 I didn't know I was facilitating this session in this particular session until about three minutes ago. I knew I was facilitating, but Paul's trick is you don't let me know which one. So a regional commission should be convened to develop a plan for flood prevention. We've read that before. Does anyone have any questions about we're in the right room? So we have about 10 minutes here to talk about what, so let me bring it back up. The goal of this is to develop a couple, two, three action steps that we can actually recommend to the commission that's going to be formed, which will be a bunch of volunteers to get behind. I'm going to pass around, maybe I'll do that now, and I'll start passing around the sheet. And this sheet meant for you to get more information, okay, and hopefully get behind as the commission forms and these ideas start to kind of come to fruition. So rather than wait to the end, I'm going to go ahead and just pass this around and please sign up so you can stay in the loop with what's happening. We're going to spend 10 minutes talking about what steps are necessary to take right now to kind of get this moving. So I'm going to give everyone a voice here, so let's be relatively short so we can make sure that everyone has a chance to speak. Yes, ma'am. The next step would be to find out what persons or bodies or organizations already exist which have knowledge and or authority over repair and management. We have a special mention. We have a scribe here who's taking notes so that we don't lose any of these thoughts. I guess I'm Cindy. I guess I feel there's a step even before that which is who is going to do this work, actually. You know, commissions are often where ideas go to die and that cannot happen in this commission. Can I ask a question to the group that was mentioned in the larger group that there was an existing structure already around such a thing? Right. Someone speak to that just so we can record maybe who might be doing this. Some of this work already. I'm sure I can see a little to it. Christian Meyer, director of the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission. We're 23 towns here in Central Vermont and a little few towns up in Orange County. We cover as much of the Wenuski water basin. Michelle Bernanke at Columbia Next to Me, director of Friends of the Wenuski. So we do have the structure where governments are meeting regularly monthly to come together and talk about these inter-school issues and how they confront them. We're really seeing throughout supporting the disabilities and looking at land policies. We expanded the transportation and clean water to a degree. And energy and climate change and adaptation. We're often kind of a Swiss Army night. Whatever tool you need you can pull it out. Can I just ask, are you a body that could identify the appropriate experts and marshal them? Like, aren't you looking at the people who would be leading this effort? Or does there need to be something on top or different from your body? I can't speak to that directly. I mean, it could be our body, but I don't want to assume that one that addresses the needs of the residents in Montpelier. Or two, that we're necessarily best suited for. There are other options like organizations. I mentioned Friends of the Wenuski and there's the Natural Resources Defense Council. There's also state agencies like EEM. They want to be addressing moving oil, watershed, as well as the Wenuski as well as the Black River, etc. So it might be part of a bigger thing. We can definitely push the group like that and we do do that conditionally. But I think it's for the community to come together and make that decision if we're the best at it. So acronyms can get lost a little bit. So Vermont Emergency Management, is that right? Yes. No, that's okay. So to make sure we can capture that. Others? Michelle? I would just say, you know, this, I've worked with the river for 25 years. And I know only about a tenth of the people in this room. And I think it's fantastic that so many people are interested in the river. And so that would be a reason I would say not to just hand it off to Christian or me or us to work on this. Because I think it's important that as many people who want to be involved, sorry. Maybe it's important to recognize the groups who may have a role in this as professionals. To make sure they have a seat at the table and participate with the community on that. To make sure we don't miss anybody who's already doing some of this work. Right? That would be important. I'll just throw another name out there. I work as an administrative assistant for the Vermont River Concertancy. Yes. So we're already doing a lot of this work. Other initial first steps? I think quantifying the challenge from flooding, rain event flooding, and from ice jam flooding. We can get the data from this last flood, from all the gauges on the Winooski and the North Grants and the Confluence. And then get climatologists and hydrologists, whomever, to come up with the worst case scenario. You know what? When the next storm or another big storm is 20, and the air is 20 degrees warmer. So we're going to have exponentially more rainfall. What's that? Is it too much to even contemplate addressing? Or is it within our means to come up with a plan to know what the greatest probable rain event will be? And the flows coming in through the Winooski and the North Grants and then exiting from the Confluence downstream. Can we determine whether or not we can increase the flow capacity of the Winooski from the Confluence downstream to accommodate that worst case scenario where we don't flood again? But we don't know that yet. So let's figure that out. Another thing in this goes with what you were saying at first is also getting in touch with those other municipalities that already have these commissions or organizations happening. And it's not just upstream, it is downstream. Like Richmond's got to be on board as much as Cabot is on board. And so really taking a holistic look at the watershed. One other question for you. I hear that you're meeting frequently about these issues. Are these open to the public? Or are these smaller departmental meetings? What are the avenues for people to get more involved in? Maybe that's for after this roundtable. Yeah, I'll hunt on that one. I think it's a longer conversation. And I don't even know all the organizations that are already having these conversations. And we are engaged in the wordings. There's a regional wordings mentioned. So that's not just doing water. It's not just doing water. So it is complicated. I think we need to get the table along with a lot of other folks. So we can have as long as we're there. Reading something different. Other thoughts around initial first steps or actions to help kind of fuel some of the early stages of this work? I think there's things that we know through friends of Manuski and the River Conservancy and from our rivers program that we have. It's Department of Environmental Conservation. Things that we could do today. We know about rain guards. We know about impervious surfaces. So I think it's kind of like that one option that was about developing a tool. We could develop a quick list as we're doing these other things. Here are things that towns or homeowners could do with their own yards that's going to help slow the water down. Not necessarily in the river maybe, but just so it doesn't get to the storm grade. So it doesn't get to the river so quickly. I think that would be a good first step. Well yeah, I guess I would say, yeah, let's start a new commission, right? Like really going to the regional planning commission friends of Manuski existing groups and maybe soliciting their feedback on what is, you know, if they've been advocating, a lot of people haven't been advocating for strategies to keep water in contour and slow it down. As a side note, I don't know what's going on with this dog river. What the hell is that? We're going to talk about two grandiose ideas and then there's this 200 yard stone embankment. So three days ago when I saw it, I mean it's insane. So what is all this for? So there is existing systems in place. How do we support or do we form a new commission? Another one of perhaps a redundancy? We're talking a lot about existing non-profit or government entities. What about the private sector that has, like it was mentioned several times in the first meeting that there's a lot of professionals in our community, in Vermont, who are already doing this work. Jamie, you had spoken a little bit to this, you know, in terms of, there's people who are studying this stuff at Middlebury College at the UVM and Dartmouth and we have people in our community who are engineers and architects. You know, can we talk into some of that? Well, thank you very much. Wonderful segue to what I was going to say anyway. In terms of the experts, I think that there's the convening experts in bodies and then there are the experts who have been studying. The ones I'm familiar with are all based around something called the Vermont EPSCORE program. How is it based out of the University of Vermont, but it included St. Michael's Middlebury, Dartmouth, etc. The point being, the folks who have for a decade, I think at least, been studying what's happened, what's going to happen in terms of climate change, watershed. What I was going to raise my hand for this anyway was to say at the outset of any work like this, I think bringing those folks in to help prioritize where, you know, if there's a lot to be done, where's the biggest bang for the buck in focus going forward? I know some of the groups in Vermont Rivers, Conservancy, and others may already have some of that in their hands, so I don't want to discount. Expertise already in the hands is in the folks in the room, but to the extent it's beyond what they already have, we have those experts and I think they should be brought in to help guide their priorities. Can you say again the name of that group? It's Vermont EPSCORE. It's a wonderful acronym, E-P-S-C-O-R. It's a National Science Foundation. Yeah, it's a National Science Foundation to stimulate research in various states around the country, and the point is that one of the focuses of the Vermont EPSCORE program in recent years was resiliency in the Chesapeake, excuse me, I used to live in D.C., in the Champlain Basin. And I interviewed them, many of them, for things I was doing, and they talked all about river floodplains and rainfall projections You have a few more minutes here, here and then here. When we're talking about higher education, let's remember Norwich University, and they have a specific program, civic engagement. It's a huge part of that university is giving back to the community, the engineering program, that university is all about on the ground learning. This is kind of a perfect project. So Jason, I have to pick on you. We have the principal of our school here, and so like, is there a way that we can engage that was brought up in this importance of engaging the youth, engaging the younger population? Like, is there a way that we can capture that in some of this work? Absolutely. We have a strong community-based learning program. In Key, you're meeting with Matt, playing on Wednesday. That's right. So we've already started to lay the groundwork of that conversation of how we can attract our students, and even the commission next door getting something voiced. So we're a member of our conservancy who is doing that face-to-the-river class here at the head school of the North Branch Nature Center as well. And these students put forward incredible ideas for how we can redesign the town to be front-of-their tour winners. So they're already engaging with these questions. I'd love to, I'm from North Branch, this is Emily Seifer. I'd love to show fans how many people have seen the films that these students put together and that were shown in the Pavilion building last winter. So you all should, you'll be so inspired. The North Branch Nature Center's website, the presentations, you'll find it. Get to stop wearing them and spend a couple of evenings. Just going back, excuse me, to the whole watershed analysis as well. Making sure it's complete. We have so many different sources of information. The university sources, the one that you mentioned. So taking a coordinate book, one of the things that we, I think we do need to take a look at is our soils and our forests because our soils are very, very wet right now and we really need to take a look at will they get due wet and will we lose them that way, for example. So there's a lot of upstream work to do which will involve other communities as well. And there's so many resources here. I'll have time for maybe one more. I just want to point out that having been through a lot of these different processes, having people sign up, as the time goes forward, you have less and less people involved. And so my question to you all is like, or maybe as an action item, how do we keep the community engaged? This flooding event will go hopefully stay in the distance for a while, right, before the next flooding event. Five years, ten years from now, you may have forgotten what happened during our week or you may have forgotten. So I just want to kind of emphasize the point of trying to keep the community engaged in this conversation and there's burnout in the volunteers and these different commissions and stuff. So just thinking about how we can kind of continually bring in the reinforcements as people are going to step off naturally for other reasons. Is there any other thoughts on action items just to kind of kick start? Maybe we'll take one or two more thoughts and then we'll transition. Yeah, I'm Patrick here with Middlesex and just a late person around this so I appreciate you hearing from all the experts. But I wanted to sort of follow a bunch of ideas, but I think in particular, Collins, about sizing the scale of the problem. I know how important rain gardens are and rain barrels and all, small scale things like that, but with the magnitude of the issues, like expecting it coming, I'm afraid those would be a drop in the bucket. And so getting that F-Score group or whatever it was called and really commissioning them to design a plan that can be responded to so we really know what that worst case is seems get the ecological engineers involved so we can really decide what seems important and seems like a defined action item that then the commission can respond to. Hi, I'm Diana. I live in Montpelier. It seems like what would be really useful would be some kind of picture of the whole watershed and somebody being able to say this potential for controlling water is here, here, and here. This is the places to focus on. That's a great project. That might exist by A and R. Create a model, a late model. You know, just a 3D, you know, equipment. There's right now a functional slide plan initiative. Oh, there's already an initiative. It's a slide plan initiative. Functioning the plan initiative. It's a multi-state collaboration of people working together in the end, folks, private consultants, nonprofits, everybody. I think they're tied in with things. They are. Yeah? All right. I want to ask the thing that the exact for the city of Montpelier. The city also needs to be able in these conversations to inform people what we are currently doing and the conversations that we're having with A and R, really with the river management about how to even manage the free that's in there now. Should we be removing some of this debris? How do we do our catch bases? What does that look like? How much volume have we lost in capacity from this current event where we sit today for the next month? So can we elaborate on that? Yes. Yes. One of the things that we've learned during this disaster is how important communication is. And so for the city to know what's happening with these conversations or the various entities and all of us who are trying to volunteer. So having some kind of structure of communication that can be accessible so that everyone knows what's happening and they're not reinventing the wheel and doing something on the side is already happening. Yeah. So something that some people may not be aware is from 2011, we have a list of hotspot areas that can check before every single storm and that actually helped prevent further flooding that may have occurred. Like we had staff at the front line breaking out the inlet to make sure that it didn't over top and flood matter. Fantastic. So I said last one, Bob. You have one last question. No, no, no. I didn't transition to the last sources, but... Okay. Okay. You have sneaked in during the six sources that you'd like. So we're going to spend, we have about 10 minutes to finish up. So we're going to spend seven minutes and we're going to recap the last three. So seven minutes, let's talk about what resources we need to enable this group. Do we need funding? Do we need... What do we need? What are the resources that is going to take for this group to really get going? We need someone to collect the resources, the intellectual resources that already exist. We need a list maker. And it should probably be someone who's pretty integrated into the river or natural resources community already, a group or a person. So they can make comprehensive lists of what talent we already have and what they're doing. Any thoughts? All the resources we might need. Just a piggyback from that. So I did this for a project in Northfield where we created this spreadsheet. You have the entity, what their assets are, their intellectual assets, their equipment assets, whatever it may be, contact information. So you have to know what each person can bring to the table for. Contact information and what their skill is or what they can bring to the table. What resources do we might need? Just knowing how often people are in meetings trying to connect to information with one another, I wonder if there are other ways that we could be using technology to share information with one another. I think meetings are great and connecting with others is great. And I know none of us need to sit in another meeting just to collect information from another partner organization or whatever. So I think you can think creatively about how we share information across these different brilliant entities. Right. Just for these three meetings alone, people have been able to participate virtually because they are single parent and all of them or if they weren't able to actually participate virtually they could go on to the board and they could kind of communicate so those kind of technologies accessibility too, right? People might not be able to participate in these types of discussions. What was going to say, in addition to studying this commission being responsible for studying and laying out what the action items might be in conjunction with the experts might be the purpose of this commission to also be doing the outreach and gathering volunteers to actually complete the work. Getting those people who are going to go out and plant trees on river banks who are going to help get involved and actually get their hands dirty much like the disaster preparedness brigade idea that we talked about before. So like Paul said, an idea that maybe didn't make it into a group can actually get incorporated into all of the groups. That policy of a brigade really should be integrated into all of these ideas, right? So great. I like the concept of the CCCs, the CCCs where roads literally got built pretty much everything they used today got built. We can't force it on CCC but we can create a more peculiar CCC and I bet a lot of youth. We already have one. We have a lot of CCCs and a lot of youth. So that was really interesting on just on that note, you know, Alec who runs the parks and had all of these volunteers on other purposes and got into the work because they were happy to be here through that program. They did an amazing job. Other resources. The technology, I take the point, and if we are in search of a good meeting room, I will offer up Mark Brinich, as a place to meet. We run and we'll have to work around that schedule but there's plenty of if that was of interest, it would hold this number of people really comfortably and there's even a breakout space. Okay. Is there any funding that's necessary for the CCC? Obviously there's going to be funding in the implementation side but is there any funding that's necessary in the planning and the groundwork that's necessary and folks know the sources of my help support it? Is needed? I just think there needs to be administrative assistance type of funding. Possibly you could get a volunteer temporary leader to coordinate information gathering but I wouldn't want someone to be tasked with collecting and organizing all this information without thinking. I would just be in support of finding funding for such a person. It sounds like we're going to learn more about this but it's going to sound like there is going to be a paid staff person who's going to be kind of the overarching paid person who's going to work directly with the commission who gets appointed and as well as various other interest groups but that doesn't mean they can do all the administrative work as well so we have to consider that. So we have just a few minutes left before we get chased back so maybe two more minutes on resources and then the last few minutes is recapping just on the resources and the finances that brought it up in that first meeting and I know there's some work bubbling around the state with this but the concept of outcomes-based financial social impact investing it's a really powerful investment tool that's being used more and more around the country. It's a great success to fund projects that wouldn't get funded in construction projects. The standard bond issue kind of thing doesn't allow for that kind of attitude and I think that I know I've written this by the sense that I've been involved in these things in searching for funding for planning I think is probably going to do better if it's lumped in in terms of getting the money within the implementation side. So not keeping those as separate. And ventures. And I will put it out there to explain where I work. I work for the State Department of Housing to develop and I know that there's conversations happening with the legislature right now and there will be a climate resiliency bill there will probably multiple climate resiliency bills so I encourage maybe one idea would be to have some listening folks participating in those conversations and I know there's some other citizens who may want to listen in on those conversations to kind of help influence where some of that goes which may be related to funding likely be related to planning and implementation. Yeah I don't have the answer here but that's great that's not happening like this month next month so and I don't think we want to spin our wheels until then. Definitely and if you bring up a really good point I think all of these groups are going to have to think about what is actionable in the short term identify what the short term means is the short term what can we do in the next few weeks and months because there are some things we can do in the next few weeks and months and the kind of longer short term but what can we do in the months and years and what can we do in the longer term for the planning in kind of the five or ten years and I think it's all important. And maybe in the short term we can do things like organize public presentations and some of this. Any other final thoughts on our last couple minutes here? I think it would be helpful to think both along in the short term and think of other social movements that have succeeded in doing that and the example that I came to my mind is what we did with child care. The child care bill that passed last year in legislature is an amazing bill. It's going to transform child care as we know it. That took like six years of organizing throughout the whole state and a lot of money to help organizing but they did both. They helped the child care centers and they helped child care professionals and then they did the advocacy and they said we already know how to fix these problems. It's just how do we get the whole society and the landowners everybody to do the measures that the organizations and professionals have already told us that we need to do. So we just got to find the political and societal to do it. So using that example of what's been successful here in Vermont but what's been successful in other states and I'll mention that in other states in other countries, you know, human eye research for a week. Last thought here. I'm going to cross the word. I chant often about ecological design because there's a dimple about working agriculture and energy and housing and I think when you really get down to it, it's like what our opportunity has is going back to what you said. You know, like, we could they've been fighting environmental issues for a long time and it's this now we've got climate change. Often the answer is within the environment. And the social structures too. Like it's about broken relationships. You know, if you look at our society, the relationship is broken. So if we can do something rather than perhaps forming a community what can we do to restore those relationships? And that could really put us in a place at least we're still talking about because we're going to burn out we're kind of the crowds are going to start to dissipate a bit. How can we make that not happen? Just a little, can you say relationships? Well, if you look at ecological design it's about inter-connectivity, the synergies between things. And when we design in our culture we often isolate the house. That's not going to be involved in the water that flows by. Now, 50, 60 years later, so when you really get down to it, the interconnectedness is about our relationships. And we have Montpelier Alive that talks about celebration. You know, we have to watch out for burnout and we got to celebrate. And one of the things that combats burnout is staying hopeful and seeing that there are other people who want to be in the room if you're solving the problems alongside you. So just keeping the conversations going. Alongside of that asset what are the existing entities that can do the things on the floor tonight? Right. Thank you all for putting all these ideas together. Oh, and existing entities, for example, being visual, I'm saying, okay, so the watershed maps, there'll be plenty of different ones that we can probably get our hands on and begin to look at and become familiar with the overall watershed. So, thank you all for all this input. I'm going to apologize in advance. I'm supposed to summarize this in 30 seconds. Probably will not capture all these ideas, but believe me, Katie has taken all these notes down and I'll need to sign up to see wherever those are, since you all can be moved in as we hear this conversation with my folks. Thank you very much. Thanks for the story. Thank you. Well, there's a couple.