 I'm just gonna introduce myself briefly and we're gonna get into this. I'll do some levels setting before we start. I'm Alyssa Sharon. So nice to be here with you all. My background is about 20 years in the environment and also in organizational leadership and management. I used to run the Department of Environmental Conservation for a number of years under the Governor Shulman. I'm so happy to have some of our staff here and we have such a good conversation to have tonight. We have some panelists who are here today who are, this isn't going to be a formal panel, these are more resource experts. We're here to have a conversation but we have, and I'll actually just let the resource experts introduce themselves for just like 30 seconds here. So you know who's in the room to answer questions. Good evening everyone. My name is Lauren Oates. I'm actually a new City of Montpelier resident. Just moved from East Montpelier at interesting time to move here. I live, sorry, I work at the Nature Conservancy. Prior to that, I worked at the state. You'll hear from my old colleague then a little bit. I've been working on flood resilience, nature-based solutions and figuring out how to mitigate. Yes, sorry, Lauren Oates, O-A-T-E-S. Thanks. Good evening everyone. I'm Lesley, I'm a faculty member in the Department of Geography and Geosciences at UBM, and I'm also the Vermont State Climatologist. Nice to be here. I'm Greg Gossum, 40-year resident of Montpelier. I'm a planner and an architect with GBA Architects. We do community redevelopment, which basically means we do a lot of work in flood plains and brownfields. Good evening. I'm Nitz Walker. I'm the Regional Flood Plain Manager, Vermont DEC, and I work with communities in Orange County and Washington County around being flood resilient. Thank you. Thank you so much. I think I got all the resource experts. So just a level set before we start our conversation. For folks who were at the recent conversation up at the Vermont College of Fine Arts a couple weeks ago, there was about 550 people involved, 300 in the room, 200 plus online, and that was a very open conversation. That was just sharing people's thoughts at that point. We took those ideas and narrowed them slightly into eight different groups, which are happening all around the building today. You know where you are. We've already talked about that. But what we're doing today is we are doing listening on the topic of the River Corridor and flooding, and we will work to identify some of the areas where there's energy in this room to focus more attention on. So coming out of this conversation, we're going to identify the one, two or three top priorities that there might be energy around that then we will move into a working group to explore key questions. So I say that because we're not here to debate. We're not here to make decisions. We're literally here to just post questions and state opinions and then see where there's energy in the group. There's going to be about, I'm going to ask that you allow me to facilitate, which means that each of us, there's a lot of people in this room, I'm going to give about two minutes. You raise your hand. I'm going to keep the mic and go like this. That's a tip someone gave me earlier. They were like, don't let go of the mic. So I'm going to try that. I hope that doesn't feel impressive. And after the two minutes, we're going to make sure I'll keep coming back to you. You should have enough time that we can keep coming around. This is also open to the public. So I want you to know, it is literally streaming. People are videoing you and I just want to make sure you're well aware that there are cameras in the room for the conversation. So the first 15 minutes of this, the key question is, what is going on now around the subject of rivers and our floodplains that we should know to level set? So we're going to start with a state of the state. I'm going to take statements or questions. I'll go to our resource experts if we don't have any. The couple is that we have a number of old dams that are just stones and one failed during Caled, in Caled. And the other is that we have been perhaps a little bit lax, like turning the rice field dam, which was intended to be a containment dam. A third of its capacity is actually being used for recreation. So there are some kind of big picture things we could look at. Thank you. When folks speak, would you also mind saying your name and where you live? I'm sorry, I should have said that at the beginning. Sandy Fitzgerald Street. Thanks so much. Hi, I'm Paul Bofo. I live in Worcester, also used to go on a business here in Montpellier as a few weeks ago. I'm seeing the problem in two ways. One is in terms of water is volume and speed. I grew up in flat New Jersey and also Rivertown. It flooded regularly for years when I was a kid. Army Corps of Engineers came in and dredged the river end of the problem. I can't say that that would be a solution here. This is a mountainous place. We know that really well. I live up in the hills of Middlesex and Worcester and the water and probably a lot of you had the same experience. The water came down furiously fast and caused not just washout but avalanche. So I think there the other pieces containing the speed of water and not relying solely on the catchment of the rice field reservoir. Let's stop there for a moment. In order to plan or have any ideas of what we ought to do, can the climatologists and the meteorologists at this point give us any useful or somewhat reliable projection of what we might expect in the next 20 years? Oh, I'm sorry. I'm Carol Bass. I've been living in Montpellier 35 years. Thank you. Would a resource expert like to answer that? Oh, I forgot. She's not going to let me move. No, that's OK. So in terms of projections out to the future, we know that there are going to be more heavy precipitation events. I think one of the challenges for a place like Montpellier or many places in Vermont along the spine of the Green Mountains is it could rain four or five, six, seven, eight inches, and it's not just the amount of rain that falls, but was it was it wet or dry before, right? And where did it fall? It fall in the headwaters. It fall in the valleys. Did it fall in the urban catchment? So all those pieces have to be part of the answer to the question and not just how much rainfall itself, because it was almost like a perfect storm here in Montpellier, right? You had pretty much every kind of rain that fell in an urban area. That's channelized like this. And so it's like everything just came together perfectly, unfortunately. I am Phil Dodd. I'd like to endorse the idea of looking at removing some of these old dams. You know, we have one at the Shaw's, we have one at the Bike Pathways. I know it takes time and money and permits, but from what I've read, they don't help things. One other thing, we obviously need more room for the river to spread out. We need more flood plain. And the last thing I'd say is I'd like to just bring in some hydrology experts to tell us what's really wrong with the whole system. Can anything be done? Can new dam be added anywhere? You know, what's the status of things? Yeah, I'm hearing a couple of questions about either removing or adding dams or judging or a couple of different points are coming up about a rainfall. Yeah, flood plains are really helpful to us. And we're not alone. We're part of a watershed. We're part of a whole place with many communities. And so having a place for the water to go is really important. So protecting flood plain functions and the room needed by the river is really critical before the water shows up in town. And then in the city, it's really hard to build some more capacity to handle the water, but it's still possible. We can set back some of the channelization. We can make some room. Even this morning, I saw a place with a railroad had shut off a whole section of flood plain that no longer functions for the city. So there's places we can explore to try to build more flood capacity to mitigate the depth and the impact and the arrival of water in the city. But we can't change the planet by ourselves. So in the context of climate change and moisture, we can anticipate a lot of water coming. OK. I'm sorry, I need to land. I live in Montpelier. I just want to, I really appreciate the thought. So thinking about the water, accepting the water in a manner that causes less damage further up the watershed and the way that we would need to all work together, I just want to reinforce the need to work across disciplines about how do we have less impervious surface? How do we think about what to plant in different places? How do we keep all of the different elements in the state working together? Thank you. I'm going to work down this side of the room and then I'll come over. Corby Griffin, Liberty Street, Montpelier, I'm just curious. It seems to me that what we're really needing and looking for is a combination of things. For me, it seems like dredging might be an issue, might be a positive. But I'm wondering if it's feasible to build up walls along the North Grant especially. I don't know if that's feasible. But if it is, how high would they have to be? Would they really be a serious mitigation or not? I'm going to come to a resource person about that in just a minute. So think about that, resource people. I'm John Snelbin in the city for 45 years. Vegetation along the rivers is a lot less than it used to be. And many of the areas along the rivers are now plowed fields. We really need to increase the permeability of all of the river areas. This one had a lot of water in it. The storm, I would be interested while we're close to what happened to really document it carefully. How high did the water come up? Where didn't it go? I know it won't be necessarily the same next time. But I think understanding what happened down to the inch is important. Thank you. I'll show you this. Everybody's seeing this. When all water comes in, the downtown section of the river and goes out, it's going to flood. So the water has to be able to go out on the river, pass something like this, this is behind motor vehicles. And things like this jammed up, there's going to be a flood. It's going to make it easier and have less rain to actually flood it. And we have things like this. It's my opinion that this should have been removed from the Winniesquid River the first week. I have a lot more information, but this is what I'm saying. The basic idea is the dam I've been up there, and I've got all kinds of pictures of the dam, is working properly right in that. As long as it's working properly, you can't ask that dam to do more than it's doing right now. So therefore, that end, I don't know what you can do. But what you've got to do is be able to smooth it, smooth the way out so the water can get out quicker, and we can prevent as much rain right now. Thank you. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm Bill Bay, and I live in a pie in the apartments, which is in the flood zone. And I have pictures I took all over that place that happened. And there's 60 people living where I live, and there's 40 people that the Montpere Housing Authority has in the land shops. That's at least 100 people. There's a whole lot more that will be without a home if this, things like this don't fit correct. Thank you. Hi. My name is Carlo Albedo. Hi, I'm downtown State Street. I'm in Plainfield. So I've been here since 2005 downtown, and I've been through four floods now. And I say that because we use our basement for prep kitchens, offices, whatnot. And we've had up to eight feet of water, three feet, five feet, two feet in all those floods. And so I just feel like I've been spending a lot of time observing and dealing with water in my restaurant. But this time, it really came in and came in and destroyed the entire restaurant. So what I keep noticing is the problem I see is that it comes up in the back parking lot of Positive Pie, and on the Julio side, it comes up there, rises up, goes around the front of Julio, starts to flood all the State Street, and starts to take over the whole town from there. I also noticed that during this flood, places like Sarducci and the Gin Shop, all those are fine. They were still capacity left in the main river. So I, too, had an idea. Why don't we build a giant concrete funnel that funnels the North Branch into coming into the city, and then a concrete tube that runs all the way out to the Winooski, and we build a park on top, I don't know. But just somehow contain it. So that water coming down through the city, if it has to be 50 feet deep, it has to be 50 feet deep. But make it so that water cannot come out of that tube until it gets out to the main river. And I realized it's a multifaceted solution. Probably the dam's flood plain's got to be figured out. But that's an observation I had, and I just wanted to throw that out there as an idea. Thank you so much. We have to hold it. That's okay. Hi, everybody. My name is Gil Johnson. I live in East Montpelier, but I live in the same river corridors as everyone else in this room. And I got flooded out of my apartment because I live 40 feet from the Winooski. This is a really multifaceted problem, and it doesn't just involve Montpelier, East Montpelier. It involves everyone who won the corridor of us and what we do, and I think we're gonna have to work with other towns. Yes, we've got to slow down the speed of that river. We really have to slow it down, at which it can be done in many different ways. I am not an expert. My background is I'm a naturalist. One of the ways I think we can slow it down is to make more wetlands, upriver, and we can have an animal help us do that, beavers. Many of you ever read this beaverland book. It goes into this. She, Layla Phillips says, our rivers looked a lot different years ago when the Native Americans were here and no other groups were here. Native Americans didn't really channel rivers a lot to my knowledge. I don't know for sure on that, but I know beavers did and beavers do today. And I actually run a small wildlife refuge up north. It's called the Johnson Wildlife Refuge. It's named after my father, not me, a father's side of the family. And there are beavers there. It's mostly wetland, and when I go in there, I'm amazed how complicated they make that flood plain next to the Clyde River. There's pools of water, there's little dams. It changes every year it seems. Here, they do so much. They help the access to the flood plain for the river. And you don't have, we have to pay to move them, but once they're established, and sometimes you have to make it comfortable for them with the right plans. But once they're established, they do it. They know what to do. And they provide that conductivity from the river to the flood plain, and they make the water spread. And it's a natural thing, and our rivers are much more like that. Now they're more like channels because we've taken away some of the wetlands. And we need to bring it back more to what a river really is. And we have to find out about that. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Pat Hinkley. I live on Redstone Ave. My wish is that we could ask help from the people who have worked with water for hundreds of years, the Dutch people. They have lots and lots of engineers and smart people who are figuring it out. That's it. Thank you. I am Sarah Norton. I am in the flood plain, but in Marshfield. And I'm really interested in what the last couple of speakers were saying about the flood plains and developing the flood plains. And I would love to hear from the flood plain expert how you are, if you're mapping the areas where you're talking about increasing the space for the river to spread out in, as people are saying. And I would love to hear about where those places are in your thoughts. Thank you. I'm gonna do a couple more people over here and then I'm coming back to the resource experts and then I'll do another loop around. Hi, I'm Eve Jacobs-Carnaghan. I live in Montpelier. So I have a two part question, again, kind of for the experts. And one is, is there some mapping that can tell us where the flood plains are in Montpelier itself that could absorb more water? And if those places have buildings on them, can we look at the feasibility of somehow changing them in some way to allow them to absorb more water? So that's the first part. The other part is, what about the other parts of the river, either upstream or downstream, and can there be, so what do we need to do to either talk to those other communities or have a statewide effort because Montpelier itself can't directly affect the expansion of the river in the upstream or downstream communities, so what do we need to do to turn that into a larger effort that's effective that we can help convince people that it's to everybody's benefit to allow the river to expand in both of those places. Thank you. I'm hearing a real theme of how do we get this water away from here and what are the key strategies? Are they natural? Are they wetlands? Are they changing the property? Are they channeling? Are they damning? Like, we have a lot of questions. Hi, my name is James Ray, I live on College Street. I'm gonna put another point on those same comments, which is essentially, I've requested the experts, I think it's really sort of after this meeting and for the folks organizing these meetings, the city government, the state government, to make accessible in an easy, to easy accessible and easy to understand way, the maps that I'm sure already exist, which is when one of the experts go, where did that rain come from when it fell and it comes into the city? So that as everyone here and everyone who's thinking about how can we handle the vegetation, the permeable surfaces, the flood plains, that people have a good sense of what are we talking about here, which cities, which counties, where, sorry, where are the problems happening so that we can all be thinking, it's productively as possible towards where the solutions need to go. Yeah, where's the most strategic place to do this? Yeah. I'm asking for like graphic visualizations that would be widely, and as someone who's spent my life in communicating science, I would emphasize, widely accessible to the lay people and understandable to lay people and clear. Yeah, and we are gonna take these ideas and actually do that, I think, as the next step. Like how do you then get more granular and tactical? Hey, I'm Steve Finchin. I live on 12 up north of the ball fields and all that towards Worcester, I guess, below the dam, and I'm on Grout Road, which is where some of you might notice there's a temporary bridge where they're rebuilding, and we're close enough to the dam, we were fine, right? But some of you got me thinking that if you know that area at all, you know there's some very nice big fields that are in the K in that area, and I, knowing that part of the North Branch, and I know the North Branch was not, you know, the whole problem here by any means, but there's still a lot of the Army Corps dredging, the Army Corps has left a lot of mess behind in terms of the walls of the river are still like levees, right, in some areas, especially if you go up further, and there's a lot of land along that river, above and below the dam, that is not being used for, let's say, corn, it's mostly being used for hay, and in some ways it's a reservoir, but it didn't get used too much, and I think that part of that may be the way those banks have been controlled and rebuilt, and then I was thinking about the way we use current use, and we ask, you know, we value through incentives, financial incentives, farmers to use the land for agriculture, and there's no reason we couldn't apply that same kind of economic system to allowing those fields to be built in a way, kind of reclaimed in a way that they could be used for water storage during peak events through, in the same way we use, we do that with agricultural land now, you know, obviously there's a financial loss when the flood comes for farmers, but if that was compensated along through the years, through using a current use type of system, that could be something that people had opt into to allow their fields to be built that way, basically. No, that's all. Okay, I'm doing two more, and then I'm gonna come over here to the resource folks, and then we'll go over to you. Hi, I'm Michelle Hill, I grew up in Montpelier, but I currently live in Worcester, want to echo what others have said about how it's a regional issue, it's a watershed issue. My husband is a weather forecaster and five days ahead, he said, oh wow, Montpelier's gonna get five inches of rain. Might have ended up being more than that, but I wonder if, with that kind of lead time, that if it's possible to let water out of the rights-filled dam, in advance of the weather, and then also, I know my front lawn, even though I'm at 1,400 feet, my front lawn is still a wetland, and it just occurs to me that there might be things that we can do in the rural areas, maybe it is provide catch basins in addition to right along the river floodplains. Martin Parker, I've lived in Montpelier since 1988, and my own the North Branch Cafe, sadly on the North Branch, we do also use our basement for refrigeration and freezing and supplies, and have no space to not use that. We had about 12 feet of water for 24 hours in the basement, but it never made it into the cafe, so we are open. As we watched the North Branch at our windows, we judge how it rises and falls, and that helps us to figure out what do we have to worry about, and we were talking about every flood we've experienced from 92 on has found its route down Elm Street and Main Street, and so in addition to working with the floodplains north of Montpelier and also in Montpelier, if we could look at ways to direct the water under the road instead of over the road and into the businesses, that's the thought that we had. Okay, resource experts, how are you, what are your reactions to this? Anyone? You can hold it, all right. Ned, you can fact check me. All right, I wrote down, well, I'm taking notes too, so I'm hoping I'm capturing everything accurately. Yeah, can we give Lauren a round of applause for taking notes for us, because a few seconds before this, and she's going to real champ about it, and she's going to at the end hopefully be able to tell us our top themes that are coming out. Just kidding, I'll try to do that once I look at her now. That was sprung upon me in this moment. Okay, so a couple of themes that the other experts will be able to answer to, I'll try to cover a few of them, a couple of discrepancies between whether or not we speed the river up or slow the river down. All of the science that we have to date, all of the lessons learned from Tropical Storm Irene are that we need to slow our rivers down. They are moving too quickly off of our land too unnaturally, that it is causing these highly erosive, very, very strong river flows creating significant damage. We have a tendency to want to move water off of our properties as quickly as possible. That's like human nature. It's like, oh, we're flooding, like get it off of my property, but that actually causes a great deal of water going downstream. A former colleague of ours, Meta 9, always said, we all live downstream, our upstream neighbor's decisions. And so we really need to look at those areas for floodplain restoration. We have dams, Wrightsville performed exceptionally well. It did its job for the city of Montpelier, but there was just so much water, it only could hold so much back. We need to look for those areas that create wetlands, create floodplains, all the way up into our headwaters, our forests, to catch that water before it comes down to our river valleys. Those areas exist in the state. We have a couple of really strong examples. Middlebury effectively was spared from Irene because of the floodplain restoration and swap work they did on the Otter Creek. Brattleboro has invested significant funding and work on the Whitestone Brook in the city limits to actually spare it from downtown flooding. We have those opportunities in Montpelier and in our neighboring communities. And we need to kind of look at the watershed scale, the reach of where we have opportunities for down and upstream restoration. I was going to come back to you. I do. So first of all, say hi to Roger for me. And the other two things I wanted to really highlight, it was listening to I think the last of the comments with if the same place keeps flooding and it's going below the ground, it makes me think of places in Burlington where that happens because they used to be a ravine that flow through the city. And once you identify where the lowest point is on landscape, even if it doesn't look like the lowest point today, it will always continue to find that. And so I really want to echo James, your comment about that mapping and visualization because once you see a 3D of what it looks like from head water stuff, wherever we end up, that'll give us a sense of where the water will naturally flow regardless of where the buildings are from a topographic perspective. So hardly echo that. I'm going to basically echo a lot of what's being said. We need to let our rivers breathe. And that is a larger question and problem than just not clear. But that being said, that's land use policy and land use kind of the egg of land use policy. Looking for the Dutch, I think it's good actually. That's a great suggestion because the Dutch have been living with this for years. They have retooled their entire agricultural industry around floodplain agriculture. So they've got to know. Now, if you get into Montpelier, our tidy little town, there still are some opportunities for us to treat our floodplain properties better than we have now. And I think we should start instituting floodplain issue policies towards development and saving our floodplain properties as a community. We've got a lot of them on the North Branch. We've got a few of them only on the Gwinnowski. But there's still some significant properties to do some better jobs with. I want to recognize that I said we were going to do 15 minutes on the state of the state and then move into talking about solutions. We are doing both of those things, which is totally fine. I just want to recognize that we're looking at also short term and long term solutions in this conversation. Yeah, there's been lots of great discussion, lots of great ideas. And one of the basic things that the state strategy has around flood resilience is to try to protect the functioning of flood plains and rivers where they still exist. So leaving room for the rivers to adjust laterally slows them down and allows them not to become too deep and to be able to flood in many smaller places before it all piles up in the village or in the city. So that's the best thing we have working for us. When we create walls and block it in, we end up pushing the water on our neighbor. And that's the problem because we're all in a watershed. We're all here together. So we're trying to take the walls down. We're hearing a little bit about the berms that have been created. That's a project that is funded. A lot of groups like Friends of the Winooski go through and take those berms down, point them out and we can pick away at them, get more money at it, they go away faster. One of the biggest berms we have around are the railroads. The railroads when they came in, they were all set up to follow a nice straight flat path and block the river in and make it straight and too fast. And we're still suffering from that. That's a big issue all the way down the Stevens, all the way down the Dawn, all the way down the Winooski, down the White. And again, that's a big issue. A lot of times they don't have culverts, they lost floodplain function. A much harder process to get the railroads to talk to us. But that's a place where we can gain some floodplain access and help out a little bit. Other places I just walked the top of my head I used to live in Dayton, Ohio, which is a flood prone city on the Miami River. And they eventually, after having put up multiple huge dams to control flood problems, they also started removing big sections of downtown and creating space, recreational space to walk by the river that looks like, yeah, there's a little bit, and create capacity even in the urban environment, massively expensive and usually only after tremendous tragedy. My name is Kasia Rancho. I'm one of the co-directors of Vermont River Conservancy and also live here in town off of Elm Street. I wanna welcome you all to the historic banks of the North Branch of the Winooski if we were to all stand up front in the step. See the river flowing across the Capitol lawn. That is the historic path before we took the river and said no, we would prefer that it went in this dredged channel that goes straight through town, not here. And so that's one of the big things that we've done in the past, to dredge and wall off and straighten our rivers and it hasn't really worked. I want everyone to know that we are in the process of looking into the feasibility of removing four dams here in Montpelier. We've been working with the city on this for several years. We have feasibility funding, the RFP, for choosing an engineering firm is out. They're going to be studying the value, how to take these dams out if it's possible. I want everyone to know that that's in process right now and we'll have those feasibility study results probably in the next year or so it will take to determine a path forward for those dams. But I think that's an exciting step forward. My organization restores flood plains tomorrow in the city of Brattleboro. There are going to be dump trucks on site for 12 acres along the wetstone brook. It's an area that didn't flood during Irene, like you all have been talking about areas that should have flooded and didn't. And we're going to be hauling out 200 years of industrial fill and restoring that flood plain and wet land right in the heart of Brattleboro and giving the city a park downtown. That's the kind of project that I think we can do here in Montpelier as well. And we need to be looking both upstream and downstream of our cities. When we were at wetlands are a huge piece of the puzzle. We, my organization Vermont River Conservancy we hold easements upstream and downstream of town. A landowner sent us photos of her easement in Worcester and these beautiful wetlands the day of the flood. And she looks upstream and it was a raging, raging fast channelized river where the road was closed because it was too fast and jeopardizing the road. And she turned her body 180 degrees and the river across her easement stopped. The water turned into a lake. You could have a hare and fishing there. It stopped the river. And then it's channelized again and it goes super fast to continue on. When we do those kinds of projects both upstream and downstream and look beyond our, within our borders and beyond our borders we can actually slow the river and it's the natural function and restoring the natural processes that can do that. So thank you. Thank you. What she was saying, I want to, I think we have to look at, because we are in this silly area, we have to look at what's happening down as the water always goes to the lowest point. And so we have to do things up high too, to build ponds and things to slow it down before it even hits the river. Kind of like what you were talking about, but even higher off of the river, right where the river is. My name's Barb and I'm Barb Albert. I live on Barrett Street for 18 years. I'm Jill, I live in Montpelier on Redstone. And I'm just curious about what is going to come, I guess it's probably moving fast forwarding a little bit, but what, so many brilliant people here, like how are these engineers and river people and climatologists and environmental engineers going to, is there a way to come together and come up with a comprehensive plan and suggestions for, then we can look at it and say, oh, that makes sense. I mean, I think it's great to get all of our input, but I know for me, I'm not smart enough to figure this stuff out and I wanna see a comprehensive plan from the experts and just, I don't know how that's gonna happen if there's a plan for it. The next step, so the vision here is that the next meeting would be with the experts who had a ton considered the questions that we put forward and came with some suggestions. Like these are the top five most strategic areas you should have wetlands or buyouts to slow the river down or things like that. Thank you, I wanted to pick up again, Barb, a couple chairs down for me and others in the room have talked about the upper part of the watershed, that's where I live and the thing, and bless the towns because they're working so rigorously and furiously to build back these ditches and culverts, but it's all rocketing in a downhill, a linear high speed direction and the thing that's missing are these diversions too and I don't know the hydrological terminology, but some kind of catchment ponds that would divert water and hold it at much higher altitudes, 500 feet, 1,000 feet, 1,500 feet above the river plain. So I just wanted to respond to Jill for a sec and I think meetings like this are the most important for us as scientists because if you live this and walk this, then you are the expert and so it's science meeting experience and lived experience and so when I watched the stream two weeks ago, I was just blown away, I was just furiously typing everything that everybody was saying, I think I got up to like 10 pages and there were another 21 pages on the padlock itself which just blows me away because it's all of the lived experiences and all of the observations that are so critical and so I just wanted to lift up all of the things that are being said, not just here tonight, but was said two weeks ago because those are what are gonna help us to move forward tonight. Hi, my name's Vangana Che, I'm from Off Territory and I just want to reiterate what other people have already been saying that we need to be talking not just about the riverine corridor but the Winooski River Basin as a whole. I live off of Territory here in Montpelier, there's a brook in my backyard that on July 10th overflowed the banks, overflowed the culvert, covered the yard, it just, you know, this was happening, I don't know how many dozens and dozens brooks all over the watershed and that's where obviously the water starts and that's where we need to start. Just wanted to address your question which is a great one. Because this is a complicated subject that's gonna take decades to deal with. Luckily tonight, one of the categories somewhere in the state of is just talking about that very thing. What body, what kind of leadership do we need to take all of these disparate ideas and bring them together and actually come up with an action plan? So what they come up with tonight should be pretty interesting. All right, coming back. Yeah, I'm Tim Murray, other than Montpelier for most of my life and a lot of great ideas but I also think you just mentioned decades, right? I don't think our city has decades. So I don't know what the answer is but all of our great businesses in town is gonna happen next year, right? So I'm sure we can't do all this stuff in a year, I'm sure but I think we do have to get really organized and have leadership on the community to work with the state government and the federal government to really start looking at this. If we're gonna do a lot more watersheds, these are all watersheds that aren't in Montpelier. We don't have enough watersheds in Montpelier to stop a loose river from flooding. So how do we coordinate that? How is that possible to create watersheds in Worcester or in Morrisville or wherever, right? So that's pretty complicated but I do think we have to be very focused and try and move things forward more quickly than we have. I'm not sure historically what happened after Irene and I'm sure we got, I don't remember having this much energy in the community and this much discussion but I'm not really sure what we did to be honest with you. Watersheds and how much we got in place in 10 years but it wasn't enough obviously, right? So I think we have, I think we should be looking in a shorter window to try and move everything forward. Are there things that we can do in the short term? What are those short term solutions to? Hi, I'm Thomas Weiss. I live in Montpelier and I've done hydrology work and one of my observations is that the flooding on the North Branch is caused by the Wynusky. The Wynusky rise is so high that the water in the North Branch backs up beyond the Spring Street Bridge and so what little water is coming down the North Branch which is only about 10% of what's in the Wynusky at that point has nowhere to go other than Elm Street and the Main Street as well as its River Channel and so I'm thinking that it don't ignore what's going on on the North Branch Basin but that in order to really reduce flood levels in Montpelier we have to work upshed in the entire Wynusky River Basin and not the North Branch Basin in the shorter term. Hi, my name is Lynn Wilde and I live in Montpelier over on Schoolton, on St. Paul Street and our house was one of the very few houses on St. Paul Street that did not take on three to eight feet, three to five feet of water in our basement and it was because of the number of reasons. One, we have a giant cottonwood tree in our yard and it fields about 200 gallons of water a day. It's surrounded by Hazelberts which are taking up more water. The soil is healthy soil, it is mulched, it has got deep-rooted plants in it that also take up water and the soil has become a soil water sponge. The neighbors that we have were amazing. They put sandbags by the driveway to divert the water from Luma Street away from the back of our house. We have downspouts that direct water to the street and we have a sub pump that could not keep up with all of the water coming in until our neighbors put in the sandbags in the back but all of those things were required to keep our basement dry and it did. So what I would like to highlight are two things. We need to look at the plants on the ground that we have around the flood plains and around our homes. We need to plant the plants that take up water and that can hold the soil in place and that can make the soil healthier. The second thing we need to do is have healthy soil and we can have soil that has roots one or two feet down and it doesn't take 10, 15, 20 years to create healthy soil. This is being done all around the country right now and there are experts here in Vermont who can help us with this. So I just wanna say our neighborhoods can also be flood plains and recharge zones. We just have to look at our grasses and lawns a little differently. I just wanna point out those are some short term ideas right there, some more green spaces, some more planting, Steven Ruiz, those are some good. Shorter term. Hi, my name is Chris Piatik. I also live on St. Paul Street. In addition to the up water shed improvement of flood plains and riparian habitat, I'm also very interested in increasing our riparian habitat through downtown Montpelier. One of the questions that I have is about the choke point when we get to the confluence of the North Branch and the Winooski. And so I'm curious how much upstream improvement of habitat would help if nothing is done about that choke point. Another question that I have is about if there's any engineering benefit, I know there's a wildlife habitat benefit to a bottom release dam for keeping water temperatures cool at a consistent, a fairly consistent temperature year round. I'm wondering if there's any flood mitigation benefit to that as well, if we could look at comparisons on how the Waterbury Dam and Waterbury Reservoir did during this most recent event versus how the Wrightsville Dam did during this event when it came, I guess, identify of going into the spillway. Yeah, I just had a thought occur to me. I really liked the idea of flood plain, but I'm also, as the gentleman over there was concerned about, I'm also concerned about short term, immediate, how can we make sure if this kind of rain happens again next year. And I'm wondering, I know we don't want, I get it. It makes sense to me now that dredging or building walls is probably not the best way to go, but I'm wondering if we actually lowered, main, not main street, but state street and used the actual street as an avenue for water to go with that actually held in the form of a flood. Interesting question. Hello, Donald LaBoyle, won't be a resident. I just wanted to throw out a more long term thinking idea because this is not a short term thing. And it's not to suggest a lot of the other ideas aren't also important, but I want to suggest that given where, given how climate in the Northeast has already shifted and what the projections are telling us, moving forward, I think we need to be able to come to terms with the reality that we are probably not going to be able to stop categorically. So what does that mean? Well, I think it means that again, we turn to other examples like the Dutch who've been mentioned here a couple of times. And I think a lot of people know that everyone in this country has this long history of being able to keep water out. But what maybe isn't as well understood is what the Dutch have been doing more recently. And in many cases, they've been giving some of the land back to water, even though it's one of the densely populated countries in the world, low line. Their projections are telling them that they cannot keep the water out in some places. And so what they're doing is they're moving through zoning and things like this. To these long-term strategy of saying to people, you can live here, but understand you are periodically going to get flooded out. So you have to learn to live here in a way that it doesn't devastate you when that happens. This is not an easy thing to do. I think it's a really big long-term change, but I feel that we might benefit from adopting some of that mentality here as well. Coming over. Robert, I'm formerly a deer field. I found a solution about 10 years ago. I bought an old seal boat in the Keys and lived there in the winter, and an old seal boat up here in the summer and lived up here. Now I'm here permanently. I'm going to be building a small tiny house in Mopulier, looking for a site to put that. But I'm listening to a lot of things here. One of the main things you got to come up with is to make sure that we have a good relationship with all these agencies that we're working with, particularly the Corps of Engineers. And they're the ones that have the deep pockets and are able to pull together this thing. They've been doing this all over the communities, all over the country. And I've got some further information that I'll be sharing with you later, thank you. And I live on Port Street in Mopulier, and I just wanted to add the name of the program in the Netherlands that's been going on for the past decade. Plus it's called Room for Rivers. So if you want to look it up, please do. And I'll just read a little bit here. The main goal of the program was to manage higher water levels and rivers by lowering the levels of flood plains, creating water buffers, relocating levees, increasing the depth of side channels and the construction of flood bypasses. And they have videos and texts that just great content for all of us to educate ourselves on. Thank you. You're doing a great job. Yeah, I'm Elizabeth Courtney. I live on Clarendon Avenue, where it's high and dry, but there's still a lot of rot going on in the plant life. All over the city, I'm sure you've noticed. What's occurring to me in this discussion tonight and it's great, there's a lot of good information coming in. I think Jill expressed an interest that I'm interested in too, which is long range planning. All these good ideas are going to cost something. And we need to figure out a way to sell what it is we're doing before we do it, after we do it and while we do it. And what's occurring to me is that we sell, Vermont is very good at selling ski areas, recreation, biking. Inviting tourism is high on the list of areas where we make a profit. So I think while we're doing this work, we should, I think how we're going to package it, how are we going to document what our process is right now because I think there are many people who would be very interested in knowing what we're doing, who are having similar problems or even very different problems, but problems nonetheless with the rapidly changing climate. So I look to places like the, yes, the New York City dilemma of what do we do with the high line? And that was a resource which was a built resource, not a natural resource that was threatening the city, but the city took that problem and treated it as an economic problem, needing an economic solution. So while we're looking at nature as part of the solution, let's look at the economics at the same time so that we can pay for the good work that we're about to do. Thank you, come down here. And at eight o'clock I'm going to start summarizing, attempting to summarize a couple themes that are coming out of this conversation because we have one, two, or three themes. We can share back with the big group and I feel like it's going to be a bit of a challenge. So start thinking about the themes you're hearing too. Devorah, Jonas, Loomis Street, and I can't see my note. Okay, so what I was thinking is that we need to think about impervious surfaces and where they are and which ones we can get rid of and that we might have to do that through zoning with our landlords, some sort of a financial incentive to get people to be willing to remove parking lots, possibly laws, depending on what the rules or laws are in the state. And that could be a short-term solution too, removing a parking lot or two and making it a green space. Our cometologists here brought up the perfect storm situation that helped produce this flood of two weeks of water rain that left all the ground saturated so the ground itself couldn't absorb the water as a result. There were 74 landslides in Vermont. And this, I don't know, and the question is do we need to do something? There was an article saying we need to reduce the speed of all the streams in the mountains. And I'm wondering whether we also need to do anything with the vegetation to allow it to have more water absorption properties than what is normally in our forest now? Tom Stern's State Street. This question of the river as our adversary is something that really strikes me as a sad perspective. This whole valley was made by this river. The farmlands that have been feeding people here for a long time have been fertilized by this river. As much as we can not be limited by the imagination of the people who have built and designed this place with eyes closed to the truth of the river, we don't want to be limited by those mistakes. And so thinking creatively about how this amazing creature that we live with is an asset to this town, an asset to this community, and in the face of climate change where much of the world is burning and is drying, how incredible that we have clean, mostly clean water coming down from the sky. And how can we use this as an asset to build, attract, and model how to finally live with this place that we love so much? We've gotten into this mess by not listening enough. So I hope we can listen. Hi, Howard Mickelson. I live on Sunset Well Above the Flood Clean, fortunately for me. For weeks, as people have said, the water was coming down in the ground. Everywhere that I walked was saturated. I couldn't keep my feet dry. When we had this massive rain event, of course having areas to absorb more water would be helpful, but in my mind, the reality is that we're only gonna get wetter, at least that's what we're being told. And so the water is gonna come. And it doesn't matter how many different ways we try to mitigate it, that we're in a valley here and it's gonna flood. And so I think the long-term solution, there's plenty of things to try to do in the short term, but I think in the long-term solution is we have to figure out how to deal with downtown flooding. And whether that, I mean, the unimaginable of moving the downtown is always talked about. But if there's ways that we can learn from other places for dealing with flooding and maintaining the business district in the same place, it seems like that has to be the long-term solution, at least in my mind. James, I wonder if the landowners, the farmers and the farmers and landowners who are throughout the water, should we've been talking about slowing the rivers down and the work that Vermont River Conservancy is doing, I wonder if there's an opportunity going forward to say you have a tremendous service to offer and you should be compensated for that service. And that service is will you landowner, will you farmer, work with the experts at hand to allow a certain part of your land to flood when nature wants it to? Recognizing then that we as a state will say thank you for this service and we will pay you for this service so that when you have a farmer who loses his or her crop, they're not losing a crop, they're actually gaining an income for providing the rest of the state an incredible service of a field that's absorbing our water or a landowner who has woods to offer to this service. I know this melds with the finance committee next door, but I think there might be some answers there. Honor the rivers, honor landowners, slow the water down and recognize as a resource to be offered. Thank you. I am going to go back, can you come up and clap a lot of participation, appreciate everyone's perspective, thank you. Given the time, some of the themes that came out of today. All right, well some of the things that, well first up Lauren, thank you for taking notes so some of the things this is going to be really hard to do in that way. Okay, so some of the things that I was hearing as I was walking around is how do we slow our, how do we slow the water down through letting the, giving the river some room to move both upstream and downstream so that we're not experiencing that same flooding and we can do incentives or we could do plantings in the short term but, or we could create wetlands and pulling up parking lots but it's all about like slowing that water down in a way that it's not going to overtake the town. That's one of the primary things. I'm also hearing a lot of engineering questions about when engineering either removing or adding dams or different engineering steps would be helpful here. Heard a lot about it, you know, a lot of those questions particularly early on. Those might feel intention actually, those two topics but that is the tension in the conversation. There are other things that we're really popping up for people that you heard many, many people say. I like to say that we heard people saying I want to see the data but some of us, like lots of people in the room know their angle and there's really rich data out there. There's the A&R river corridors, there's the trains work on resilience planning and repeat damage, there's municipal, there's a lot of stuff out there that's not, maybe not visible enough or hooked together enough. It doesn't have to all be in one place so much as I think we need to improve our communication and I think that's a short term step. We should be thinking about how we communicate with each other about these great programs that exist, about the data that exists but this doesn't have to be quite as intimidating as it might sound because there is so much data and science and plans underway already but maybe we could in the short term figure out how to communicate that. Yeah, so we have an engineering, we have slowing the rivers down and we had a lot about show us the data so that we're doing the right and the strategic thing. I'm gonna come here, I'm gonna come back there and see if there are other people out for these. Where you hand your hand up to? Oh, you want that? Yeah, no. Back to you, Lauren, thank you so much. Okay. I haven't heard a lot tonight. I think Ned touched on that briefly but I think I've heard lingering in the community that I wanna bring into this is that as we envision the future of our river, this opportunity to re-envision our green space along the river and parks, I think that's, we haven't heard that a lot that tonight but I think it's in the community and I think it speaks to what you said about our relationship with our river to reconnect and embrace our identity as a town and as a space, as a river town. And so I think that's a really big opportunity that is maybe not something that we've heard a lot but I think it's really important and it's lingering within the community. I wanna make sure that gets into this speech. Yeah, and we just captured that in the notes. And these notes are going to be synthesized and made public and looked at by the experts. The three things that I'm hearing are to understand the climate, the river system and the flooding, what happened in flooding. Number two is to slow the flow, both short-term and long-term solutions and then to look elsewhere and see what others have done that has been successful that we can learn from or mimic. Thank you, that's a great point about learning from others that I wasn't capturing in the leaves, yeah. Lauren, I'm gonna love the ending of these notes where maybe we're capturing those top things, thanks so much. Yeah, I'm hearing a lot about the upper reaches of the watershed to the wetlands that aren't in the flood plain but are far up our forests and pervious surfaces in towns far away. And I think kind of like married to that, the needs for I think really thinking watershed wide regional wide from the top of the watershed all the way down. Yeah, thank you. I'm gonna tackle people who we haven't heard from. Hi, I'm Harry Colombo and I've lived here all my life. And one of the things that I think we have an opportunity to do here is we've got a lot of stuff that's already been developed from an engineering and scientific standpoint. We have studies that are underway six weeks ago or maybe disjointed or maybe had a specific purpose. And maybe one of the things that we can do is to take the engineers or of engineers, whoever those people are, and saying, okay, so what have we got going on now? What information have we already developed? How do we use this event to flesh out scopes that we wish we could have done when we started a non-going study that we have going now? So we get a comprehensive list of data and choices or alternatives and future studies that we can then put to work. Thank you. I'm gonna go here and back there. You're gonna close us out and we're gonna take a breather because everyone is gonna be coming back into this room. My name's Eric Oberg, I'm North Franklin. I had a few ideas I heard about the railroad berms. They could be perforated in places so that water could spread onto the other side of them. We couldn't reservoirs, we kept it at lower levels so that when they start to fill, they can slow the water that way. Can we allow beavers to live in the upper uplands as they like to do and not persecute them so much? So catch bases, I heard about that. And all these ideas in concert would probably do a lot. I also wanted to say that the Dutch don't live with mountains, they're trying to make land out of ocean side. And so we're like having a roof above us and our rivers are like the eaves trough and the downspout and once it gets there, if we hurry it through our town, it will flood the next town worse. So at every step, we have to slow it and that's what I've heard all around. Thank you. Thank you, okay. Coming back for our last comment about the night. No for us. No for us, you're welcome. My name is Cherie Smishow and I live on Mountain Dew Street and the one thing that I've heard many people say that I do think is really important and I'm thinking for tonight is that this is not just a mountaineering problem. This is a regional problem and there's no way Mount Paleo's gonna solve this. On its own, we have to be working in concert with the Watershed region. Yes, thank you. Give yourselves a round of applause. Thank you so much for your participation. Take a break, you have like one minute, hand on the stretch and we'll all get back together in a moment.