that discount being able to be recouped by the landlord for their burden of just going through the process. We have no data yet from that program of how many folks are taking advantage of it, the costs of administering that program. DC Water is one of my clients and I'd really rather see how that plays out for them before we actually start implementing something here in Burlington. But it's interesting, it's something that we're keeping close eye on. And as Megan mentioned, it's something that we're gonna be coming back to the city council on to present our findings and seeing how that program is playing out as well as a couple of other programs around the country and see if there's something we can do to provide some assistance to not only the single-family residential homes but also those multifamily properties as well. Thanks, Dave. And we also are trying to keep an eye on the new federal program. There's a sort of LIHEAP equivalent called LIWAP, which is going to provide presumably direct assistance to rental units and to other low-income customers. So we're kind of trying to see how that shakes out as well. Did that answer some of your question, Councillor Shannon? I apologize, it's really, I really appreciate the work that you do because it is all so complex. But I am not confident with what I've heard so far that these rate changes aren't going to harm large families living in single-family duplex or triplexes. And I do think that water is very expensive in Burlington and it definitely can be a pass-through from the landlord to the tenant. And some tenants will cost you much more in water. And so with this new structure, and maybe you can send me information after this to help me see how this is not going to actually harm those larger families who will be larger users in this. It's good because I don't want to labor this because perhaps I don't understand something, but I think it's a really important issue because these are often families least able to take on more expense. And I think the intent is to actually be helpful. So I'd like to understand it better. And you're mostly concerned then about the multi-tier, the two-tier rates because of that extra hire, yes. Yeah. Okay. And Councillor Shannon, I hear that. And I think one of the pieces that we'd love to go over with you is just to how the RAP program, Water Assistance Resource Program really will help address that situation in the chart. It really shows that there's even a savings for the high volume user if they are eligible for RAP. So I think there's a way to get at that issue. So who is eligible for RAP? RAP, so he's talking about the fixed fee waiver. So if folks are qualified for some other type of program, income-based program like LIHEAP or SNAP or something like that, they will be able to apply and have a waiver of that monthly charge consistently. That does not apply. Pardon, say that again. If they're renters, that would not apply. Right, which is what we're acknowledging is that this is not the end of our development of our program. This is where we're at now and we are clearly flagging renters as a place that needs more work. But we do not currently have a solution for renters at this point. But are we making it worse for them in the interim? That's my concern. I think, so if you look at the table, one of the tables that's presented, I think row five, high volume 600 cubic foot customer, so somebody who's above that median usage, that customer, even though they will be paying more than they did last year, they are still paying less than what they would have otherwise if we had just done a regular rate increase. So if we had done a regular rate increase with your support, everybody would have been seeing about a 5.9% increase, at least the 600 cubic foot volume customer, which is what I'm looking at at my table, they would experience under this proposal a 4.5% increase. So it's still better than it would have been. We're not helping them as much as we could and as much as we would like to, particularly if we figure out how to provide the affordability program to renters. If somebody qualified for that fixed fee waiver, that same customer who uses 600 cubic feet would actually see a six and a half percent decrease on their overall bill. So for the folks. We're getting into a little bit of a back and forth here. So can we please wrap in Councilor Shannon? You've been able to ask quite a few questions. So if you can please wrap up at this point. I think that's what I just did. Okay, thank you. All right. There are other comments from counselors. Okay, are we ready to go to a vote? Okay, seeing none, let's go to a vote and will the city clerk please call the roll. Councillor Barlow. Yes. Councillor Carpenter. Yes. Councillor Jang. Yes. Councillor Freeman. Yes. Councillor Hanson. Yes. Councillor Hightower. Yes. Councillor Mason. Yes. Councillor Paul. Yes. Councillor Shannon. Sorry. Yes. Councillor Stromberg. Yes. City Council President Tracy. Yes. 11 ayes. That passes unanimously. Brings us to our next item, which is another DPW related item having to do with authorizing a cooperative agreement regarding the Rail Yard Enterprise project. I will go to say. Councillor Garonne here. Point of order. Councillor Tracy. Yes. Did we actually make the... Did we actually make the motion or did we just vote on that last item? Yeah, you're right actually. I'm sorry. Thank you for that. I'm sorry. No, that's okay. I just wanted to make sure... I apologize folks. I got my second COVID shot and I'm feeling very out of it. So, I apologize for that. let me give you my, let's go back, I apologize for that. Thank you for catching that, Councilor Hanson. Councilor Hanson, would you like to make the motion? Sure, yeah. I'll move to approved and adopt the 2021 water resources rate restructuring and affordability program proposal conditional upon the adoption of the necessary amendments to be made to the Burlington Code of Ordinances. And number two, to suspend the rules and place the attached amendments to the Burlington Code of Ordinances chapters 26 and 31 in all stages of passage. Thank you. Seconded by Councilor Freeman. Any further discussion? Hearing none, let's go to a vote. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That carries unanimously. Thank you for catching that. I appreciate that. All right, now we'll go to the next item, which has to do with authorizing the director of our authorizing public works to move forward with a cooperative agreement regarding the rail yard enterprise project. Councilor Hanson, before we get to the presentation, let's go to a motion on that first and then we'll get into the presentation. Okay, great. I will move. You just went on mute, Councilor. Sorry, I was using the space bar and messed up. I will move to authorize the director of public works to execute a cooperative agreement between the city of Burlington and the state of Vermont for the rail yard enterprise project. Okay, we have a motion. Is there a second on that? Seconded by Councilor Jiang. Councilor Hanson, did you want the floor back? No, that's okay. Okay, then I will turn it over to Director Spencer. Thank you, President Tracy and Councilors and Director Pine for the opportunity to provide an update on the rail yard enterprise project. City Engineer, Norm Baldwin's going to provide an overview of the cooperative agreement in front of you and the initiation of preliminary engineering and after his overview, I'll wrap up with some quick content. Thank you, Chapin. City Engineer, Norm Baldwin. Thank you, Chapin. So as noted in the motion, the department seeking authorization to execute a cooperative agreement for the rail enterprise project. The rail enterprise project is intended to create a multimodal link between Pine Street and Battery Street. The merits of that project include supporting economic development, improving livability for the surrounding neighborhoods, enhance mobile multimodal connectivity between Pine Street and Battery Street and improve intermodal connections to the rail yard. The city administration has been in conversations with V-Trans and Federal Highway seeking their support to advance this project as a priority. V-Trans and Federal Highway have been supportive of the project and have committed funds for the project starting July 1st, 2021, this coming July. The project is at proposed limits it's starting at $10 million, with the potential of increasing the maximum living amount to $20 million. And to further clarify some questions that came earlier out of the memo, this first year we expect that we will be spending approximately 500K with a local match obligation of $50,000. The project cost sharing is split between Federal Highway and V-Trans in the city. Federal Highway split to be more precise is 81.08%. State is a 0.92% and the city is a nice, even flat 10% local match obligation. The project though it does have a favorable local match obligation there is a soil liabilities that are considered non-participating. And it's unclear as to precisely what those costs are given we've not advanced through the various phases of design to determine volume metrics and costs to dispose of those materials if there are any. So there is some financial risks in the city. But I would note that we are working very closely with DEC looking for other funds and sources to offset some of those costs in the future. Once we have, if we assuming we have a cooperative agreement that's executed, we will quickly move towards requesting proposals for a consultant team to advance the project. And being successful, we would hope to be back to the council and board of finance in the late summer to award the design contract. We are attempting to work as urgently as possible. And in fact, there has been numerous conversations with myself and V-Trans representatives to assemble draft documents to get that procurement going for the RFQ for a consultant team. I think that's kind of my summary of the project. I don't know if there's any questions specific to that. So just to wrap up and provide some context V-Trans in the city, this is one out of four projects, major transportation projects that the city and V-Trans are working on for the south end right now. And altogether they enhance multimodal mobility, driving job growth, cultural dynamism and overall vitality for the south end in the region. Those four major projects are the Shelvern Street Roundabout, the Rail Yard Enterprise Project, Amtrak Passenger Rail and Champlain Parkway. And together these projects integrate into the existing transportation system that will be more resilient and sustainable for the region. That said, these projects also require careful planning on how to implement and execute construction so that the communities post COVID vitality fully returns and construction impacts do not impair community recovery. With this in mind, we are evaluating the timing and the potential phasing of these projects with our partners. We hope to have more information for you in the coming weeks. All this said, advancing the engineering and the permitting of the Rail Yard Enterprise Project is critical given the project's strong public support and the need to bring this project closer to construction. We're happy to answer any questions. Thank you. Thank you for that overview. Are there any questions or comments from counselors? Councillor Hanson. Great, thanks. I think you maybe just alluded to this, Director Spencer, but can you tell us anything more at this point about the timing of this in comparison to the Champlain Parkway and just for folks who don't know the context? There's been a lot of conversation around, you know, the traffic impacts of the Champlain Parkway, and specifically the increase in traffic in the King Maple neighborhood. And this project would help to alleviate those traffic impacts. And so there's strong desire that many of us share to try to advance. And you obviously know this, Director Spencer. I'm just giving this for the public. Try to advance this Rail Yard Enterprise Project at the same time as the Champlain Parkway. So that we don't have those traffic impacts in the King Maple neighborhood. Is there anything you can say at this time about that? Right, thanks, Councillor Hanson. So we are looking to advance the Rail Yard Enterprise Project quickly, which is why, one, we've been pushing so hard for a 90% contribution and to start the Rail Yard Enterprise Project now. Thanks to V-Trans and Federal Highway, they've agreed to that. In addition, one of the ways we can expedite the REP, the Rail Yard Enterprise Project, is by looking at what environmental permitting we will need to go through. And we've been working with Federal Highway and think we have a proposal to go through an environmental assessment, which is quicker and has fewer hurdles than a full blown environmental impact statement. So we're continuing to look at those opportunities. They are the Champlain Parkway and the Rail Yard Enterprise Project are two separate projects, separate as well from the Roundabout Project in the South End too. So they each are moving on their own trajectory. That said, what I did discuss tonight is because there are so many large transportation projects in the South End, we are working with our partners to discuss how each could be phased in such a way that minimizes the overall impact. And frankly, the Parkway and the Roundabout Teams have been having this conversation for a while. We're broadening it out to the other South End projects now. I really, we don't have more of an update for you at this time, but I hope in the coming weeks we will have more to share. I know we will have more to share. That's great. And I look forward to that. And I'm glad that we're moving this forward tonight because I think, yeah, this is really important in regards to the negative impacts of Champlain Parkway. So really appreciate all the work that went into accelerating the Rail Yard Enterprise Project. Thanks, Councilor Hansen. Any other comments or questions from counselors? Councilor Mason. Thank you, President Krazy. I just want to take this opportunity to publicly thank our team as well as our partners at Federal Highway and State to say where we're at today. And I appreciate, based on our experience with the Champlain Parkway, this is the beginning of a process, but to say, to recognize where we are with a 90% match versus when we started this conversation on the Rail Yard Enterprise Project, it was great in concept. The numbers came back and the fear of the expense that we would have to bear made it almost a non-buildable project. So to be where we are today and hearing what, you know, that this is viable and affordable or at least, you know, for our taxpayers, I just want to take this moment to, you know, commend the team for getting us here and for continuing to work toward, I think the shared goal. So thank you for that. Thank you, Councilor Mason. Any further comments or questions from counselors? Okay, seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. Brings us to our next item, which is another issue having to do with rate changes, but this time regarding BED, I will go to Councilor Paul for a motion on this. Thanks, President Tracy. So I would make a motion to take the recommended action as detailed on board docs and do not need the floor back. I believe that Director Darren Springer is here if there are people that have questions. Sure, great. Thank you for that motion. Councilor Paul, is there a second? Seconded by Councilor Shannon. And I will go to Director Springer before, or GM Springer before we go to the council. Go ahead, James Springer. Thank you, Council President Tracy. We presented a lengthier slide deck during our Thursday budget presentation at the Board of Finance. I'm happy to run through any of that. Again, I know there may be some counselors who weren't there for it, but the summary really of where we are is after 12 years, a really unprecedented run of holding rates steady, reducing the growth in controllable costs, working very hard to advance, becoming a 100% renewable electric utility during that time and then working hard to advance and a zero energy vision during that time and making some other strategic decisions to hold down costs. The pandemic has really caused a major challenge for us. We've seen well over 2 million in lower sales to customers. We've seen over a million and a half in reduced customer contributions for capital projects. And we've seen customer arrearages, customers who are behind on their bills, which is currently at 1.3 million and has been peaking again after a period of decline following some state assistance. That combined with a 1.5 million increase in regional and state transmission costs really led us to the point where this rate proposal is necessary for fiscal year 22 to continue to fund the utility operations and continue to maintain healthy financial metrics for us as well. We did put together a proposal that's included in this for a new low income energy assistance program which would operate during fiscal year 22 and provide a bill credit based on eligibility for residential customers. If they receive state fuel assistance, they would be eligible for this program and that's 185% of federal poverty level income. And that would offset the bill increase, the rate increase for those customers during FY 22 and then longer term, we are working towards having a low income discounted rate approved by the Public Utility Commission and offered in FY 23. That's on top of the pandemic relief that we've tried to provide for our customers, suspending disconnections for non-payment, waiving all late fees, extended budget billing plans and seeking arrearage assistance. So we understand the challenge of the moment for the community and we definitely view a rate increase as a last resort and I'd be glad to answer any questions that the council has. Excellent, thank you for that. Are there any questions or comments from counselors? Okay, seeing none, let's go to a vote. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Councilor Jang, is that opposed? Yes. Okay, will the CAO please call the roll? Councilor Barlow. Yes. Councilor Carpenter. Yes. Councilor Jang. No. Councilor Freeman. Yes. Councilor Hansen. Yes. Councilor Hightower. Yes. Councilor Mason. Yes. Councilor Paul. Yes. Councilor Shannon. Yes. Councilor Stromberg. Yes. City Council President Tracy. Yes. 10 ayes, one nay. The motion carries, brings us to our next item, which has to do with an approval of an amendment to the UVM letter of agreement, Councilor Mason. Sorry, President Tracy. I would make a motion to adopt the resolution as presented and I do not need the floor back. I believe CAO Schad or the city attorney can speak to the underlying amendment. Okay. I believe, so I'm, is attorney Blackwood, do we need a different motion given that we're approving and extending? I don't know that there's a resolution attached to this. necessarily that's, that we have an agreement. So do we need to refer to it as an agreement? Yeah. Yeah. The. I mean, I think if I apologize, I apologize that I had, that was just stepping back to my computer from for a minute. And I missed exactly what the motion was that. Let me revise my computer was up. Now I have enough to make a motion to approve and authorize the mayor to enter into the amendment to the UVM letter of agreement dated June 24, 2019. Okay. Thank you for that, Councilor Mason. Is there a second? Seconded by Councilor Paul. Did you want the floor back, Councilor Mason? Okay. Any discussion on this item? Councilor Hanson. Yeah, I just wanted to clarify maybe the mayor. I don't know who, but my reading of it was that this was really UVMs option to extend. It didn't seem to read that the city really. You know, the city really had autonomy over, over that. Is that the case or do we actually have the ability to. Go in a different direction? Maybe, yeah, whoever can answer that. I see. Yeah. I'll come to you and see if you have. So for those of you who recall when this was negotiated last round, UVM insisted on having the unilateral ability to extend the agreement or not. I think that was the case. In this case, they, and you may recall that it took us a very long time. And we had a lot of very contentious discussion to get to an agreement that, that both parties could live with. I believe that agreement is posted on, on board docs so that you can see the content of it. That was in June of 2019. And then they, we approached them and said, Hey, the agreements ending, you know, can we discuss and they just said, let's extend for a year without much discussion. And that they also wanted that they offered to be willing to have the same ability to extend again. And we thought that actually was a pretty good deal, particularly because we had had such a contentious time trying to get to an agreement last time. So this seemed to us to be a very positive step. Was that Councilor Hinton? Yeah. Thanks. Any further comments or questions from councillors? Okay. Let's go to a vote. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. The next item has to do with item 6.10 was removed. So we'll move right into item 6.11, which is a presentation from attorney Blackwood regarding redistricting. Councilor Treas, I have a brief PowerPoint. If that is acceptable. Absolutely. Believe you should, you should be able to share. Great. I'm just pulling it up here. All right. I was asked to give a little background on redistricting as the U.S. Census is coming up and is expected to deliver results in September. So what is redistricting? It starts with the U.S. Constitution and what happens with the U.S. Congress. And that provides that, that a census every 10 years determines the distribution of House of Representative seats. And then we have, as you know, each state gets one house seat plus additional seats based on population. And this is technically called apportionment. Then each state then has to adjust its voting districts to elect the number of seats that it gets by creating or changing geographic subdivisions. This is what is known as redistricting. I just wanted to make sure people have some of this basic terminology as we get started. The same principles generally applied each level of government, but it's not the same. It's not the same thing. Currently all of Vermont, as you know, has one house U.S. House district, which will remain the same based on the initial results of the 2020 census. Burlington itself is currently divided among seven Vermont House districts to, to get to those numbers Berlin to under our state. House districts. And we have eight wards and four districts currently. The 14th amendment has a theory of one person, one vote. So what does that mean? Basing the measurement on the total on total population equality. That is the, the norm for municipalities. It is definitely approved by the Supreme court. And what that means is that you look at the number of districts that you want to create. And, and you don't have to have perfect mathematical quality, but you're looking at the total population of the people within that each district. And I'm using the word district, not in our sense of warden district, but as in a voting district that within each district, the population is needs to be substantially equal to each other district. Some municipalities have attempted over the years to count just people who are actually eligible to vote. There've been, as you can probably guess, many political concerns about say prisoners. There's some, there was a case in Rhode Island. A few years ago involving a large prison that made up about a third of one of the districts. And there was a challenge to that. And the court of appeals ended up saying, that was the correct way to count it, to include those prisoners, even though some of them could not vote and some of them voted in other districts. So the measurement is by the population that is there. So students are considered within Burlington's population, even if they are registered to vote in some other district for representation purposes. They are included here. The, in the Supreme Court case of Evan Well versus Abbott, it was a Justice Ginsburg decision. And one of the things that they pointed out is that non-voters access constituent services, they take part in public debates and representatives are, are supposed to be elected to represent all residents regardless of whether they are voters or do vote or not. So that is the theory behind measuring total population. There are other measurements, the other than total population that might be constitutional, but no others have been approved from municipalities in the case law that I've been able to find. Deviation from perfect equality is allowed in order to serve valid governmental interests. That's the theory behind why you can have substantial equality. It doesn't have to be perfect. Note that for the US House of Representatives, there is a higher standard than there is for municipalities. They are required to be closer to equal than municipalities are. And moving on to talk about this, a prima facie case of discrimination is established if there's a deviation of more than 10% between districts. Although less than 10% could be discriminatory. Also, if for example, there is invidious discrimination in the way that the districts are divided up to ensure that, for example, there would not be a majority of a racial minority in one particular district. A deviation of more than 10% may be allowed for states, but not usually for municipalities. The vast majority of the cases involving municipalities are saying the deviation should be less than 10%. And a deviation that is less than 10% is usually presumed to be constitutional. So what are the traditional redistricting factors that one looks at? One person, one vote I've talked about and having a deviation among districts that the population of each district is supposed to be as nearly equal to every other district is practical with the deviations between districts being less than 10%. Maintaining existing political subdivision lines or natural or historical boundary lines is usually one of the traditional redistricting factors, compactness of each district that it is. In Colorado, they describe it in one of the cases of being, if you put a circle around the district, the ratio between the diameter of the circle and the area of the district is supposed to be as close to one to one as possible. So you don't want to have some, some snaky looking district that would have to have a circle many times the area of the district that is within that circle. Contiguity of territory, sorry, I'm having some pronunciation problems. One part of the district can't be totally separate. You can't have, say, you know, two circles that aren't connected that constitute the district. So you don't want to have that. You don't want to have that. You don't want to have that. You don't want to have that kind of interest. And this may be based on race, religion, other kinds of interest. Characteristics that folks are working together and that they live together and that, that where they may have voting interest that affect their specific specific interest block. Another factor is providing small districts with meaningful information. And the other factor is providing a few clear limits is that you cannot separate districts based purely on race, ethnicity, religion, dividing up those who share those common interests would be unconstitutional. And for municipal districts, the use of census blocks, meaning grouping of houses and apartment buildings that are the smallest unit the census uses, there are two units on a property draw a district line between them. Vermont state has redistricting standards that applies to the state legislative districts. And those say in so far as practicable, the goal is to preserve existing political subdivision lines to recognize and maintain patterns of geography, social interaction, trade, political ties and common interest, compact and contiguous territory. A Vermont municipality using these state principles in conjunction with the one person, one vote, and not having more than a 10% deviation from equal population standards would likely meet constitutional standards. So this is a list of I went back and looked at in the 2010 redistricting. These were some evaluation criteria that Burlington came up with and use. Looking at the starting with the total number of counselors that folks thought they might like to have divided by the population that ended up giving you an idea of how many districts or wards you might want to have, keeping geographic areas intact, minimizing the population difference between wards. And again, we looked at the 10% deviation. Boundaries following major roads as much as possible was one of Burlington's criteria. Having academic institutions should be in more than one ward. Ward size matters for citizen communication and campaigning was another factor that Burlington considered minimizing changes from current wards was also something that was important. Reviewing at least the relationship to the state districts and then if we talked about overall deviation less than 10%. The process is first to review the census results when they come in and determine if redistricting is necessary. Then there would be a goal of establishing evaluation criteria. This isn't necessarily an order. Suppose you could establish evaluation criteria before that. But then once you had established those criteria that you would want to ensure that records were kept of how those evaluation criteria were met by the proposals that were finally considered. Using GIS software to review maps and apply evaluation criteria, the city's already looked at that we could get an add on for our GIS software for about $5,000 or so that would allow citizens, other people, to input different maps and explore and play around with them to get to those relatively equal population numbers. So that is a possibility of a way that the council could decide to go. And then a timeline, the redistricting is expected as soon as possible following the census. As you know, last time round in 2010, Burlington's redistricting took several years. And there was some concern about the process dragging on that long. In Burlington, the other issue is that there is a need for a charter change, which requires, as you know, a significant period of time for public hearings and warnings requires voter approval, legislative action, and then the governor's approval to get the redistricts in place. And that was a very quick run-through about redistricting. I'm happy to answer questions. Thank you for that, Attorney Blockwood. If you could just take it out of share mode. Thank you so much. Are there any questions or comments from counselors? I'll go with Councillor Barlow to be followed by Councillor Hanson. Thank you for that presentation. Mike, my question is an easy one. Could you attach that to the council agenda for tonight? So we have it. Yeah, so apologies. I was not finishing it in time. I had a time to get it up there, but I will get it. Thank you. Okay, Councillor Hanson. Great. Thanks for this. This is really helpful. Wasn't, last time that the city went through this, wasn't there a set of criteria that were used? I don't have it right in front of me. I've looked at it before, but City Attorney Blockwood, do you happen to know, there was like three or four guiding principles that I think the city used in order to do the redistricting? What I found was what's on slide seven, when I post it, you'll be able to see that again, was a set of evaluation criteria that were then made into like a survey so that folks could fill in as they were looking at maps and looking at possible ways the city staff generated a number of different map options and people could weigh and evaluate each one of those on a, it was put in a form of a checklist, a survey checklist that people could fill in. Okay, okay, great. Yeah, I'll go back and look at that. And sorry if I missed that. Thanks. Councilor Call. Thank you, President Tracy. So I have a couple, just to backtrack just a second for those who aren't following the census happenings. The census is normally available, the data is normally available in the beginning of April following the census. So in other words, the 2020 data should have been available in April of 2021. Due to COVID, the data now may not be available as late as the 30th of September, although there is talk about possibly being able to get that data sometime in either late July or early August, it may not be available in the, not really sure I understand this, but there's talk about it being available earlier. However, supposedly it would not be available in some sort of format that is easy to work with. So I'm not really sure exactly what that means, but that's what I've heard and been told. As most of you know, I've been trying to work on a resolution to do with redistricting and really have only two goals and that is in 2010, when this was done, it was a very long process. It was highly contentious. It went through several iterations and we didn't end up with a plan and a path to implementing it until 2015. So I would like to see that we not repeat that process and hopefully learn from some of the challenges that we had the last time and not repeat them. And for just speaking for myself, the other reason for bringing this forward is to hopefully be able to get lots and lots of collaboration about what is a fair nonpartisan process for doing redistricting. Because in 2010 it did involve a lot of elected officials and I think potentially that might have been one of the challenges in trying to reach consensus. So I just wanted to mention that I'm very appreciative of counselors Barlow and counselor Hanson who have engaged on this and I'm very appreciative of their time. You all have probably noticed several different versions of this resolution. That's mostly because of taking input from a number of people and wanting to try to come up with a process that hopefully we can all agree to. So if I'm hopeful that a resolution will come in early June, but I think the more important issue is that it come at a time when it's ready to come and hopefully, as I say, be broadly accepted by all of us. So if you have any ideas, I would love to hear them and hope that we can work this out in a way that is a much smoother process than it was last time. Thanks. Thanks counselor Paul, any further comments? Okay, seeing none, we will go ahead and move to our final item of the evening, which is a resolution having to do with approving the receipt of revenue in anticipation from the airport department. Counselor Paul may please have a motion on that. Thanks, President Tracy. I would waive the reading and adopt the resolution. Okay, we have a motion. Is there a second? Seconded by Counselor Carpenter. Counselor Paul, did you want the floor back? I do not need the floor back. I believe that airport director Jean Richards and several members of the airport staff are here to answer any questions that the council may have. We did discuss this at the board of finance. It was approved by the board of finance unanimously. Okay, thank you, Counselor Paul. Director Richards, do you want to say anything, speak to this item? Director Richards, you're muted. Lucky you. No, thank you for having us here tonight. We're here to answer any questions that you may have. We were, it's my understanding that this was taken off the consent agenda like it was last year. This item is terribly important to the ability to run the airport. It's not an easy item to get, especially when you need it. And it's a safety mechanism to make sure that if there's any more hiccups with COVID or anything that could possibly go wrong in a year like we've had or two years, this is our safety net. And it's my recommendation that we move forward with it. And I hope you all agree. It's just something that I am doing and the team is doing to make sure that if we run into a hiccup, we're not relying on taxpayers or coming back to you. We're running our business as an enterprise zone, the way it's supposed to be run. And so it's forward thinking and meaning we're doing what we need to do to plan for days that we can't plan and we can't predict. So that is the purpose of why we're here tonight and why we're asking for this. Okay. Thank you, Director Richards. Are there any comments or questions from counselors? Councilor Hanson. Thanks, yeah. I have a question, which is, so last year, we did these revenue anticipation as well. And I see in the memo that they were, those were repaid. And I'm just curious, given how revenues were so far down last year due to COVID, can you explain sort of just how those were fully repaid sort of despite the low revenues? Were they already anticipating low revenues or? Last year was very unpredictable. And as this coming year is, our business is rebounding, but nowhere near the levels that we once had, we do not have our and will not have for at least another year the international travel rebound. We hope that we will see Canadian travel come back in the next 60 to 90 days, but there's no guarantee. And business travel will be off. We anticipate well into next year. So as far as why we were able to pay back is that we receive CARES money. And that's how we utilize that as well as budget coming. Does that answer your question? Yeah, I think it does. And yeah, I was one of the people that voted no on this last year. And I think just my biggest discomfort with it is just around sort of the concept of basically, this is the tax, we're asking the taxpayers to, there's some risk involved with this. We're asking the taxpayers to basically burden the loan temporarily. And I guess my concern is it feels like kind of betting on a return and a recovery of the airline industry and of air travel. It's interesting that last year they were paid back despite the lack of bounce back, I guess, of air travel. But it feels similarly uncertain at this point. And I think it also ties into just the bigger picture of where we wanna try to go with sustainable transportation moving forward and coming out of the pandemic. The alternative is that you don't do it and then you need it and you pay a lot more for that money when you do need it. You go back to the taxpayers and it costs more money to get the money if you are able to get it. Early on in my career at the airport, I don't, you weren't here, but the airport had very tough financial times. That was one of my tasks is to return and have good financial principles and to make good decisions. And we have been doing that since we started. And this is just one of those things, it's a safety net. And the reason we were able to do well last year is because we were back by grants and care grants. And we still have some for the future, but we can't just depend on that. And we may need to borrow, say we have a bad day, we would then have at least the ability to come back and borrow more money against the airport and do something. But this is merely a tool to make sure that if we have an issue or a bump, now we're able to continue running the airport. All set, Councilor Hanson? I think so, yeah, I find it a little bit confusing, but I think we can, Director Richards and I talk frequently and we can follow up and I'm sure I'll gain a better understanding of how it is that the risk, it seems like Director Richards was saying that the risk to the taxpayer is potentially greater without doing this, which I don't fully understand, but happy to have that conversation. But at this point, I'll be voting no as I did last year, just based on my current understanding of it. But thanks. Okay, thank you, Councilor Hanson. Any further comments and questions from Councilors? Okay, seeing none, will the CAO please call the roll? Councilor Barlow. Yes. Councilor Carpenter. Yes. Councilor Jang. Yes. Councilor Freeman. No. Councilor Hanson. No. Councilor Hightower. Yes. Councilor Mason. Yes. Councilor Paul. Yes. Councilor Shannon. Yes. Councilor Stromberg. No. City Council President Tracy. Yes. Seven eyes, nope, sorry, eight eyes, three nays. Okay, that item carries and concludes our deliberative agenda. Thank you to the airport team for joining us for that item and staying up late to answer questions. I will now move us into our next item, which has committee reports. Are there any committee chairs wishing to offer a report? Thank you all for supporting us tonight. For those of you who did, we really appreciate that. Okay. Are there any committee chairs who would like to offer a report? Councilor Hall. Thank you. The public safety committee is going to be meeting at 530 on June 1st. We're going to be discussing the CSL job description. And potentially a few other items. But we will be meeting on the 1st of June at 5.30. Thanks. Thank you. Councilor Paul. Any further updates from committee chairs? chairs. Okay. Seeing none, we'll transition into city council general affairs. Any comments on city council general affairs? Okay. Seeing none, I'll go to council president updates. I don't have any updates for folks. President Tracy, um, yeah, counselor Mason wanted to speak. Oh my goodness. I'm sorry, counselor Mason. Okay. I'm sorry. I, um, I was trying to get in the queue on the, um, just for purposes. The ordinance committee is scheduled to meet on Thursday, the 27th, which is this week, um, to continue our discussion on decarbonization and certificate of compliance. So thank you. Just wanted to put that out. Okay. Perfect. Thank you for that. Appreciate it. Um, I do not have an update, so I will go to mayor Weinberger. Thank you, president Tracy. I have three items. Um, I do want to touch on, um, we are in the home stretch in the, this pandemic and with the efforts to vaccinate as many, uh, Vermonters, Chittin County residents, Burlingtonians as possible. Um, the, uh, council, they've seen the governor's announcement on Friday that he has set a goal of 80% of the eligible population being vaccinated to declare the end of this emergency. There was a surge of vaccinations, uh, over the weekend in response to that. Some of them, uh, part of that surge took place here in Burlington. There were pop-up vaccination sites at North Beach and on Church Street that were successful and, uh, vaccinating hundreds, um, more, um, uh, members of the community. They also garnered, uh, a lot of attention, I think helped, uh, really bring attention to the, uh, shift in vaccination opportunities that has taken place over the last couple of weeks. Um, we are working closely with the state and we'll be announcing, we believe more of these pop-up, very accessible, one-and-done, uh, vaccination opportunities here in Burlington, um, in the coming days for the upcoming, uh, weekend and the upcoming, uh, festivals look for announcements about those soon. We love the help of the council and the public and getting the word out about this and finishing the job. Um, another, um, uh, a couple, uh, you know, it's, it's a great, um, change and, and, and very welcome change that we are starting to have in-person events once again. Uh, the baseball is coming back to Burlington starting this weekend. Opening day will be at Centennial Field after, uh, a stretch here where it appeared that, uh, the long tradition of, uh, high quality baseball here in, uh, Burlington might be coming to an end. Um, the, a new group has stepped forward and we'll be, uh, opening this, this weekend. I encourage people to check it out. I had a chance to meet with the, the new, uh, group of leaders. And I think this is, uh, I'm really quite excited, uh, uh, about, uh, the way in which baseball will continue going forward. This is a collegiate league. There are many numerous players have connections to Vermont. Uh, the season starts even earlier than it did in past year starting, uh, before the end of May. Um, the new ownership group is making new, substantial new investments in Centennial Field. Um, I think this is a positive, uh, step forward for those of us in this community who love baseball. And another great, uh, event is returning after a year hiatus. Jazz Fest will start on June 4th or run from June 4th to 13th. And, uh, so that means that, you know, before we meet again, it will start. And, um, there is a full lineup of free events spread around the city this year. It's a very different lineup in the past. Um, it would be great if the community responds to it this year the way it has so many times before over the past 40 years. Uh, check out the Flynn Center webpage for details. That's what I got tonight. President Tracy, thanks for the opportunity to win. Thank you, Mayor. That brings us to the end of our agenda and a motion to adjourn is in order. Moved by Councillor Jang. Is there a second? Seconded by Councillor Hanson. All those in favor, please. Any, any discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Opposed? That passes unanimously and we are adjourned at 10 34. Good night, everyone.