 6 p.m. On Tuesday, September 3rd, I'd like to call to order the regular Wynuski City Council meeting Please join us in the Pledge of Allegiance led by Councillor Amy Moffitt I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you First up on our agenda is a gender review. You may notice that Councillor Coulson is not able to join us this evening He's under the weather. He has asked if we would table the discussion on equity and inclusion recommendations until our next meeting so that he can participate As you know, he has been involved in the discussion Since the beginning, much like your subject. How do you all feel about postponing this? That makes sense to me. We should all be here for that. Awesome. So we will postpone item E until our next meeting, which means we will end at D this evening. Any other questions about agenda review? Next on the agenda is public comment. This is time for members of the public who want to make a comment that is not related to any item that will be covered in the agenda. Do we have any public comments? All right. Next we have our consent agenda. We have three items. We have approval of the minutes from our August 19th meeting, the payroll warrant period, August 11 to 24, and the warrant ending August 29th, and a Main Street Revitalization Project USDA loan obligation loan funding we previously approved. Any questions about the consent agenda items? Any questions from the public? I would entertain a motion to approve the three consent agenda items. So moved. Second. Motion by Amy, second by Mike. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. City updates. Great. Thank you. We have a number of updates for you tonight. Late last week we sent out a notice about some crack ceiling upgrades that are happening in the city. Unfortunately our contractor who is managing that work had their only truck in Vermont break down today. They're supposed to start that work tomorrow. So they are bringing up another truck from out of state. So it will only be delayed a day, but it is delayed a day. So we have noticed that through front porch forum and Facebook. It does include some no parking on the streets where that crack ceiling is being done, and we will be posting no parking notices on those streets when it's happening. So it's a day delayed. We apologize for the inconvenience, but we're very thankful to the contractor for bringing up a new truck so quickly. I also want to give you an update on East Allen Street 268 East Allen, which is the Cassavan Overlook. The mixed use development has received their certificate of occupancy and people are starting to move in. So that construction is ending. So I want to give you an update about what's going to happen on that roadway. During construction, as you know, we've done some lane changes in part to accommodate the construction, but also to test out some traffic calming measures along that stretch, which is, as you know, very fast stretch into town. Those have been proven pretty useful. So that pattern is going to be maintained moving forward, but with permanent markings and street amenities. So that work will start next week doing the striping and putting in the making the crosswalk that's currently at Manso, a permanent crosswalk. And that work will wrap up by the end of September. That work is being paid for by the developer. So it's part of their cost of doing business. So I just want to give you a heads up that that was coming. We are still looking for members for the Development Review Board and the Planning Commission and Finance Commission. We do have five candidates for the Finance Commission, but we would still be interested in two additional candidates if people are out there and looking to be involved. And you can apply for those on our city website. We have exciting news about Main Street again this week. We received notice late last month that we did receive the $400,000 VTrans Vermont bike and pedestrian grant that Heather and John and Ryan worked on. So that's over in about a month's time about $850,000 that's come into that project. That money will specifically be for bike and pedestrian improvements along Main Street. We wanted to put that in context what that meant as we bring in grant dollars to offset the local tax burden. So with those two awards, that $850,000 that calculates into $1.25 million in debt service and interest payments. So by buying down that debt, we don't have to incur interest in addition to the debt buy down. And for the life of the loan that equals out to about $550 for the life of the $550 for an average property tax payer for the life of the loan. So that's that's pretty significant money that we are deferring and a huge thank you to Heather and John and Ryan for putting together those grant applications. Just want to confirm you got a message for me today about this but we are going to change our regular October 21st meeting to October 28th. Really appreciate 29th, 29th Tuesday, October 29th. Really appreciate your flexibility in that. At your next meeting, you are going to see a retroactive request to approve a check. We need to do a mid cycle check to Cortland, which is our contractor on the Hickok Street project. They've been functioning very well and we need to pay them off cycle to meet their financial needs. It's all work that we have budgeted for it's within budget and we have authorized approval of that so we will be asking you to approve that retroactively at your next meeting. And then the fun stuff some updates on events and programs going on in the city in the next couple of weeks. So tomorrow is our next Winooski Wednesday event in Rotary Park featuring the Wild Leak River Band. It's supposed to be a pretty nice evening so encourage people to come out to that. Saturday, September 14th from 9 to 1 we're doing a Winooski River Cleanup event. So folks are encouraged to meet at the O'Brien Community Center at 9 and participate in that River Cleanup. We have a new Pokemon Club at the library on Friday afternoons at 3.15. We have a new youth librarian at the library who's really kind of running with this and is getting amazing feedback on it. So if you or your kiddos are interested in Pokemon come join their friends at Friday at 3.15 at the library. Thrive after school now that school's back in session is up and running if you're interested. We still have a few spaces left so registration if you're interested in that can register at the website. Or by emailing our new Thrive Program Director Kate Anderson who came on at the end of last month. Who we should bring to introduce to you all at some future meeting. Vermont Patriots Soccer Program is also up and running. We have 100 youth registered. They're really fun evenings watching kids of all ages play soccer. And a huge thanks to the parents and the coaches who are really making that work with all of those young people. And then finally as I mentioned last time we're having an adult three on three basketball tournament Wednesday, September 11th and Thursday, September 12th. And we're still taking registrations for that event on the website as well. That's all I have. Thank you. Thank you. Next up we have council reports. Can I start down here? Yes, you can. I have nothing to report. Downtown Manuski has also not met since our last meeting so I too have nothing to report. I had another meeting with the mayor of Burlington and the chair of the South Burlington City Council to try to finalize the agreement that we're working on this three cities for how we move forward with the moist mitigation work. Should see another revision in the next couple weeks and be able to bring that to you all to have an open discussion about how we move forward. We've continued a little bit of work on the equity recommendations, just kind of checking in after our last meeting, but no other official report. Let's move on then to our regular items. The first item of business on our agenda is potential approval of FY20 municipal resolution for municipal planning grants. Thank you Heather. You're very busy with grant work. Okay, so we're requesting approval to apply for $22,000 in a municipal planning grant. The match on what that would be $3,300 which has already been budgeted into the WCDC budget. And this funding would be a request to hire a preservation planner to come in and have a community, first of all facilitate a community conversation about our preservation priorities and secondly to give us a historic resource inventory of our entire city. So we consider this to be the first important step in coming up with a more unified and comprehensive community driven preservation plan for the city. Thank you. I'm excited to see this potential resource for this work to move forward. I was reading through the grant requirements and saw some pretty hopeful quotes in there about having a single and well defined focus direct connection to municipal plan. So I can see how this fits in. I did want to ask a couple of questions about the scoring criteria on page 38. There was mention of a statewide priority project and I'm not familiar with that term or if we fit into it. I apologize for not. They have priorities every year for these municipal planning grants and it does meet one of the priorities, which is a single planning project for visual improvement. And underneath that criteria, they make specific mention of bylaws for historic preservation. So it would meet the priority criteria and I will certainly make that case. That is awesome. There was another line about community partnership and support and I wondered if we've thought about how to demonstrate that. Well, I have already gone through and pulled up all of the front porch forum comments for about a six week period and compiled it into a single document. So I can demonstrate that this is an emerging issue in our community. I think that absolutely without fail shows that there and certainly that's one of many ways that I will speak to that. We've received this grant for the past three years straight. So coming up with what the community engagement piece of it will be has been very successful thus far. And I think we're looking at even further community engagement for this particular grant. Yeah. And I know from being at several meetings in planning commission, we have quite a few residents who are involved in historic preservation. Absolutely. I'm very on board with that. I, those are the only questions I had. I'm, like I said, excited to see this potential flooding coming through questions from my fellow counselors. I had a question. I was noticing in the grant criteria that it said any source of match funds may be used, including from nonprofit organizations and that the scoring criteria if we can demonstrate partnerships with some of those entities would be given higher scores. So I was just curious if we were thinking about the Lewinowski historical preservation society or the mill museum, if we've talked with them. Yeah. I haven't talked to them about any kind of financial match, but I'm certainly open to discussing that with them. Last year, the way that they've recently shifted the municipal planning grant is to require only 10% match. There used to be a higher requirement. What I'm proposing here is a 15% match because you get more points for going over that 10%. So I'm already kind of point crafting here, but certainly it's worth looking into to see if there are other organizations that would like to partner. Okay. And then my other question was it says if we were to receive this grant, we wouldn't be eligible for the better connections grant, which is supposed to increase transportation options. We're already not eligible for that. Okay. So it's something that we're not eligible for to begin with. Great. Thanks. Good eye for detail there. Any questions concerned in the community from the public? All right. I would then entertain a motion to approve the FY20 municipal resolution for municipal planning grant. So second. Moved by Mike. Motion by Mike, second by Jim. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Next on our agenda is a discussion from we have someone here from VTrans presenting about the exit 16 diverging diamond interchange. So John and Michael will be joining us for this. Thank you. This is warming up. I just want to thank you for having me this evening. As I was telling Jesse earlier, it's kind of been a long time coming. This project has been in the works for several years. I believe we started work initially on this project in 2012. We finally got to a point where we have a great design. We want to move forward and start public outreach process. And so this was a great opportunity to sit down and explain to the people of Konuski what we're trying to do, even though technically it's in the next town over. This exit has a great or does have a great impact to the residents of Konuski. So it's very appropriate that I'm here tonight. We just started the public outreach process for this project about two, two weeks ago, three weeks ago. Our first major outreach effort was at the fair. We spent two weeks at the fair, two weekends at the fair. And it was great to see people reach out and get feedback from them while we were there. Throughout the course of the next six to 12 months, we're going to be increasing our efforts to increase the awareness of this project when it comes and what it's all about. And you guys are one of the first on board. So I will start my somewhat short presentation. Feel free to ask questions along the way. We'll begin. What I'd like to do tonight is just share with you, if you don't already know about the project, what it is, and then show you how it works. And then we can talk about where we are in the status and the schedule of the project. So the project is almost entirely within the limits of the town of Colchester. The roadway work starts at the Winnowski town line, Winnowski City Line. And it follows Route 7 all the way up past Sunderland Woods Road and before it goes into Southern Hollow in Colchester. And it's about 1.05 miles. It includes seven signalized intersections, including the audit offerings at the interchange at exit 16. And then we are going to be doing, we had initially planned on doing some work at the Tide Industry intersection as well. And I'll talk about that in a little more depth a little bit later as well. Just what are some of the problems? Why do we have a project here? Third highest crash location in Vermont for injuries. It's the eighth highest for the total number of crashes. So it's a significant, there's a significant safety issue here. And traffic capacity as you probably are well aware of driving in and out of the interchange, it just backs up into the AM and the PM peaks. And something just needs to be done. There's too much traffic for the current interchange to handle. Primarily the biggest deficiency out there is because of the left turn in traffic. And that's really to enter and exit the interstate and traffic signals just can't handle that left turn movement. In addition to that, there's a lack of sidewalks and bicycle facilities. So folks from the Nuske for instance, they want to go to Shaw's, they want to go to CVS. They either have to take the go path alongside the road or they have to walk in the road. So it is very unsafe for those folks as well. There's no stormwater treatment out there that meets any sort of current standard. So this project will be improving that situation as well. The barrier and utility issue, utilities out there are also an issue. So we're going to try to tighten up that as well. And then finally the bridges out there are actually one of the good things about the interchange, believe it or not. They're actually structurally good, which I'm happy to report. They do not need to be replaced, which was a factor in why the DDI, which we'll talk about in a moment, was selected as the preferred alternative. So the project will have stormwater treatment infrastructure. We're going to have three dry ponds, eight grass channels. They'll be graded from the roadway. You probably won't notice them too much. We're going to be changing the banking on the roadway primarily north of the Mountain View Drive intersection to the end of the project. So that's going to be primarily a repaving operation. New sized and paid marketing to traffic signals, new drainage. And then the crowd jewel is the DDI, which is known as a divergent diamond interchange. This is an aerial photo of what exit 16 looks like today. To get you oriented, Wynuski would be on the left and south to north. So Colchester would be on the right. The Hampton Inn is the big building on the bottom right. This is a schematic of what the DDI would look like if you melted the bridges away. So you can see underneath the bridges here. And then just to kind of give it a pretty picture, we rendered it out and we added our 3D design elements to it. And this is what we are reaching out to folks with in terms of materials. So it looks complicated, but we'll talk about how it functions in a moment. Actually, we'll do it right now. The way the DDI functions is it forces traffic on the arterial highway, so not the interstate, the freeway, but Route 7, to the left side of the road under the bridges via traffic signals. And then what that does is it effectively takes away the left turning movement at a traffic signal. The traffic signal no longer has to indicate a green arrow to let traffic through against opposing traffic, because traffic is already on the left side of the road. Likewise, if you're coming off the interstate and you want to take a left, you don't need to wait for a traffic signal either because traffic on Route 7 is already on the left side of the road. So traffic entering and leaving the interstate will not only have to interface with one traffic signal instead of two. So there's a huge efficiency in time, savings in time for the overall interchange because we take those signalized movements away. This is just a quick 60 second spur video of how traffic would flow. Again, when you ski to your left and where the camera is going to shift to your right towards Colchester. So right now, northbound Route 7 traffic is crossing over to the left side of the road and they are traveling under the bridges. Traffic wanting to go onto the interstate can just slide onto the on-ramp, unopposed, while folks that want to continue north on Route 7 wait for the next signal to turn green and then cross back over. Now the green light has just turned on for the southbound Route 7 traffic and they are making the same movement just in the opposite direction. I talked about bicycles and pedestrians, how there are no facilities out there today. We are addressing that by creating sidewalks leading up to and beyond the interchange. Within the interchange there will be shared use paths. So bicyclists will be able to either take a lane in traffic and drive the cars as they're allowed to do by law in Vermont. If they are uncomfortable with that situation, there will be bike ramps where bikes can leave the roadway and use the bike shared use paths in the interchange. Where there will be crosswalks and pedestrian activated buttons to alert motorists of crossing and bike traffic. I mentioned Tykins Street earlier. Depending on the time of the Main Street Revealment Project and the time of our project, there will be some level of coordination. I've already started speaking with Public Works about this and while we are planning on updating the traffic signal at the intersection, the interface at the town-city line will need some level of coordination as well. So we plan on working closely with John and his staff and getting our lanes lined up appropriately and making sure that everything matches up nicely. Can I interrupt briefly? Yeah. What are you changing and planning to change about the Tygin signal there? Not much. There will be new infrastructure, new signal equipment, modern 21st century signal equipment and it will have some level of remote access. The reason why the city came to us early early on and asked us to include that signal into our project was because a long time ago, that signal used to be coordinated with the rest of the signals along the corridor and it might still be to some degree, but we really wanted to make sure that that signal gets upgraded with the rest of our signals so that it's all one continuous system and that should help with traffic flow. Thank you. Sure. Project status where we're at. You probably heard in the news we did get a Supreme Court decision on Friday and generally it was really well. It was in our favor for the most part. We're pleased with that decision. There was one small piece of the Act 250 permit that did have to be sent back to the environmental court so the court there could take additional testimony on one piece. I don't know the status of that hearing or what's involved with that. We're meeting with the Attorney General this week. So that's to be determined how that affects the overall timeline of the project is still up in the air as well. Before Friday our schedule was at the bottom. So this would be the earliest possible schedule. We would go to bid sometime in the winter awarded in the spring and then potentially break some ground out there later in the spring early summer. The project is going to be about two and a half years of construction. It's going to be invasive and disruptive to say the least which is one of the reasons why we're trying to get ahead of this now. Try to make as many people aware that this is happening and so that they can prepare and that we can prepare. One bright spot if you call it a bright spot when the construction of the project is we are planning on doing night work. We just have to there's too much traffic during the day to have construction equipment out the roadway. There's significant amounts of lead removal that would have to be done and we can't do that while traffic is moving obviously. So there's going to be some level of coordination with that. So the first season is primarily just going to be digging up and rebuilding everything underneath the roadway and underneath the interchange. So utilities, ledge, stormwater drainage, those are the things that we are aiming to do in the first construction year. The second construction season will be where the changes that you see are really going to come through fruition. So that's where the roadway work is going to happen. You know, we're going to have the the curved islands, those are going to start appearing. The new traffic signals will come online. Drive accesses will always be open. That's just part of what we mandate our contractors to do. And then they have to come up with a mitigation if for some reason they need to short-term close a driveway. I've got a question for you. Can I have time noise? If you have to remove lead, are you going to be blasting at night? No, we won't allow the contractor to blast at night because of debris. If a piece of debris gets away from us, we can't see where it goes. So there will be short, very short bursts of lane closures and road closures. Just enough time to allow for a quick blast and then the removal of the ledge, open the traffic again. So yeah, that's why there will be some disruption during the day. But in general, most of the work beside the ledge removal will be done. What about jar camera? Is that going to happen at night too? No. Again, that's part of the ledge removal. We would ask that the contractor try to do that during the day. There are several hotels around. They do their business at night. So we're also trying to be respectful of that. It's kind of hard to balance all that. Unfortunately, it's a very busy place during the day, but it's also sensitive at night as well. I know that residents on the upper side of Bellevue Street, Nomad Street, Weaver Street, they hear the WIC complaint at night. So that's why I was just trying to figure out what kind of noise just to let residents know and understand what's expected. Yeah, absolutely. That's part of what we're trying to do and reach out to those folks. There will be several other iterations of public outreach. I'm sure we'll have at least one more, meaning probably more, and try to get more residents involved and let them know we're coming. And I have one more question to back up to the Teagan Street. Where does the Main Street project start? Does that start at Teagan and go down? That's a question for John. That's a question for John. We started at the City Line. Now, if your project's delayed because of the Act 250 permit, and we start our project, who's going to be responsible for repairing or fixing brand new pavement that could be done by time you guys get started? Is that someone that V-Trans is going to take responsibility for after we have our infrastructure done? Because our job, that starts, correct me if I'm wrong, next spring, correct? The Main Street redevelopment? Correct. We still have to discuss with Council phasing. That's right. We haven't had the discussion to start yet. We're doing the full mile and out. Okay. I just want to try to be efficient so that we're not wasting tax dollars to pay our money. I'm ripping stuff up and want your toys and if V-Trans gets delayed on our, if we're not, I want to make sure someone's responsible for that. Right. We had similar concerns about our end because we were planning on going this spring and there was a potential of a delay in the Main Street project. We're doing this little dance here. We're filling each other out. We'll try not to step on each other's toes. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. So going back to construction the third season, if needed, we'll have the contractor come up, do some cleanup, do some landscaping. So there is that possibility. We have a project website. It's part of our public outreach plan. We've been pushing it hard. There's a lot of great information about the project more specifically than what I was able to share with you tonight. There's some great videos, animations. I'm just trying to get the word out. Go visit it. We have project updates on that website. Please sign up. And we have a 24-hour project hotline that is open now and will be open all throughout construction and probably beyond. And actually that reminds me that the education piece of all this is there is an education component to the public outreach plan where we are trying to alleviate some concerns or fears about driving on the left side of the road for 400 feet. It's not very common in the United States. So what we did is we've developed a driving simulator. We had it at the fair and it went over very well. We've reached out to drivers education programs in Colchester and we're about to do so in Muskie as well. To get the word out that this is coming and just share our experiences, share the driving simulator with them and it's gone over very well. That education component will continue throughout construction and beyond as well because once construction ends doesn't mean that we need to stop educating people on how it functions. So I just wanted to add that piece to it as well. And then if you subscribe to any of the AOT outlets on social media, there's project updates that will be fed blasted to those accounts as well. So that's what I have for this evening. If you have any questions, I'll be more than happy to answer them. Any questions? Sure. I'm curious more on the logistics of how it's all going to work. Is there literature? Is snow removal going to affect this? No. We've worked closely with our maintenance folks and they're plowing. They're going to plow the road like they would any other road, which is very similar to a lot of other western states that have DDIs that also get a lot of snow. Who have reported they have not experienced major issues with snow removal. After a large storm, our maintenance folks would probably have to come in with a smaller truck after to do some cleanup, but that's not atypical of tight intersections or interchanges such as roundabouts or the like. So they're already used to doing that so this doesn't really change how they're going to operate. And like there's a ton of track coming down by showers coming down from Costco. How will they join this interchange? Yep. So I didn't really get into the details about that, but we are improving the intersections at Mountain View Drive, Hercules Drive, and at Raddy Road as well, by the inclusion of turn lanes. At Mountain View Drive, the intersection that you speak of, we are adding a second right turn lane coming off Water Tower Hill, and then a second left turn lane coming off of Lower Mountain View Drive. And then we're going to re-phase the signal such that the two movements don't go simultaneously. So one right turn movement, the right turn movement coming off Water Tower Hill will get their time at the signal, and then don't go red, and then the Lower Mountain View Drive left turn signal won't go unopposed. So that should eliminate a lot of the issues that we're having with those two movements going simultaneously. I was wondering about the setback with the quarter. I know you can't tell exactly, but is there any, guess us, is it a months-long delay, or are you talking maybe a year or two? I honestly don't know. We're meeting, like I said, we're meeting with our attorneys this week to figure out what the next steps are. If I had it, I would certainly share it. And you expect us to hand them more cars now? We've got all the backup, then the current people? Yes. There's about 100 DDIs in the country right now in about 40 states, and they're constructing them 10 to 12 a year. What they're experiencing is huge increases in traffic, accommodation, with the added benefit of having a 60% reduction in crashes. So statistically, it's looking like a really good strategy. When the states have come together, I mean the first DDI in the country was built in 2009, and they've built 100 of them in 10 years, and they're starting to build in 10 a year that should give you its testimony to how well they function. Sure. If you guys are doing your Main Street project next year, and you guys are doing digging out the street, it's going to be a nightmare going on Main Street. I mean, the business people are going to be screaming, and just everybody's going to be given all this and that. Are you guys concerned about that? Yeah, so as we were referring to earlier, we haven't yet determined as a city if we're going to do the entire construction along the entire length of Main Street. There's been previous conversations about potentially doing from the Rotary to the Fountain or Spring, not completing the entire project right now and saving the other phases for future years. I think this definitely plays into that discussion about what makes sense and maybe it's the reverse, maybe it's from the top down. That's something that we're going to have to keep talking about, and that Michael and John will be coordinating so we know what the schedule looks like for the others. It is unfortunate though that both of our schedules are now in flux at the moment. If I can just add to that, and also I ask people to remember to introduce themselves when they're making public comment. Thank you. In terms of the Main Street project, our community development staff, communication staff have been involved with the business community since the beginning of the planning for that project. We certainly do understand that it's going to be any large scale construction as an inconvenience to businesses. So we're looking at creative ways to ensure that we send out the message that Manuski is still open for business and look for ways that we can best support, especially our small businesses along Main Street. I have a question for you about crosswalks. So it looked like on the diagram a lot of the crosswalks are going to be at on or off ramps. Correct. Can you talk about what sort of precautions or are you going to install flashing lights or what might be there for safety? Yeah, so this is a snapshot of the southbound ramp. So at the top would be the southbound off ramp and at the bottom is the southbound off ramp. The only ramp there that you see that's signalized is the southbound right turn and you can see with the stop bar. That would be that crossing there will be a standard crosswalk with a pedestrian activated push button. And then the other three which are yield conditions, well, yeah, for the sake of discussions under yield conditions, they will have the small rapid rectangular flashing beacons, exactly like what's down at the circulator. And are you also installing a crosswalk that will connect lower to upper mountain view drive? Yes. I don't have any diagrams to share with you on that, but there will be three of the four approaches at that intersection will have crosswalks. The walking, it looks like from your diagram there goes behind the post, is that correct? That's correct. Now there's no room there right now because it's just all rocks there. How are you going to make it for it? Our contractor will have to get behind there and excavate that out. Back in 2011-2012 there was a sidewalk project that was originally scheduled to go in along this stretch, but got postponed because this project was coming through. And the original plans for that were to excavate from behind the piers and install the sidewalk. We took the same plans and modified them a bit such that we're going to put the shared use paths in and put some walls. Has there been experience in the Northeast with the lack of striking that happens for a period of time and how this will function for people who are used to either knowing the road or having physical barriers to separate lanes or for the five months we actually do have line striking. How does that work? Because in the western states it's a different situation in terms of maintaining striking and clearing of the roads, so I'm just curious how that will work. Yeah, absolutely. We do struggle with keeping our line striking down. Well, with DDIs we're going to have signage in advance of the interchange that's overhead that's not currently there now. That would hopefully get people lined up into the proper lane assignment. So that'll help. We'll have the raised islands there are going to make it very restrictive and no channelized traffic to where it needs to go. And then the pavement markings, the package that we're prescribing is a very robust material. It's called thermoplastic and it's going to be set into the pavement. They're going to grind a groove into the pavement and then fill that groove with this hot thermoplastic that cools. And in Vermont we've started using it on a roundabouts where we get a lot of torsion and thermoplastic has been holding up very well even during the winter time. So we're going to use that material on this project because we can't afford to have to keep coming back through here and repaint it every year. Because it's just a crucial part of the design. I know you're talking about doing ongoing outreach and education. Is there anything else that you've learned from other communities who implemented one of these in the getting used to it portion? It's kind of interesting because they've done less outreach than what we're trying to do here. We have videos in a lot of those communities hadn't ever done that. Missouri, which was the first state to implement DVIs on a large scale, essentially just built them and then crossed their fingers. But it worked out very well. It's very intuitive. If you've ever driven through one out west or in the south, it's very intuitive unless you're making really sharp turns to or off of the interstate. So what they've experienced was that they felt like they were able to get by without it or a small amount. Based on our experience, would they say roundabouts for instance? And the fact that this would be the first in New England, we really wanted to take the bull by the horns and make sure our faces were covered with outreach and education. So we weren't going to roll the dice like they did. Well, that's promising. We think so. Other questions from Council? Other questions from the public? Well, thank you for coming in. Thank you. I appreciate it. And Michael is going to be joining me for In the World of Winooski on September 24th to kind of do this presentation again in a recorded format that we'll be able to share out with community members. So we will also help get the word out for you. Absolutely. Great opportunity. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. That's nice meeting you. Did you just follow Jeremy for something? No. No. This one. Oh, okay. Did I miss that memo? Should I call a brief recess for the news to depart? Or are you good? I'm good to go. Okay. Just checking in. Is it Mike as well? Okay. I know we've been before. It's a lot of Mike's here today. Yeah, you can join us too. Yes. We can move on then to our next item, which is discussion of the scholarship policy and Ray Coffey will be joining us. Just while Ray helps us some EV stuff to table set a bit. So this is similar to the affordable housing trust fund policy we brought you. We have brought you in the past, just a reminder that the council approves high level policy for the city. And then we develop internal procedures and guidelines for how to implement that policy on an operational basis. So what you have before you tonight is a proposed policy, which is a new policy for the city, and then also a set of draft guidelines and a form as well. So you can see the whole picture, but really what we are looking for your feedback on is the policy. Correct. And just, I think, a little additional table setting there. So we, for a long time, have dealt with scholarship requests on a case-by-case basis because we were not running outside of the Thrive program a lot of fee-based programs through our community services program for quite some time. We were able to do that. Now that we're starting to ramp that up, look at diversifying revenue streams and adding more programs to the mix, we're seeing more and more requests for scholarship support. And so we felt like we really needed to put some of that on paper to help us structure that. So the draft in front of you tonight is hopefully going to help us do that. You know, I think, again, we are here to seek feedback and get your thoughts. Take that back to the drawing table and make some updates as needed, and then come back in a couple of weeks and share that update. So a couple of things to note. Again, as Jesse mentioned, the form here, which is, I believe, in your packet, the first page of what you've got in the PDF. The idea with that is that we want to, we're going to attach that to every application for a fee-based program that goes out. We really want to avoid the situation where folks requesting scholarships have to come in and ask for another piece of paper. So every fee-based program that goes out, regardless, will have that attached. And then within the web-based service, that will be added as a prompt as well. So again, anybody going through checking out is going to see that and have that as an option. We felt like that's a good way to sort of reduce what can be a barrier for folks feeling stigma about coming in and asking for that help. We are also giving folks options to kind of self-select into different tiers. And then also if we make a request separate, that is more a program for the program that they're applying for, since this will be applied across multiple types of fee-based programs. And then the last thing, just to highlight, and then, you know, give Jesse credit for this thought, is really trying to look at, for the folks who are already accessing other benefit programs, let's not make them go through another loop, let's try to use the work they've already done as a way to justify the ask. So we're asking that if people do look for scholarship support over 25 bucks that they select, or self-select into one of these programs that they're already receiving benefits from, and then use the documentation they already have as a means of justifying the ask. So that's kind of a little bit of a snapshot of what that front page looks like. And then I think, you know, hopefully from a positive perspective it's fairly straightforward. I think I guess rather than reading it all to you would ask if there are questions, and certainly I want to take notes and get feedback tonight. So I'll stop there. I appreciate the thought that's gone into how to address these requests in a more, you know, you're removing some bias out of it, removing some of the barriers to access. I was curious about the list of programs that's included, like how did you come to that as the... Sure. So that was mirroring within the DCF state subsidy program the list of other eligible programs that they have there. So we took that list and pulled that over. The ones that, the one that we did add here is refugee resettlement support. So that's not specified within the DCF program as a specific kind of program that makes you eligible. But we felt like here that's an important one for us to acknowledge and kind of call. So we added that to the list there. I also noticed that there was called out in here some implicit bias training for staff who would have made these decisions. Is that something that we will be starting new or have we been doing this for these staff before? So we've done a staff-wide implicit bias training probably a year ago. So I expect that that's something that we'll want to keep up and keep offering. So, you know, at this point we have quite a few staff, pretty much everybody from our department has been through that. But certainly if we have a person appointed to that committee, we go and find a way to get them that training in addition. Do you have an estimate of how many you think are going to apply for our scholarship? It's tough to know. I think partially because we haven't, we haven't led with this. You know, we haven't made it widely known with the exception of the community gardens program. But because the price point there is fairly low, we haven't seen an enormous amount of users there. I'm trying to remember Angela from the gardens. So 500 dollars for the gardens? Yeah. So it's not a huge sum of money. So where does the revenue come from furthest? So that I think upon approving of the policy is going to be the next question. You know, certain programs like the garden program has some funding set aside, our youth football program has some funding set aside. But that's going to be a conversation I think for us to have and for us to do some work on as we look at revenue coming in, how are we leveraging that? How much are we scrolling away? How are we sort of starting to structure budgets and programs that are going to be sustainable over time? So would you say that the budget would put a number on people that would be able to be eligible for this? Say like 100 for just numbers to just throw them out there. So dependent on what we can sort of identify at the beginning of a fiscal year, or in this case we're going to be a little off-cycle because we're a little while into the year, we'll set parameters for the year and say we're going to spend up to this amount. And that dollar amount that we set will be done in such a way that we're not going to blow through reserves. You know, we're going to look at that as a sustainable approach and say, our community garden program is running an annual revenue of, you know, positive revenue of 300 bucks. We're not going to say every year we're going to give away $600 of scholarship. We're probably going to say we'll give away 100, sock away 200, and keep some overage and grow some nest eggs. So I think it's a little bit to be determined and also will be determined on sort of a program-by-program basis. Again, some programs have scholarship money already and others don't. I think we also received specific donations for scholarships for programs. Yes. Okay, that's the next question I was having. But I also think we need to look at this the other way. I mean, I think I agree with everything that they've just said, but I think we do need to look at this the other way, too, in that we've, as far as I know today, we've never only run programs that pay for themselves. We have always subsidized programs to some level. So it is as much about putting money aside specifically for scholarships as it is about just being more transparent about where we anticipate raising revenue to fund community services and to what extent we are subsidizing that with taxpayer dollars and being more transparent about that. So I think that there is a pathway here where we may say, we're going to come to you with a budget ask of X dollars specifically for a scholarship fund. There may also just be how we account for that in the revenue. You know, we're going to work in whole numbers. We're going to run a program for 100 kids that cost a dollar per program, but we're going to only count on $80 of revenue for that program. I'm just using hard numbers. So it's not solely about raising money for subsidies. It's also how we track what we project the revenues for each program will come in. We have never raised the money through program fees to pay for the programs we offer. We've never done that through cost accounting. And we're not suggesting we do that now. We're just trying to develop a system where we're a little bit more aware of one, what is raising revenue, how we can increase our program offerings, and to ensure that we're removing bias and three, ensure that we're following our own financial policies about waving fees for folks. No, I think that's great. This is very good right here. To get back on the donation, is there grants available for such a program like this? Do we know? I think so. I think it would be a hard find to find a grant to see a scholarship fund. I think most funders want to be able to see, through grant programs, want to be able to see an immediate outcome, a project, a program, et cetera. I think the more likely path from a fundraising perspective or grant seeking perspective would be to look at individuals to help support this, either through having an ask on every registration. Do you want to add five bucks to your fee to fund the scholarship fund, or potentially to find individual or individuals to support the funds? There's not a lot of grant programs I think that would give you money to just... Well, with the checklist you have here, I think there might be, because there's some, I mean, it's pretty straightforward, and I think maybe there's something out there that could help us. Yeah, we'll certainly look around and see what's out there. And I would say, like to Jessie's point earlier, there has always been a value that the city would be providing some services, right? So when we say we're subsidizing something, the city is providing the service. And that's a decision for this body, for safe, healthy, connected people, for the public decision-making process to say, these are services we want to provide with taxpayer dollars. Maybe other ones aren't. Like, there's a question in there that we can think about as information becomes available. Like, I feel like once this gets going, we're going to come to a later decision of, like, here's the way the money played out. You know, we ran out six months into the year, and we need more money, or we need to change the way we're looking at this. And I think right now our staff's value statement, and this is a question for the Council over time, is this is not meant to prevent anyone from participating. Our goal is, if there is a, especially a young person who wants to participate in a program, they get to participate. This is just a way that we kind of monitor and track and have good justification so we can go to our auditor so we can come to you and say we're using dollars wisely. So I think if we really got to a point where we were running out and turning people away, we would need to take a really hard look at how we're budgeting or how we're managing the system. So I just want to jump in on that point, Jesse, because there is a piece in the policy outline right now that says people who can receive the scholarship have to be in good financial standing with the city. And that, you know, I would love to hear more about how we came to that point of the policy because it made me really uncomfortable, quite frankly. Like I think, especially a young child who wants to participate in a program, and then their parents, oh, I don't know, money on a water bill, is that really fair to deprive them the opportunity to learn and grow with their peers? So I think, and I think the language in terms of good financial standing is designed to be specific to the community services department. So, you know, tax bills, water bills, parking tickets, that sort of stuff outside our purview. If it's not spelled out that way, I'll make sure we go back and look at that. I want to really stay focused kind of on the recreational programming side of things. So, and I think, you know, heard and understood, I think with that said, we try to be really clear and transparent with families up front about what the costs are, the programs that we do, and I think to Jesse's point, already pretty deeply subsidized a lot of the work that my department does. And so, I want to be sensitive, believe me, I'm, as Angela and Jesse will test, the bleeding heart of all bleeding hearts. I want to be sensitive to that. At the same time, I don't want to create a situation where families feel like, you know what, I'm just going to sign my kit up for Thrive for the whole year, blow off that cost, which for us ends up being thousands of dollars, and then turn around on August 31st and ask for a scholarship or something. So, I think. So, it's really about program fees that haven't been paid? Correct. Correct. And I think it's, you know, yeah, exactly. And again, I'll take a look and make sure that that's very clear within the language here, if it's not. Now, to her point, now, if a family is at a point where, say, for just an example number, they owe $500 for a program, but they can only afford $250 and they pay it, they're trying to pay it. Are you, is that a flag for their children to participate or for them to participate? As long as they're actively trying to pay, is that they may be behind, but at least if they're giving you $10 a week. So, we do that all the time with families. You do, okay. Just look behind where we're very open to setting up payment plans. And so long as a family stays on that payment plan, we'll let them enroll for future programming. Do you have a question? Yeah, the, well, I do, I do want to point out that Ray you're right, that it's very explicitly to the community services program and that you can either be on a payment plan or paid all your dues. Yes. So, it doesn't have, you don't have to be zero balance. You can be on a payment plan. And how many people do you have on payment plans? Generally, like, two, 20, 40. So, all of the fraud is technically on payment plans. Right. And we do have a handful of, a handful of registrations that are currently on payment plan. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And just to clear for others, Jim knows because you've been part of that program, but with Thrive, it's a payment plan in that it's a year-long program. So, when you sign up, you see the total cost, but you pay that off in weekly increments. So, we don't ask people to pay the full cost up front for Thrive. Adam, so the question I have is around the restriction barring Wynieski Employee Families from receiving these. I'm assuming that there are probably folks in our employee who do qualify for these programs. And I'm sure this comes around conflict of interest or undue influence issues. But I'm going to say I'm wondering how hard that line is if there is any room to open this up to family members. It's a great question. I think I'm about to pass the book, but I can't get back to you all to sort of talk about that. I mean, I think it's a great point. You know, I think for reasons to be mentioned, we kind of left that separate and apart. But I think if Council felt strongly, we should make that available, then we can sort of answer that. And I guess it kind of dovetails with the second question I had around conflict of interest, because reading the procedures and the committee of staff who will review this, you could make a... you could have a favorable determination for a person because you have liked that person. There could be other reasons that you have conflict of interest around maybe you're the teacher for the program and you want to get as many folks in the door for your program. So are the city, and maybe this is for Jesse, are the cities like conflict of interest standards basically governing this committee that someone would recuse or identify those conflicts? And if so, couldn't that basically solve the family participation problem as well? Yeah, that's a good question. I think we should revisit that before we ask you to approve this. My off-the-cuff answer is I think our personnel policies that talk about being good stewards, being responsible for taxpayer dollars, et cetera, as well as like the financial checks and balances of who can actually approve expenditures would cover that. But I think that's worth calling out where those... what policy kind of rains here and how we might get around this employee issue with those policies. And I don't know how other members feel, but it seems like it would be... I mean, I think about our housing trust fund would be open to city employees and it would be nice to have that be something extended in this case, too. I also feel like what you say is too small to have a hard and fast. Like, I know this person, so I can't be involved in this decision. There's just too many connections here. Could there be a way to make them, the applications blind that you don't know? I would just assume disclosure would be enough. I mean, we have the same roles in ours like we have conflict of interest. We disclose and if we feel that we can still participate, we do if you... Right, you make a judgment on your own. As long as you're being honest, I feel like the same could apply. But I would hate to see our... Yeah, our money scheme employees not be able to take advantage of the program. I'm also a big fan of relying on existing policy instead of making them less. Okay, so I'm hearing generally positive feedback about having eligibility for staff to access this and then we'll look at the conflict of interest policy and which one governs here. Those are great questions. And then my last one, and then I'll stop, is the requirement to recertify every fiscal year for eligibility. Will that align favorably with the other programs in that do they all cycle on a fiscal year? Of course. Is it all over the place? I guess I'm just worried that I would worry if someone was like, well, I don't know if I'm going to be eligible because they'll tell me July 1st and you want to sign up for July program. That's the one question that rose when I was looking at those. No, that's a great question. So a lot of the... Well, I'll speak to the Child Care Financial Assistance Program which we know well. So that program is really dependent on the individual as to when the cycle starts and ends. So if a family has a change in eligibility for that program, that can happen at any point. If they have a shift change and suddenly they don't have a service need as designated state, if they get a pay raise and their subsidy goes down, that certificate sort of reboots and then it's a one-year certificate. So we have certificates beginning and ending kind of all over the year. And I think, again, I haven't worked a lot with the details of these other programs, but I suspect they are similar in that way that you've got families kind of coming on and off all over the map. So it's a good question. I think it's something we'll have to sort of play by year. But with us, I think if we know that every fiscal year we're going to be rebooting that and we have families that are historically asking for support we would then have a time on the map where we could say, you know, every April, May we're going to prioritize two weeks. We're going to really push and try to get those documents updated for the next year. It's a good question. I think just adding to that, how I have interpreted this, which is part of the discussion right is how we find to this, is that we're not necessarily, you know, in that attempt to both have documentation but lower barriers. We're not going to say, well this, you know, as long as you can demonstrate one of these that's currently active, that's good for the year. We're not going to say your reach up expires in six months, so we're only going to give you authorization through six months. We're going to make the assumption that you qualify for something, you get the access to this for our year. And then I think it's a good point that we can adjust that timeline as we learn more about how to implement this. But the intention isn't here that we can account for every day that they receive a subsidy that they are qualified for something. It's more to demonstrate that we have a process, we have a criteria. We're looking at that. We're not arbitrarily making scholarship decisions based on who we perceive as needing whatever. You're eligible for your year. You're eligible for your year. I don't think that's the way that it's written out. One of the documents I think is the procedures that specifically says that they'll recertify every fiscal year. So it's on the fiscal year cycle. So I think that would be great that if it's like the others where you're eligible for a year from proving eligibility, great. That sounds really good to me. I just had one other point. I realize this crosses into the less policy more procedural. I think the application itself is written at a very high level and in terms of reading level where I work, we work with a lot of vulnerable and low income people. We try to aim for eighth grade reading level and I think that this would be way beyond that. So I would just encourage you and your team to there's a lot of free tools out there that I could send your way but you can essentially take your application and put it into this widget and it will rate it with a bunch of different criteria and tell you how high it is. That would be fantastic. Are you happy to send that your way? Any more questions? Is there any other feedback that would be useful to you today? I think this is definitely really helpful. Amy, if you're able to send that document or the document translator that would be awesome and we can do that because it's kind of right size in terms of reading level and then I think make some of the other adjustments but I think it's super helpful. It's a really helpful conversation. Thank you. Awesome. Next item is Pine Grove Theater Store Water Improvement Project Clean Water Block Grant and then the number one. So this is a request for our advice grant agreement with the CCRPC to increase the grant award amount from the original 79,350 to 104,119 so it basically increases the grant we're receiving in the 50% match by 24,769 dollars and then the other request is authorization for an additional 8200 for fund balance so this request is for additional construction phase services that we've encountered during the sort of close construction inspection work so during engineering we observed that we ran into a lot of clayey soils so that required sort of an enhanced look at how we're addressing those clayey soils so we have an onsite inspector doing some equipment basically out there checking compaction we had to do some advanced assessment of with this increased pond height how that impacts the slope stability so that amendment to the original engineering contract was $8,800 and actually just to go back because I think some of you may not be really familiar with this project because it started last year so this project just general overview is we have an updated MS support permit through DEC 2012 one of the requirements in this updated stormwater permit is that we have to do some improvements for Morehouse Brook which this trains into so Morehouse Brook was found to be an impaired watershed so in 2016 we did a study with Stone Environmental to look at options that we have to perform this work DEC requires that we do a project to treat this impaired watershed by 2022 so this pine growth tennis project was found to be sort of best bang for the buck to get our stormwater credits for this project so there are some regulatory issues with this project that is required I have some very specific questions but we would like to open it up your first question is the same as mine which I assume is related to the clay east oils that you discovered my question was why did the project budget go up and as you said you observe clay soils which require I guess what is the new activity that's taking this additional funds to deal with that so we have amended that it's $800 for an onsite inspector to do the soils inspection to do the slopes of the lay analysis and then why isn't Colchester increasing its cost share or is that part of it they had an original cost share match but I don't know it wasn't clear to me whether the budget in there was modified in all fronts or is it just the Wienewski cost share and the overall grant amount working with their public director they will be supplying 10% of our actual costs an actual cost meaning minus the grant award so right now it's projected at like $10,412 that may go up but basically whatever we get whatever the final expenses minus the grant that's what they're willing to care yeah because their original when we saw this back in July was like $19,000 we've had some discussions after that meeting with Colchester and rightfully so they're willing to kick in the actual cost minus the grant we tried to meet the argument that there's some administrative costs on our time that we're covering but you know when this original flow restoration plan for Morehouse Brook was established that 10% parameter with actual costs was a point of discussion so we're holding that and sticking to what our actual expenses are and the other change that I noticed was that there's no line item for drilling anymore but the engineering cost went up about $15,000 yeah so they consolidated the items into one item so if you're looking at engineering inspections we have an agreement with Stone for $40,250 New England was they did some initial subsurface investigation work was $4,888 and then that additional amendment that I was talking about with the Clay Soils is also in that $55,138 okay and then I appreciate that you included you want to pull this money out of reserves and you have the balance there to show us there's still a little over $300,000 remaining yeah my hope is that you know with the inspection we're hoping it comes under budget we don't want to utilize the whole $8,200 so there is a little bit of buffer in that $8,200 because the proposal is time and materials the amendment for the engineering art so that's the height of what we other questions here let us all just take this as a reminder that all projects are estimated and increases are not uncommon when we're thinking about budgeting but I understand like this is something that we have to do and it's nice that we're able to at least pull from the reserve and not you know we're not doing an actual additional increase to the money we're taking then yeah and we'll add most projects we now we typically add at least a 10 or 15% contingency this is a project we had a sort of a contingency line so that's one of the reasons we've come back for additional fund balance you know I'm wondering shouldn't they have known that there was play there before they started though wasn't there was no test before they started so we did initial soil boring investigations we did a plumber engineering report we knew the sort of the characteristics of the soil and that there was clay really again really into the details what we found was there's a outlet structure and within that outlet structure we need a sort of draining material and then within the pond itself we're looking at ways to drain the additional head into that collar we'll call it the drain collar so that it doesn't create sort of holes into the structure so preliminary investigation we knew but it took us to get until we got out in the field and really saw how much clay we were dealing with and some of the groundwater issues that we were dealing with we had to do a more robust sort of design and then slopsability came into as a concern so it was kind of later in the project stages these concerns were addressed any more questions seeing and hearing none I would entertain a motion to approve the pine grove terrestrial water improvement project clean water black grant amendment number one so moved motion by Jim second by Amy all those in favor please say aye motion carries with that we have reached the end of our agenda as we have tabled our final item to our next meeting I would entertain a motion to adjourn so moved motion by Amy second by Mike all those in favor please say aye meeting adjourned thank you John