 We'll call it order of the regular city of Winooski City Council meeting. I would ask that everybody please start off by joining us for the Pledge of Allegiance led by Deputy Mayor Nicole Mace. Pledge of Allegiance to the Light of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Okay, first up tonight is a gender review. This is an opportunity for members of council to make adjustments to the agenda based on any concerns or process, flow issues you might have with it. I think we scheduled it to be reflective of the folks that are in the crowd. Any questions, concerns in regards to the agenda? So, seeing and hearing none, we'll move on to public comment. This is an opportunity for members of the public to address city council about anything that's not on tonight's agenda. There's an agenda in the back if you're curious about what tonight's program will be. We also really appreciate everybody taking a moment to sign in in the back, too, if you're attending to the public today. We appreciate that. So we have a record of who attended and know how to spell out your name in the minutes if you speak. So this is an opportunity to bring up anything that's not on tonight's agenda. Everybody's happy with the snow plowing. All right. Good. Great. So we'll move on to the consent agenda. So we have five items on tonight's consent agenda. We have the city council minutes from December 10th, 2018. The war ending in the 14th of December, 2018 is up for payout for September and October. We also have the certificate of project completion for the closeout for the wastewater treatment plant garage, which is the bond issue. And then the headworks project also related to improvements at the wastewater plant, the clean state revolving loan fund step three funding application, which again is something that's been covered extensively in public meetings and council. And then the headworks project construction administrative services contract for those of you at home. Headworks project is again the bond item that folks voted an approval of for us to move forward with improvements to the plant and the entryway to the plant to help the longevity of it. So I don't think that there's any need for anybody to recuse. We can take the full consent agenda as presented. Anybody have anything to show? Okay. So seeing and hearing none, I retain any questions or concerns from the public in regards to the consent agenda. So seeing and hearing none, I retain a motion for the consent as presented. Motion by Eric, seconded by Christine for the discussion. Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And those opposed, motion carries. City update. Thank you. Just a few quick items tonight. We did get a notification from AFSCME, which is our union that represents our public works employees, indicating their intent to negotiate a success or agreement, which is the notice that kicks off our negotiation process. Their contract expires the end of June, 2019. So at a January council meeting, I'll be putting executive session on our agenda to talk about that negotiation and any goals we may have for that negotiation. We're excited to see them coming to the table at this point. It's a good time to start that negotiation. Just a reminder for the public that City Hall will be closed for a number, for a couple of different windows in the next couple of weeks. So we closed at 1130 on December 24th. We will be closed December 25th. Then we closed at 1130 on December 31st and will be closed on January 1st. Your first responders are always here and will be working diligently during that time, but City Hall will be closed. And then finally, I want to give Ray a shout out. He submitted today the Land and Water Conservation Fund grant for the Myers Memorial Pool. So that's the grant application you approve for $147,000. That would go to offset the construction costs for the pools. It was a huge amount of work putting it together. We used some of our other department heads as well for pieces of that, but good job Ray. And that's all I have. Thank you very much. Okay. Next up we have council reports. We'll start with you. Sure. This afternoon, I met with Jesse and Julie and we reviewed the agenda for the upcoming equity gathering for the leadership team here, as well as the council and commissioners. Essentially, the purpose of this day-long workshop is to explore ways that race, power and privilege and inequities impact the way that we interact with each other and how we lead. We're hoping to begin and build an understanding about the ways of the legacy of racism in classes of another systems of oppression and how they perpetuate systemic inequities. And we're going to hopefully prepare our leaders to begin to recognize and interrupt whether it's personal or systemic inequities. And we'll end the day with a visioning process so that we can build a lens of equity as we guide our leadership and move forward. And this is not a one-off experience based on the day. We're going to look forward to ongoing conversations and how they might be structured will be determined. And I think the other takeaway we want to see happen is how do we build a sense of social analysis so that as we're making decisions, we're asking those critical questions about who's being helped, who's being harmed, who has power who doesn't, who's at the table, who's missing. How do we have a different awareness so that we can lead with equity? So we're pretty excited about how it's coming together. And I think it'll be a great day and experience for all involved. So the Public Safety Commission was unable to pull together a quorum to meet. And so there's no update from there. The Downtown Wyniewski Board did meet. You'll see many of them in the audience tonight. And they're the first item on the agenda. So I think rather than delve into that, we'll wait until we get into that item. Great. There it is. It's been quiet, quite late. You know, I think most exciting out of the Planning Commission meeting for folks who haven't had an opportunity to draft master plans available on the city website. And the comment period is open until the 21st, I believe, is the last. I don't see Eric, but I believe it's the 21st that they'd like all the comments back. Really cool tool if you go on there. And again, this is setting the stage for how investments are going to work in the city for the next at least five years, right? And you can go in and read the plan. It's 86 pages. You can skim and scan if there's particular areas you're interested in. And you can make comments right in the sheet, which is really cool. It's a dynamic worksheet. It's very quick to submit your thoughts on something and you can navigate it very easily. So really, really encourage folks to do that. And then, yeah, just, I mean, obviously today is due to a press release that effective January the 28th, I'll be stepping down as city's mayor. And I'm not going to do a big speech here because there's a press release with stuff in there and you're all stuck with me for another month and a half. So I'm going to be out in the community talking about our budget and the great work that we're still continuing to do. But just quickly, obviously, this has been the greatest honor and privilege that I've had in my life. It's been the most meaningful thing to me from a relationship with the people who work here and work so hard for the city standpoint, but to see the impact that we've had in the community. I'm immensely proud of the time I've spent trying to represent the will of the people of this community and trying to make this a better place to live, work, and play. And, you know, one thing that maybe doesn't come out as clear in the press piece that I want to make clear tonight is how deeply appreciative of the other four people who sit at this table and the time, commitment, and effort, and energy that you all put in each and every week to make this a productive decision-making body that I think people can watch function and feel really good about the way decisions are being made in their community. So to all of you, I am very, very deeply grateful because I wouldn't have made any of those decisions without all of your thought, input, and as we all know, nothing gets done but for the work of the staff. And thank you, Jesse, and to the entire team here for your time of this work, too. So again, you'll get another tear-filled speech later at another date, but we're going to keep chucking along here until this is with the, or excuse me, January the 28th, and hopefully we'll pass the budget then. So thank you all very much. Lots of nice comments and things and only a few. Oh, thank God he's leaving. So I appreciate that. Thank you very much. So, God. It's been a pleasure to work with you. Your leadership has been phenomenal. So thank you. I don't have anything else to add. As I shared last week, there was no Public Works Commission meeting this month. I did last week meet with both Seth and Jesse to talk about budget and budget communications and just get clear on that information. And I'll second what you said, Seth. Sad to see you go. The meetings will be so short. It won't be up here. Pontificating. Okay. Actually, I'm going to come and sit in the crowd and remind you why a decision was made 10 years ago. Okay. Okay. So next up tonight is for regular items, we have the first item, which is downtown, and funding requests. We'll move on to regular items. Welcome, Heather and friends. Can you face up? I'll show you this time. Thanks for having us again. We'll be back. We gave you a whole bunch in your packet. I don't think we need to necessarily go through it line by line, but we gave you a narrative of kind of where we were, where we are now, where we would like to go, as well as budget numbers, some actuals and projections if things go well tonight. And then in addition, job description for the city director position and MOU with the city. So just to give you a little bit of warm-up, we've been talking with Jesse and Heather quite a bit, a potential to move down to the city. The need from the city, or desire maybe from the city to have this region be a little bit stronger and our desire to do the same thing. So I think we have staff support on general areas of funding here and MOU was drafted by Heather and we had a lot back and forth fine-tuning that. So we really have been trying to work very hard to make sure that staff is not getting any surprises and that we're communicating from the very beginning on this so that when we come to you hopefully there's religious questions from the group out there. So yeah, I guess I'll pretty much leave it there and see if there's any questions you have for us, or obviously staff, on any detail and the information in the packet. And we'd like to say thank you to Seth too because he was on airport once. That's how it got sucked into this. I didn't tell you I was the one that said thank goodness he's gone. Yes, Seth, thanks a lot for everything over the years. You're a powerful leader and you really did move a lot from the city so your efforts don't go unrecognized. So with that buttering up, what do you got? Nothing to do with the funding request, bro. Well done. Just for context in history. The city's commitment to the community partnership started years ago when they ran a waterfront river festival and the city gave annually 8 to 10,000 dollars to the organization to run that event. Maybe 8 years ago the board decided to re-curse those funds towards more general activities and the farmers market in particular the benchmark event that the city saw itself as supporting and the other stream of income obviously is mentioned in your packages, the fact that they received sidewalk fees from businesses. Just to be clear the request is for use of fund balance and if we could speak just to what the continued capacity or obligation on the budget would look like. So my understanding is a one-time request of $54,000 from fund balance currently we have $586,000 sitting in our reserves and that's undesignated reserves that does not include cash on hand or other designated reserves that you've so indicated. So I think that there is room within the fund balance budget to do this depending on what other priorities you all may have. I guess for just as by way of intro maybe something I should have said at the beginning I think having a successful downtown organization is an incredible tool for urban areas there's a lot of things we can access a lot of supports to the business community and the development community and the residents of Winooski because we have a designated downtown and we're making sure that that organization is healthy and strong is certainly a benefit to the city as a whole and I think one of the things Heather and the board have really tried to outline here is a way to make a one-time investment to bring back staff and shore up the organization and then make it sustainable over time and I think that there's a good alignment there to the city's economic development strategic plan as well as the mission of the organization. Add a little bit of flavor on top of that. So the one-year S&P did have an additional potential for another one-balance ask in 2020 really that's nothing we're asking for right now but we wanted to really just be as transparent as possible and work up to that conversation of it potentially being there and I think our goal is to really make sure that this one-year money that we're getting puts us in a position that we don't need to come back but you know basically we're looking at a lot of priorities coming out of the economic development plan a lot of big ticket items whether it be local options tax or mainstream utilization that are going to take a lot of time so we wanted to be really clear that you know there's potential that next year you may see us again for a significantly smaller ask we hope that that's not the case but we just wanted to build in there now so that you would not kick us out next year. It also depends on when we actually hire someone so our success this year I think really hinges on finding a really capable person but should we not be able to hire them until say April you know then the numbers that we've projected might not be as accurate and then that all throws things down the line these numbers are just as good of a guess as we could make and hope for yeah and let's also just reset too you said nice words about the city but you know we're so tremendously appreciative of the work you do in the downtown and all your efforts to promote the businesses there and the entire culture of the downtown and connect with residents so thank you for all that work and we know and recognize you a lot of volunteers and working very hard right now especially in the absence of this paid staff member to make that go. One of the hardest things is knowing how much the businesses could use or help more and just from a time standpoint we're not able to be at their doors you know once a week giving them new information like we would really like to be. Those relationships are one of our most valuable assets and being you know full time working volunteers that's just not in their capacity right now. Just to be clear too our name is downtown Noosky but we really are trying to reach all businesses in the city whether it be manufacturing industrial stuff up you know at the top of the city to the small home businesses or new American businesses too so trying to not just be downtown you know I think we've heard I think you just hear in general right that to remember the neighborhoods and remember the other sections of the city you know when I was up there that was a lot of the things we'd hear in emails or whatever it was it's not all just about the downtown don't forget you know everyone else and we've tried to you know through that lens of I think they're for businesses to look broader than just the downtown obviously that's the core but there's a lot more to it so. There's some swimming lessons in their home pool that's interested in being in the access When you ski card next year so you know I think that is just another area that with the paid staff person again we'll be able to really do more of that reach So thank you for being here and thank you for your proposal well very thorough and in the memo you talked about looking at other downtown organizations in Waterbury and Berry so you know one concern I have is reliance on one time funds to support ongoing operational expenses and you had benchmarked some other organizations for the operational budget as far exceeds downtown partnerships and do you know those sources of revenue for those I specifically know revitalizing Waterbury as a building the train station and their funding their budget is available on their website I don't remember the numbers offhand but they have a lot of funding from corporations in the area that make large gifts which I think is another area that we are woefully not we're just not making those asks because we don't have those relationships built but then I think the train station has a certain amount of income that accounts for their much higher budget they actually have two full time staff members on that budget they did a lot of fundraising around 2011 for Irene so I think they also had a surplus of funds around that time that helped carry them over to be a larger organization but again I would say check out their website because their budget is on their website and so I guess I'm just trying to determine whether the city's contribution to the organization is out of line with other of those cities or if those cities are just better at fundraising and grant writing. Gotcha. Those cities do contribute a larger percentage to their organization I specifically chose those because cities like Burlington and Montpelier have special assessment districts so that the tax there's a certain payment to the downtown organization based on the charter and so those two Waterbury and Berry don't have that and so it's just a more accurate comparison but then there are also downtown organizations that have a budget of essentially zero and don't really operate so it runs the gamut in Vermont. Right. So part of the premise here is that this one-time money will allow the organization to hire an executive director who will then be able to do more fundraising and move towards a sort of a membership structure. Correct. And I guess which I think is great but it's also sort of an untested theory so I think it's one of those things where we don't have an executive director it's really hard to move forward with some of these things but I guess I'm just worried about even as you said external factors contributing to the timing of the hire then not allowing us to really test whether this is a sustainable financial approach that essentially the city's contribution is sidewalk fees and permits and you're left to your own devices in terms of funding the ongoing operation of the organization so I guess I'm just trying to we're in budget season just trying to like suss out is the one-time appropriation the best and most sustainable approach. And I think so I think the idea a little bit behind it and correct me if I'm wrong but I think pulling from fund balance probably gives you a little bit of chance to test the water as opposed to us coming and asking for just a raise in maybe a percentage of paid parking or increasing sidewalk fees right away and having this ongoing funding where let's be honest there's a chance that we have to reevaluate this after a year after that. Right. I guess I would I think you should be considering assuming you're able to hire someone in six weeks assuming this goes through and they're able to hire someone to be thinking about rather than I would rather than see it I'll be here but there are requests for one-time money you know how can you benchmark us against other cities and come up with a proposal that both relies on additional fundraising, grant writing and contributions from businesses but also maybe there needs to be a different source of support from the city because I think when you're relying on it is an important organization to sustain and to have some stability so that you can keep somebody in that position so they can develop the relationships and so I'm interested in what's the sustainable model for this moving forward. Yeah, no absolutely we think there's potential to look at a bunch of different things and honestly we'd love to do as much of that without I know without support from the city but we'd like to be able to do it freestanding a lot of it too I think there is more potential to add asks from different areas but we'd like to the goal really is to be self-sustaining in those ways so we really look at this as a jump start just for context in 2016 the average funding percentage of downtown organizations was 35% from municipalities and averaged about $33,000 per year and the average overall from downtown organizations operational budgets was about $113,000 $112,000 So the total operational budget is about $113,000 That was the average from the the ACCD or the Community Economic Development Division survey which I think it'd be great if we could just for the city's knowledge and you guys too to get your holiday at the city Yeah I have that information he did a survey in 2014 and so I have that data and so I think that average is gone off a lot by Montpelier and Burlington having a much higher city contribution because of that assessment district I would assume that I didn't go back and compare your sheet but our goal in resetting the amount once we got this information in 2016 when we upped our contribution was trying to get in the game and trying to be appropriately supported from a budgetary standpoint of like okay what's reflective of what our average should be especially went to that number and backed into this is how we get there The other thing that we talked about when we brought this up last time was for somebody to take a peek at our sidewalk fees because from a sustainability model standpoint they are from a business standpoint they might not agree with me but they are ridiculously low from a contextual standpoint versus the rest of the region so to Nicole's point I don't think it's not a conversation we can rush through right now and suddenly pass but if there is one time funding and then the potential of adding a reasonable amount to the sidewalk fees in addition to 100% sales tax that we might look at that because that's and you know to be blunt we would look back to you guys to say this is an opportunity for funding stream for you guys which is where we put them on anyway and it's an opportunity it could create an opportunity for you guys to engage this is why you're getting a higher fee right it demonstrates efficacy and what the funds are going towards I'm sorry Eric Do you mind walking through some of what you consider highlight areas in the budget projections for between you know if this allocation were to be made between next year and the year after some of the other significant areas of increase where you see the organization growing to build towards more of a sustainable funding model Sure so what I did to try to be clear and I'm not a budget person I'm like a marketing and user design person so tried to make this legible and easy the colored and bolded numbers represent major differences from our past funding so for example donations in 2017 were relatively low but in 2018 we were at 13 grand just from a couple of individuals to make us financially solvent and we think that because those were just a couple of personal asks that in 2019 we would be able to repeat that success and continue to grow those personal asks in 2020 and 21 21 up to 15k we would introduce the business membership in 2020 with $5,000 in 2021 just for example if we had like a lower 250 business membership if there were 20 businesses at 250 and 10 businesses at $500 a year that would make $10,000 something like that would be a very reasonable goal let's see for Heather and I were talking about a national life main street grant the deadline for that just passed this year but that's something for next year that we have a lot of ideas about videography for the businesses in four areas where that would just be a home run for us to write a grant that would sorry I'm losing my train of thought write a grant that would represent different businesses and be a marketing tool for them as well as the city and us to attract new businesses so that's just an example of a grant that we could win we want to increase our budget for advertising we've done co-op advertising in the back like the back of 7 days where businesses can buy a square and we then sell those squares and 7 days then has a big downtown Winooski advertisement on the back that's both an income stream and a cost and then we also want to just spend more money on events which we think can also make us more money if we wanted to have like a 5k or something like that so we have a lot of ideas and the farmers market is also has a lot of opportunities to grow because of the Essex farmers market is actually closing next year and the Burlington farmers market is moving in the summer so we feel that there might I mean it's not a good thing but we feel that there might be a lot of vendors that will be looking for other nearby markets that we see that as an opportunity for the Winooski farmers market so that's another area of growth yeah that I mean the thing is that city fund balance dropping significantly we have a fairly high number because of recruitment costs and potential for consulting on HR or legal fees things like that so we have some higher first year costs there that obviously that's not all of that difference but that's why our number is where it's at could you walk us through the the ask of $54,497 in change how might that be allocated and how much of that goes to the EDD salary and so forth yes do you want to do this sure so you know basically we have it broken down for sorry we didn't include this in your packet but you know we're looking at you know a 32 hour a week position somewhere around you know $50,000 a year obviously we have more in here than just the $54,500 this is everything that's going to take but it all builds up into that ask so you know benefits that we just took some average numbers 25% of salary to build in for benefits we have some different tax amounts in there totaling about $4,000 and then a smaller one for health care contribution and then a couple thousand dollars $2,504 for things like computer, software, cell phone kind of start up costs for a position like that and then we have about $4,100 in there for recruitment and other fees so total of $73,000 yeah so it's a total of $73,000 where the that's the $54,500 plus our normal contribution from the city basically I'd be curious to hear from Heather in what ways there would be significant differences between the city's relationship with businesses and some of the work we're trying to do whether or not this allocation is made and they're able to hire an executive director or if it's not and they're unable to for your perspective yeah well one of the things that I've actually worked for a general organization in the past and one of the things that I was able to do at that organization was I was able to be promotion so I could promote events that businesses were doing which is not something that we do as a city I also was able to act as an advocate so I could have offline conversations with the business community and could come forward to something like a city council and I could represent some of the things that I'd heard from the business community so that their voices were at the table and frequently businesses are uncomfortable coming to a public meeting like this because they may be alienating some of their client base by being here so they don't want to take on a political stand whereas I could from a downtown an executive director of the downtown organization could come and say the business community is concerned about this and that voice could be at the table that way so I think that's the value and I also think that it's a significant difference to have a 32-hour own executive director over what we had previously which was 20 hours a week so I think you can build relationships more effectively with someone that's technically a full-time employee thank you along those lines are in the scope of service here under the responsibilities of the city and you know this evening or downtown is there any like significant ads here to kind of what the goals already are from the city the city and downtown oh yeah so the I highlighted in the MOE actually the I see the additional like whatever value adds my screens not great but now you pointed out that's okay most of that comes directly from the economic development plan awesome thank you okay so I'm hearing a couple different things you know broad support right for the organization figuring out how to do that concern about sustainability right share some of my express thoughts just to maybe kick some of that I want to stop for a second and see actually first before we do that if there's any comments or questions that people in the audience will make because I can see the number of faces here tonight on behalf of that on behalf of this agenda item anybody wants to say now at this point in time we'll do another public comment too on it yes sir I'm hearing a bit more about the success on this money sort of a one-time grant in a way certainly sustainability I'm wondering if they've built in any other sort of measures that they'll be able to bring back to the council in a year because what were they able to do part of our part of the MOU is actually to annual report to city council providing highlights and metrics of organizational effectiveness and that's a new addition to the that we haven't done in the past that we know is an important item especially considering the amount of this funding request and the metrics will come from the MOU from those responsibilities I think that's a good theme because we've had you in a few times to talk about kind of where things are at and how the organization is evolving and I think dedicating the organization to an impact report that comes back here would be great because not only is it good for us where we can show accountability to taxpayers that there's output for the dollars public dollars would be expending but it also creates a narrative so you're forcing yourself to create a narrative that's you have to turn back to over and over again that's that's a good point and when I think it would be great to see even more fleshed out in here if possible I will express the concern about signing up next year's council of which most of us have said we're not most of us but several of us have already notated we're not going to be part of for use of fund balance that's the part I think that scares me the most I would love to see an alternative budget that looks at things like the sidewalk fees or puts more quite frankly pressure back or a proposal back that says this is what we would need absolute bottom dollar from a tax basis for the city to commit to so that that's clear to council I don't think it's going to affect whether or not the decision is made on fund balance this year but I think that's a critical condition to this and it doesn't I don't even know if it needs to come back here now I just think that that can be worked through on the staff level would be my concept to that which is just no that's okay we talked a lot about this and Eric was really helpful in thinking about what's the best way to make this ask to you and we just wanted to be realistic with our budget and acknowledge that there is probably not going to be you know from zero to a hundred or rather in very monetary terms 50,000 to a hundred thousand dollar operating budget that we're not going to be able to make that much growth with the organization over a one year period and that we want to be realistic about that we don't want to ask you to ask the next council to agree to this additional ask and we think that with a paid staff person we're going to come up with a better solution but we don't know what that is yet and we don't have the capacity to come up with that solution without a paid staff person what you're saying is perfectly reasonable we really put that that second year ask in so that this conversation would happen not so that it would actually just be a direct deposit from the fund balances so that we could figure it out in the coming year if we need to you know instead of just trying to figure that all out now before coming in for this one year we just wanted to put it in I think it's kind of working so that we would get to this discussion over the next year so yeah thanks for that the other thing I know I would love to see in here that wasn't is a requirement that we recruit the tax department to come and give presentations for business owners here on an annual basis because quite frankly the largest transferable value we can point to farmers markets amazing the vibrancy from that is beyond measurement appreciated but the biggest dollar thing we can point to is the sales tax reallocation and tax credits that have come from the downtown designation and the other thing that I would really like to see in the update or in a potential updated MOU to work with the state to review the map that is connected to your designation and there's no opportunity to increase your revenues then by having more customers and even though you may be serving some of those other entities if we could expand the footprint of the tax credits for example tax credit program in the state this is the initial boundaries for this program was part of the downtown redevelopment plan so that's really the box it's an old box even for example it cuts off before beverage warehouse I think that there's probably an argument to be made that downtown is different than what it was eight years ago ten years ago and this map is less revisited especially with the gateway districts some of those grants that there's access to go beyond the downtown border right the it's just the neighborhood development area and there are incentives and benefits that come with that but it's nowhere near the level of what it comes with I don't think that that's I've been to the hearings where they make those decisions it's not a sophisticated thing on your behalf where you have to get GIS mapping down or anything like that it's literally just here's a map of our town we think this is a reasonable definition of downtown look these arteries there's a continuous stream of business and activity here that's all it's and therefore you know you make that argument and it's a group of people that make that call so I would love to see that updated to make sure that we're providing as much of a benefit for as much of the city as possible too anybody else I have a question about the job description it calls on you know a number of different skills which we assume communication, leadership fundraising, grant raising obviously fiscal management and also marketing and promotion and I guess I'm just curious how likely is it to find the right person with all of those skills because sometimes marketing promotion might be a whole different skill set and is there a plan B if you don't find the right person with all of those skill sets how might you parse out some of that work and still be effective in leading this effort that's a great question and I think it's so exciting personally for me who you know currently does our quick books and our payroll and everything to think about what my capacity would be if I was putting the same amount of time into higher level thinking or even some of those marketing pieces which is what I do for work not quick books, not my skill set so with someone else keeping the organization awesome you know keeping the organization where it needs to be our board has many many skills and we also want to expand our board and change our bylaws so that we can have more board members and have more business members on our board think we'll be gaining a lot of people that have those skill sets and that folks will be interested in filling the gaps that we have should we not find someone who fills the role to a T which I think is a very realistic expectation okay I think Winooski is such an exciting place to work for someone who is a downtown professional with all of the things that are going on here I think you'll have to read the literature for this kind of you can see when there's so much going on here I think it's something that I mean 9 out of 10 professionals okay I'll just add on top of that like if we do find somebody that has a recognized deficit in one of these areas I hope they would bring some options on how to fill that themselves too that would be recognizing grant opportunities for a market grant or something for a consultant to fill some of those gaps but also you know we've had some board turnover over the years because it's asking a lot of different things from a few different people but if there was specific areas we needed to focus on to build up committees or whatever you might want to call it subcommittees of the board so they can focus on a passion area that they actually have a specific skill set around I think we could fill some of those gaps if needed pretty easily this will also bring us to the level where we can think about other programs that are on offered in nonprofits in Vermont like the AmeriCorps VISTA program we don't currently have an office and one of the requirements of having a VISTA intern is that they need to have a desk and a position like this would help us enable there's a line in the budget for space I don't know if we're going to spend $3,000 on wrench but I think that having a desk somewhere in some capacity is really important so that we can again just grow to the next level have access to more resources like that Questions, concerns, comments you know I think just the other thing I'll say and again we'll be involved in this conversation next year but if we're at the point where the city is being asked for funds again next year that essentially equal the total salary I just would really challenge the city and the organization to revisit the model I think that this from a taxpayer investment standpoint I don't want to say like the last or all that's not it it's just it's a significant investment and because of that you know it's not to sound like control freaks but when we stand up a position or in the city we hold it accountable because we're ultimately accountable to the taxpayers and there are other municipalities where this is a position that's built into the city staff seeing all of this comes to mind I think that that's challenged philosophically I think this is the better model the more successful model for this to run but I think that that would have to be revisited next year I think if this especially if we're way over the 20,000 conversation and the budget's off again I think that that should be something that you should all flag as a okay let's sit down and revisit what this model is and if it's working so I would just question that other questions, comments, concerns turn it back to the public questions, comments, concerns from the public you know just again before there's any vote there's this is on as a discussion I am tonight so there's also an opportunity for folks to follow up either at home with additional questions, thoughts, concerns or ideas and I don't think we gave you a really definitive list of things that are timely in terms of their follow up other than those couple MOU if you guys could talk about those MOU things that were thrown out you know I think most of that was consideration for next time around that makes sense everybody and so we'll take we'll take this up on our January the 7th meeting and come back and do a vote but I I do think it's not inappropriate to say if anybody has any concerns they want to voice about potentially passing list that this would be the time to flag that so that the organization and staff can move forward with some kind of sense of the body anybody want to raise any directed concerns so in other words you have you can take that as probably a good sense of general support thank you guys for all your work we really appreciate you and Seth and Nicole now you'll have some capacity next year thank you guys thanks for all your work next up tonight is community services budget presentation with extreme apologies so that I can pay attention I'm going to ask for a 90 second recess and we'll reconvene the meeting at 6.57 I'm really sorry I was joking I had to move forward the Manuski City Council meeting thanks for your patience during your recess and we'll pick up from the agenda on item B which is the community services budget presentation minor technical difficulties here we go and we're back great so excited to be here and jump right into slides here and the nice thing is as many of these humans are in the room I know Seth here is great about sort of acknowledging the hard work that the staff do here I want to take a moment before jumping into the details of this staff layout to just say for certainly the folks here but also those who are not here tonight for my team we couldn't do any of what we do without those folks but in countless hours work super hard on behalf of residents here and I've been saying this to them a lot but it's been really cool this year as a parent of a child who's now hitting the age of a lot of the programs we run to not only be managing these programs but be a customer and that's good and bad for them I think depending on the day that I have to come pick at you at least once a week and see what's going on but I have to say as a customer it's just super impressive to see what they do really nice to kind of be diving in on that level so community services for folks in the audience who don't know entails Recreation of Parks our public library, our senior center our early childhood programs which we titled Children and Family Programs and then the O'Brien Community Center there are two sub-budgets that you'll see that are not called out here Meals and the Community Gardens right now our Meals program is being managed through our public library which we'll talk about that a little bit more when we get there and the Community Gardens are actually being folded in with Parks and Recreation moving forward and we're going to be using some of our staff there to manage that program instead of bringing on very temporary seasonal staff as we've done the last year so exciting to see some of those changes happening and I think it's going to represent a service improvement for our gardeners so notable change here from a structural perspective is that we will be reducing in the coming year this Recreation and Parks AmeriCorps position so we will talk about that in terms of what's coming down the line I didn't get fancy enough to do sort of the animation where that box disappears but this is sort of current staffing but just wanted to note that that AmeriCorps Rec position is one that at the moment is proposed to go away we want to point out that that human is actually sitting here tonight Sarah Franco just joined us within the last month it was a really interesting recruitment year very slow nationally for AmeriCorps recruitment and so we were really fortunate literally on the last day that we could bring on a full-time member to have Sarah come on board with us this year so she's going to kind of eke into this next fiscal year the budget you're seeing does not include the funds to support that ekage and we're going to find that elsewhere but it ends up being about a $2,000 cost into fiscal year 20 that we're going to find from other funds but it felt like to get her here on board for this fiscal year where we had budget money it was worth that extension into the next fiscal year figuring that out down the road so any questions on a staffing perspective here I'll just to note we have a consistent position just closed on the 14th we have 42 applicants for that so Alicia and I have just started reviewing that which is really exciting so hopefully we'll have that nailed down pretty soon yeah let's be clear today they're not well I don't think so anyway so highlighting some pieces from the strategic plan from fiscal year 18 I think about childcare and early childhood work and I think while both Kirsten and I would attest that we didn't get where we wanted to I think it was worth note here that a lot of work and effort in this community not only from the two of us but from a lot of our partners went into the effort around trying to land a childcare center at the O'Brien Center and it's one of those projects that is frustrating that it didn't come to fruition but I think it wasn't for lack of a lot of really good work on this side it just the market wasn't playing out for us as we'd hoped so again not a success story per se but I think one that I did want to highlight from a workload perspective being a big piece of our work this year certainly the pool which you'll hear a little bit more about later a lot of effort there and the community center as well excited to have a lease on the agenda later with EVM Medical it's a huge step for us around that building but again a lot of effort in there a lot of effort Kudo's security and her team for achieving a third star and thrive that officially designates us as high quality with the state that's a huge deal when this program started it was eight kids in a back corner at the O'Brien Center I would venture to say probably not designated as a high quality program at that point despite the best efforts of those involved the amount of professionalism and infrastructure and formality to come in under Kirstie's leadership has been tremendous and I think the fact that we have achieved and retained that third star is a big deal so I didn't want to highlight that and then I think with the youth sports programs youth football is one certainly that I want to get Alicia some kudos for bringing back a program that had sort of faded out here in the community a ton of effort went in there 36 youth participating and if anybody had a chance to get up to the school to watch a practice or a game it's pretty awesome to see those little guys with like the helmets that are this big kind of bobbling around just to see the learning and the growth and development those kids are doing that program is wonderful so big shout out to Alicia for her efforts and the volunteers as well some other accomplishments that didn't quite fit a box and the plan that I felt like wanted to make note of here I'm going to just crank through a few but our fee grant and donation revenue generation was up about 20% over fiscal year 17 it's exciting we've talked a lot here about the need to figure out how to subsidize programs for folks who can't afford them figure out how to simultaneously start to add fee based programming to the mix and I think on the side of that hustle for grants and donations and I think you'll see there fiscal year 18 was a good year for us in terms of that effort across the board the volunteer piece is a sort of another financial element that we like to call out it doesn't hit the budget per se but if you look at the value of hours served by volunteers in the community that's $100,000 of staff time essentially that we're offsetting by bringing in residents and visitors to the city who want to do a good thing so that's fantastic Afea who's since departed as Vista did a great job managing that Olivia Miller's here this year in her position and we're super excited to have her on board so that continues to be a big part of our budget the library I think interestingly these numbers reflect a fairly static participation number in terms of folks coming into the physical plant at the library I think when you look at the fiscal year 19 numbers based on how the summer went down there we're going to see a much different story the summer was bonkers at the library to be to be honest and having a ton of kids in the space was great but a lot of those were July and August so I think you'll see next year's numbers jump you know small growth here 2.5% it's good but I think we'll see a bigger increase for fiscal year 19 over 18 I also was not able to be at the last council meeting but there was a question posed sort of around computer use for the library so I didn't want to share Amanda let me know there were 3583 discreet log-ons for the public computers at our library so there are presently two public computers there which we just purchased new last year so they get pretty heavy use what Amanda shared is that they don't presently have a way to track users who didn't log on because of a waitlist or a line or whatever so I suspect that that use number that 3500 is below what the need is so it's something that we're looking at moving forward how do we add some more capacity to the facility as it relates to public machines and are there other places in the community we can add that capacity potentially so knowing that was a specific question from council last time I'll pause and see if that answers the question or if there are other pieces yeah I think the question just was if there are plans for increasing capacity in the library with more computers layout certainly is a challenge in there I think if anyone's been there it's a small space and so I think trying to figure out how to move you know you move one little thing in a corner here and because it's so small the ripples can be pretty significant from an operational perspective so trying to figure out adding a third machine may seem like well whatever I have a $500 computer and a table you're all good there's a little bit more to it figuring out layout and we're going to move everything around the board so definitely on the radar for us though is a need and then the meals program is one I'm always really proud to highlight too between Meals on Wheels and the congregate meals last year at the senior center we estimate we served at least 11,000 meals to residents in the community so that's a huge deal in this small town you know for community of 7,200 people that's a big deal and I want to give Barb and her team a lot of accolade for that there's a lot of work that goes into getting those meals out the door every morning so so many questions here on these fiscal year 18 pieces so fiscal year 19 to date it's been a busy year as I think we can see here again a lot of those projects caring for child care space O'Brien Center, Meyers pool certainly continuing to take time and effort across the board excited to have initiated some preliminary work with Lot 2 and Casavent Park for folks who were able to get to the presentations that the students did on their conceptual designs for Lot 2 downtown awesome event I want to give Jesse a lot of credit for spearheading that with the classes and getting that going but exciting to think about how to engage a group that's not typically engaged in that type of work and honestly there were some really cool ideas that I think you will see some iteration of in future development in that park and that's pretty neat to be able to point to that kid with the crazy tree that was accessible for climbing you know like there's things that I think could be pretty interesting to try to incorporate and certainly we're excited I'm going to I'm going to spoiler alert sort of the next slide a little bit but we were informed a few weeks back that we're a finalist for the NRPA's 10 minute walk national planning grant had an interview last week Alicia and Jesse and I and are hopeful we're going to hear this week as to whether we're going to receive that award so I think as it relates to these planning pieces there could be some resource coming in to help us do that regardless I think this is something we really want to try to focus on through the remainder of this year and then into next around parks and open space planning full tendency obviously at the O'Brien Center continues to be a goal I think I need to tell you all it's been a challenge and I think continues to be a baseline goal for us with that facility recreational needs assessment is underway just checked in with them yesterday we've got 382 responses to that survey and they continue to trickle in which is great it's been pretty steady so we're going to keep that out through the end of the calendar year so if anyone hasn't had a chance I will confess I was number 382 I went in and did it myself as a resident the other day so I think there's still folks out there who keep saying get to that please jump on and do so working and behind on this but working towards formalizing scholarship programs and fundraising approaches for our department I think this is something that again as we've grown tried to add more fee based programming to the mix and try to get more creative frankly in how we're generating revenue beyond just coming here and asking you all for money once a year it's something that I think we really need to do some work to formalize so this is work that's ongoing again had hoped to be further along than we are at this point in the year but confident by the end of this year we're going to be in good shape and then other pieces I just want to highlight again things you're well aware of but the successful bond vote for the pool and just the means by which that passed the percentage with which that passed I think is a really strong vote of confidence for the work that we're doing it feels good to have the community come to the table with their vote and say we believe in what you're doing and we want to support it and I think that's reflective of a confidence in certainly this elected body but in the teams that are kind of running these projects it's really cool to see so that felt like a significant forget one to highlight as well any questions here sorry I forgot to jump in so so looking forward to fiscal year 20 certainly we've got work yet to do with council around setting on goals and priorities but expect that Myers pool construction will be well underway into the next fiscal year so that'll be a piece that is going to be on the radar for us and starting I think John and his team are going to manage the brass tacks of the construction which for everybody's sake is good if I'm not in the dirt digging but we need to then start to build the operational model and the logistics and the staffing and all those pieces that on day one when that key turns we need to be ready so that's going to take quite a bit of focus I think for my team in the next year again hopeful that we'll have a resource through this planning grant to do a parks and open space study for the entire community that's really not very exciting and some recent developments with parks district around the canoe access certainly the ones that we have here sort of on this side of town near the the mills are fine but they tend to cater towards folks that are a little bit more comfortable in a boat and in the water the water's not particularly flat there and we've definitely had some folks with some challenges getting in and out and we do want people to access the river as a recreational resource so recently looking with the Wieski Valley Park District and Redstone at some options through Memorial Park and what that might look like so I anticipate that being a project that gets some likes in the coming year I think one piece to it before jumping ahead I just want to highlight here is that despite the Promise Communities grant around early childhood work sunsetting at the end of this month there's a really strong commitment from the parties that have been at the table to keep the conversation and the work around early childhood going forward the grant I think was a great carrot to sort of get everybody to the table it was really encouraging at our last meeting to kind of pose that question of like so now what the grant's gone, we're not a formal steering committee for this grant program anymore what do we want to do and to a person everybody was like let's meet in January so we're going to move probably to a quarterly meeting cycle with that group but are going to continue to move ahead with trying to take your childcare in the area and focus on program improvements around our youngest residents so that's I think work that grant aside will continue in the fiscal year 20 any other things that from a council perspective I'm missing there or questions on anything I think it's worth acknowledging that sometimes you work towards things and they don't go exactly as we'd hoped and plan it doesn't mean the work's not still done and it's great to hear that there's other positive outcomes out of that and we are going to do OCC but same philosophical approach there so acknowledge great and I just want to say you mentioned the pool and the strong support for the community and I think that's in large part due to the support that you and your department provided to the pool committee for so many months to sort of work with the community and build a vision and sort of see that through and I think that takes a lot of effort but it takes time and it you certainly had to navigate a few curveballs along the way so that is a significant accomplishment I think the community is really eager to see the opening of that pool and I think that's because they were a part of the process from the get go so they're going to go yes in the budget so before we get into the spreadsheets and the numbers just a kind of high level overview of some pieces that are included in this budget that I wanted to call out specifically so some staffing changes as mentioned in order to achieve the target goal that council had set around funding we did look to eliminate the AmeriCorps position I think as mentioned here it is a change that we feel like we can weather also just want to be really up front that it's something I'm looking at are there different ways that we can fund that are there grants, are there program revenue generation models that could potentially keep that position intact so as much as the general fund budget models that position going away I'm not ready to totally give up on that yet and I think you'd kind of be exploring options there moving towards the next budget cycle and then also just wanted to highlight too that this budget includes reduction of the children and family program manager position from a 40-hour position to a 32-hour position we've had as you know some transitions in that role with Kirsten being out on maternity then getting back just in the nick of time for her replacement to go out on maternity and through the course of those transitions and those dialogues determined that for the time being the 32-hour position is a good fit for all parties involved it's going to allow us to keep thrive running successfully and leave some space on the edges for the early childhood sort of systems level work that we were hopeful for this is always a really challenging question to have to ask right and you guys can plead the fifth on it you're allowed to plead the fifth on it but I'm understanding the reduction hours are the result of operational considerations more than budgetary or blended between the two I would categorize it as a personnel issue and not a budgetary reduction okay thank you but I think important is a change in the number that you're going to see so well it's significant to us from a decision making process right if we're saying you know it's good to understand what the results of we set benchmarks with the outcome that is and not shy away from that responsibility here right so if it's operational it can be different sorry sorry so refresh my memory but I thought that there was discussion last year about the need to increase thrive participation rates so there was some concern that they were leveling off and that part of the role for this program manager is to expand enrollment so this decision is it connected at all to enrollment in the program I think enrollment is good I think certainly compared to last year we're in a much stronger position than we were in terms of enrollment numbers you know we're still I'd say trending down a little bit from where we were a few years back and not quite sure why that is we're running pretty close to capacity for after school though at the moment in terms of our licensing requirements summer's been an interesting beast and Alicia too a bit recently had a lot of discussions about how we do summer maybe a little differently moving forward one thing we did last year was reduce from three classrooms to two to adjust to the smaller enrollment numbers that worked really well for us but also trying to figure out how do we pair with the school's half day summer school and not be running competing programs concurrently but also make make it clear to families that you can have your child and care from the morning until the evening and so those half day weeks are a little bit funky for us and that we're often staffing up for full enrollment because we have to be prepared for that from a regulatory perspective but we're not always seeing full participation numbers based on that and because we do our hiring before the program gets rolling we're airing towards wanting to have more confidence to have members on hand than less so summer's been tricky and again we're looking at some different options moving into the coming summer but for now we're sort of modeling status quo budgetarily but thinking about are there some different ways to partner with the school and staffing are there different ways we can do recruitment we've been in touch with an entity that does third party entity that runs summer camp programs that they'll come in and sort of run the program for you essentially and the price point is higher and so that's again in the spirit of a lot of conversations we've had here balancing access and equitable access doesn't make sense to just bring in all these programs that are a little bit higher and less affordable and accessible so so yeah it's after school again is in a pretty solid space certainly there's space for a few more kiddos if anybody's got kids that are looking to get rid of between 3 and 530 every day but summer's been a little bit lower we're trying to figure out what that is and then everybody's favorite subject the O'Brien Center so again as we know lease or tendency has been slow to come together so we are projecting in this coming year to be exhausting reserves which is a year or two ahead of where we hope to be for those who aren't familiar this is a budget building budget operationally that has never been solvent the expenses to operate the facility have always outstripped the revenues that the leases have generated and we were fortunate to have a significant donation up front at the beginning of the building that we've been sort of eating away at over time and at the moment it's looking like this will be the year that we kind of get to the bottom of that reserve it's disappointing with that said I feel like we've taken a flyer on some pretty meaningful projects there that didn't pan out to your point Seth and I think that's been a philosophical choice certainly I'll own my portion of that professionally excited to have the UVM team here tonight to formalize a lease hopefully and move into a relationship around that significant chunk of the building and have some exciting irons in the fire for other portions of the building that we're hoping to bring back in the next meeting or two some letters of intent so I think we'll get there by the end of this year with tenancy but again budgetarily it's not a great picture so I just wanted to call that out and highlight that Does this deficit account for the UVM lease already? It does yes and I should note and Angel you can correct me if I'm way off base here but the operating deficit when we were at full tenancy in 2015 I think was the last 2015 or 16 I don't remember was about 22,000 at that point so this 28,000 number year over year for that building is not it's not crazy it's not way out of whack it's just again that's the financial reality of the model of that building so I just want to sort of put that in context to say that that number is not in the last couple years we've seen big annual deficit numbers because of vacancies this gets us back in line with kind of where we were in 1516 Again just me hedging and trying to help decisions that are going to be made in the future that I will have me say and I just really want to encourage future iterations of council as we have their community conversations about what may happen with a portion of that property and land that if certainly there's any taxable income created off of that or I shouldn't say income if there's tax revenue as a result of any development or sale of that property that you know that context should always be there and as it feeds into the general fund we might look at it a little differently if it added from the tax base in a different method and I think that that dance is going to be someone complicated but it's going to have to be shown to people you know so that they understand okay it's continuing to have this deficit that's quote unquote hitting the general fund a few years from now think about that it's just going to be something that's built in the general fund that's been running for a while but that that is part of offsetting it would be taking that action because we've treated it like an enterprise fund for so long and now we're not and that's from a finance perspective that's a big philosophical change in a big deal and the last thing here small but I think worth calling out recommending an additional thousand dollars this year towards the city's annual allocation for the park district as a historical reference we have for the last number of years reimbursed the park district well below what our sort of prescribed dues are by the formula that they use for their member municipalities they've been gracious and supportive and we've continued to develop a really strong working relationship there but given the amount of technical assistance they're providing on some of our more sensitive properties on Casablanca Memorial in particular you know pending work around what we anticipate will be an updated new launch we feel like it's a good opportunity to nudge that needle forward a little bit and jump from four to five thousand dollars in terms of what we're contributing to their organization so that's a call that out as well all right on to spreadsheets so general fund wise this is broken out community center and community services just based on the way the line items kind of run in our budget again here you can see from an expense perspective we are projecting to bring the cost of operating the O'Brien Center down in fiscal year 20 year over year certainly chunk of that is driven by the service reduction but also some improvements to the budgeting I think just based on actuals we're looking at reducing some of those building operating costs based on actuals so for the most part I think a pretty straight forward budget year over year and then on the revenue side we'll get to this slide a little bit further down and the revenues were covered in the last budget presentation but I believe we're projecting the one-ish that would get us that $28,000 deficit so we'll see that in more detail a little bit and then on the community services side again just as a reminder this is kind of all things community services and the general fund lump together so that includes recreation, library senior center, my salary and pieces of the broader departmental stuff so again I think here year over year not a lot of excitement to report I think you've got your natural growth in salaries and benefits but by and large I guess one piece to point out is that the specialty supplies from 19 to 20 is dropping significantly and that is offset by an increase in salaries and just as a reminder that when the pool closed in 2016 there were $16,000 set in the community services budget to be allocated towards at the time it was either staffing or supplies dependent on what the identified needs were to sort of backfill services from the pool closing we've continued to carry that $16,000 in a specialty supply line this year we're moving that and that's part of us allowing us to hire the recreation assistant position which we feel like at this time is a more critical need for us than the ability to buy a bunch of supplies and stuff so you see that reflected here basically the money departs the specialty supplies line and moves up to the salary line but it's a net that $16,000 is net captured here it's just in different areas does that make sense but next year we will need to I mean so we're basically absorbing the capacity that we had to restore some or to maintain funding for pool related expenses that's being reallocated to a position so next year's budget the council will need to come up with the entire ad for pool operations and correct me if I'm wrong because this is a few years back but I think if I'm remembering correctly the nature of the conversation when that at the time it was about $48,000 in operating funds for the pool when the pool officially closed and we're like we're done it's not opening again when that went away I recall there was a pretty bright line between that funding and the $16,000 that was added to support programming in so much as the conversation I recall was that when the pool comes back online we want to consider that operating ad in totality and not sort of reabsorb that $16,000 into it again it's been a few years and I'm happy to look back and see if that's how it was pitched okay, okay okay we all shared that so a more recent conversation about that though is when we've been modeling the pool costs we've been modeling full operations cost as part of that tax rate increase with offsetting revenues and we have not been taking into consideration this revenue line or this expenditure line so that was my next question so in the modeling that we've seen that suggests the tax rate increase that we're proposing for FY20 will be what we're projecting and then FY21 does that include the increase in operational costs for the pool so it's like a bigger bump in FY20 and a much smaller bump in FY21 and that accounts for 100% of the new operating costs but also relies on new operating revenue correct? correct but just to be clear there's no pool operations cost built into the FY20 correct that won't be added in FY21 but it's a much smaller than the debt service payment mostly or somewhat offset by the revenues that we're expecting but this really exciting feature yes so any general fund questions are good and we'll I'll just throw some photos in because I feel like we generate quite a few cute photos in here but recreation budget this is our program budget separate and apart from the general fund so this is where program fees grants and donations flow through for various programs you're going to see a pretty significant increase in the fee for service on the revenue side some of that is driven by anticipated growth in programs and projected growth in programs we're setting a high goal for we don't think it's a goal that's out of bounds and I think with especially Eureka sister coming on board Sarah here for the year I think we're going to be in good shape to get there the nice thing about all these program budgets is they're scalable so that if revenues are not performing to the degree we need we're turning around and addressing costs measures and scaling those costs so in most cases we build our expense budgets around a revenue budget and try to target these towards a break even so again if we don't hit 8000 which is an ambitious increase year over year we can scale down expenses and stay within that bottom line number so in terms of any specific things to highlight here one big change was in the contracts and professional services piece reducing from 19 to 20 that's the result of us outsourcing our teen employment program so we started a partnership last year with resource whereby they will be taking on the management and thus the expense of the teen employment program ideally we'll continue to still get kiddos in the city working within our programs but they'll be footing that bill so that's about a $5000 reduction in that contract that's great that's a nice culmination of a four year conversation yeah yeah and I think to have an agency that's got the chops around professional development and workforce development at the helm is really huge for us recruitment was a challenge last year in our first year but we actually are starting meeting with them next month as a way to sort of get way ahead of the game so I'm feeling good about this coming summer so any questions here for Rec I want to come here a place that needs no introduction but the Winnieski Senior Center again a budget here that reflects I think a pretty strong history of frankly revenue generation overall I think this is an area where we've continued to see revenues outstripping expenses we are making some strategic investments you did have us come back here a couple meetings ago and ask for use of reserves to start to make some investments in materials in the space you know we're going to continue to look for opportunities to make those strategic investments in the program in the building but for now the budget is performing really well participation numbers are up Bingo which is our primary revenue generator has been really strongly attended and again I want to give Barb and her team a huge amount of credit for that it's a really fun day if you ever go over there on a Thursday it's a hoot don't interrupt that don't interrupt but it's a hoot don't use that as your day to go talk about an issue or something like that just sit quite and observe there's any specific questions here but again this is sort of our operating budget for this program meals program so this is one I say this every year I'll say it again this is a program that's budgeting a deficit I take this deficit all day every day every year we're serving a lot of meals to a lot of kids in a given year the challenge with the way this program is structured is that every meal that we serve we are actually losing money on roughly 10 cents so even if we get our meal counts 100% accurate we're going to project a deficit and unfortunately because our meals program is a drop-in program we're not 100% accurate there's no way you can possibly know how many kids are going to wander in off the street on a Tuesday night to pick up a back lunch at the library so Amanda's done a tremendous job of getting this budget into a pretty good space I do want to note the fiscal year 19 deficit is higher than usual primary reason being is that we had some revenues that came in after the fiscal year because of Colleen departed our Vista Amanda took on the program and there was a lag in getting some of that paperwork process with the state so there was an additional fiscal year 18 deposit that came in that isn't hitting in this fiscal year 19 year so hence the bigger negative number there but overall I think Amanda's done a great job of making this program work and continue to see it be well utilized I'm sorry just a reminder to the other in terms of funds coming in it's the donations and again a reminder we've been pulling from program reserves to cover this or we've been doing it's been through community service programs any other meal questions Thrive program I would like to highlight the very adorable child in the lower center and our fantastic staff in the upper left so Thrive program budget is one that I think is going to warrant some conversation as you can see we are projecting a pretty significant deficit for both fiscal year 19 and 20 fiscal year 19 we knew was coming because with a staff person on maternity leave we were essentially paying two directors simultaneously for a chunk of the fall so we knew that there was going to be a deficit there I also do want to point out that with the Thrive budget it is a budget that typically catches up to itself throughout the year so summer as I mentioned earlier enrollment has been more difficult we tend to not break even on summer after school tends to be a program where we have we generate more revenue than our costs and so through the course of the year as we get closer to June and we've had more weeks of after school we're incrementally catching up and that deficit is coming down so Thrive always looks terrible early in the year and by year it tends to level out and be in a better space but again we're projecting here a not insignificant deficit year over year so I think again it's a warranted conversation on the revenue side we are we made some adjustments that will potentially include fee increases for fee paying families so right now we in essence have three tiers of participants folks who either receive full subsidy from the state partial subsidy from the state or who receive no state subsidy and are required to pay full price our goal is to try to start to adjust the financial expectations on the fee paying families and move towards a sliding scale we're going to do that slowly we very much recognize it's a knob not a switch when it comes to increasing the cost of programs we're hopeful that that will be an increase that's understood we've also not increased program fees for Thrive in how many years three at least three or four so it's time I think for us to sort of catch up a bit and then I think it's notable too that because we're now a STARS program folks that generate their fees through the subsidy system receive a bonus on top of their base rate so in essence subsidy families are actually paying a little bit more than fee paying families at the moment because of that bonus so in some ways we're actually helping to catch the fee paying families up to the amount that subsidy families are generating so the bonus is pooled so it's not tagged necessarily to a kid in the way that we budget for it but again it's if you could boil it down that way it is in essence extra revenue per kid so what we're projecting is for the after school program a dollar a day or five dollars a week so weekly rates would go from 70 to 75 and for this summer it would be two dollars a day so an additional ten dollars a week so a relatively minimal increase I think considering we haven't grown that revenue base in a while worth noting and you're probably asking so you're increasing fees wise the number going down from fiscal year 19 to 20 I could read your mind Nicole but we if you look back at the historical actuals versus budgets the last couple years we have not had projections on the revenue side and we are typically below where we are expecting to be so we went back and made some adjustments to projected enrollments and that subsequently brought the total revenue down I think it's going to be more accurate picture but again it does look like a loss of revenue year over year but I would argue I don't think that's revenue we're going to actually see in fiscal year 19 at the end of the day based on where enrollments are tracking right now so so where's the light I mean last year it was we think if we make this investment we can up enrollment and get it to sustainable break even ish model but I mean the real commitment we've made was okay we're going to do this this year let's come back next year and talk about where it's at yeah it's I'm not sure to be honest with you at this point you know I think one piece to note is that salaries for part time staff have jumped a fair bit in that program based on the non union wage scale adjustment it's a great thing to do it's the right thing to do that's an additional salary costs that that this program wasn't carrying in fiscal year 18 is that the 755 is that the miscellaneous no that's baked into the salary and benefit lines for those part time positions which is most of the staff for this program so the miscellaneous is made up of the general fund transfer and the credit card fees because we already scheduled a general fund transfer as part of last year's budget approval or a wait we have this program contribute to the general fund for a portion of raise time spent helping to manage the program so is this a program that's another one that has always run in deficit it is not we've been the past few years made some significant investments I think Kirstie's position being one just history for you Thrive used to run separate summer and after school programs and we would bring in part time seasonal directors so from a program quality perspective it was really challenging because there was very little consistency between you know on June 15th that last day of after school and June 16th that first day of summer you'd have a different organizational leader different staff, different approach so I think from a program quality investments we've made to increase salaries for part time staff provide more training opportunities for those folks have a full time year on director on board have really borne out and I think you see that with the Thrive or the status designation that we're achieving from the state as we've made those initial investments we were running pretty consistently at a break even point or right near it we had a little bit of a staff transition a couple years back and I remember I was sitting in a different chair so I think with all that we saw some real challenges with enrollment again part-time temps spilling in people with different roles and that I think started this sort of snowball effect where numbers came down numbers have stayed down a bit and we're kind of growing back up so Sadie I think to your question I you know me at this point I'm a hopeful and optimistic dude you know I think there's a way for us out of this I think we're certainly looking at staffing structure and are there ways we can be more efficient there and still retain a quality program that's within regulatory compliance we are certainly continuing to push for improved enrollment I think I mentioned earlier some of the stuff we're doing in the summer I'm hopeful will help us there but and again slowly turning that knob on revenue is important for us as well this is also a program I think we may need to start to explore some grant writing support for this is not something we've done historically because we've had a pretty solid revenue stream but I think it's a pretty compelling program from a community need perspective so that's also something that in the coming year I really want to poke at and start to explore so and so the again for some historical context last year the big discussion was percentage of salaries based on duties and and the decision was made to say no let's accurately reflect what the person's doing does the reduction to 32 out of 40 does that make any impact whatsoever in that pie? the percentages stay the same it's a smaller pie but the percentages stay the same general fund and thrive and right now thrive 80% general fund is 20 as of last year between the lines last year that was a big conversation piece of when we came to this program item was whether or not we might shift a percentage of that around within the budget to alleviate some stress or pressure on this program but the decision was no reinvest in it if you think the numbers can make the budget work right if the investment then the additional staff time equals back we don't want to short sell it if you're trying to get more people in to help on the revenue side because initially that had been a one third, two third split is it not being anywhere near the field is it common for the municipality to own thrive programming where it exists in other communities I'm looking at Kirstie but I'd say generally less so the municipalities that run after school programs but in terms of license regulated programs in my experience at least they're tending to be managed by outside non-profit agencies not always the municipality I think Burlington is an example that runs a licensed program and are there school districts ever responsible for them is that the logical or unlawful or private non-profit does operate an after-school program but it doesn't go until 5.30 well and it's not licensed and it's not so it's limited care it's not a child care program as much as it's an enrichment type program so that's the difference and at this structure how much of the programming is done at the school for us all of it two years ago I mean I'll just say obviously the reflection on the program is just overwhelmingly very effusively positive right in terms of the participants and the families and it's impacting the community I think I would say as a result at least if this is a go on this budget last year we kind of had this conversation about hey we can see it getting closer to cash flow or let's be honest about what that looks like I would think that you know a responsible ask if this is a budget that's approved again is number one it's the same thing like real accountability on the numbers not accountability just a really realistic picture of what's a reasonable amount of revenue for this program in terms of what it's going to cost and then I would just I would just say that the community is probably going to challenge the model if this is the way it looks year after year in terms of an expense and have counsel whatever that looks like accept the expense for what it is in the program and deficit area and budget accordingly right instead of it being I don't I generally don't like the practice of passing negative budgets not generally don't like I think it's kind of bad financial management right so we're kind of acknowledging that there's a problem an issue with no answer and to be clear I don't like putting a negative number it's not like stand back and say sweet we're done I think we have really been banging on this and trying to figure out without disrupting enrollment pretty dramatically especially for folks at the lower end of the economics spectrum how do we start to move that needle so it's a hard one I wish I had a better answer for you I fully appreciate that with additions to households there come changes in circumstances situations and congratulations on that but also obviously from a program standpoint makes that challenging too so I guess that would be my condition to be accepting of this is that there be again not just a numbers review next year but I would think that it would be appropriate to have a real structural conversation about the model and if the municipality is going to continue to be the right operator and if that's in the best interest of the community I don't know I mean we've seen how easy it is to start up a new healthcare center I mean the fact is the business model doesn't work after school anywhere no matter what the age range it's the issues are different so it's a challenge I'm interested in exploring the likelihood of grants and other sources of funding to support the program I don't know what's out there but is that a viable path to support this type of programming but that would actually be helpful I think in the context of even this budget is to your assessment of what's out there in terms of you know before we go to families and I am I mean I pay so I'm not supposed to read these things it's a great deal but I not always but I think you know looking at the revenue mix is also important but I don't want to put our eggs in that basket if it's like well there's two grants available and they're extremely competitive and we really need to focus more on the rates that we're charging families or the structure of the program overall and I think that can lead to a dangerous spiral too if we're looking at just fees and increasing rates to make up the balance when we end up pricing people out which lowers enrollment which means we end up with a greater balance which means we attempt to increase fees which can put us in a really bad place that impacts families in a really negative way it doesn't achieve the outcomes that we'd be looking for what are the authors say about this just any curiosity did we get any did we get poked on it no not at all I think it is the end thing when it's a couple of years with good explanations of why it's one thing when it's multiple years at similar rates I think we would be heading back towards an OCC conversation about I mean the reality is this program has reserves now so we can make it work but if those are depleted and we start what we're really doing right now is subsidizing the service delivery with our reserves which is fine it's an option but if we deplete those reserves will we subsidize it with taxpayer dollars and I think that's the point that the auditors would have right good questions and we'll certainly try to get some answers to those and appreciate and I wanted to say to Eric I appreciate the sensitivity I think that this body has shown towards pricing and the impacts of that it's certainly something I hold pretty dear and just want to say out loud we're not over here trying to crank that knob a bunch of money we're at times I think overly sensitive to it but it's important to me that people that need the program can get in it and get there so I just appreciate you bringing that up so alright community gardens that lower left photo is not the most gardening photo of all time but excited that we added a new site this year at the Wunuski senior center and very huge shout out to Zach who really spearheaded a lot of that effort and Michelle on the far right who is our intern so this budget is pretty quick and easy this is one that's grown each year we have added plots every year since I've been here and I keep thinking this is the year that we're going to add plots and not have a wait list that has not happened yet which is pretty cool so we continue to add plots see revenue increase slightly and sort of track expenses accordingly so and this is a program that's been built to be right around break even in a given year we do have some investments coming up in raised beds down at the O'Brien center those are a couple years old now so we have a nest egg for the garden program we're trying to strategically invest those to re re-up infrastructure if you will and it's been a great success of a program overall and Alicia is going to be looking on the overall management of that moving into this next season so pretty exciting these budgets are always a reminder that in the course of a $12 million budget it can be quick to blink at $3,000 to $4,000 operational budgets about how much pleasure and impact and engagement that those network causes so it's not a scale of $1 to $1 so thank you for your work in that so we mentioned reserves a few times here so this is just a quick overview the highlighted pieces are obviously the ones that relate to the budgets presented tonight so currently for or as of end of fiscal year 18 community service programs has a surplus of $147 $969.78 and community center as of fiscal year 18 at $65,000 again we're projecting that to get drawn down this year to bring that budget whole I just wanted to put those numbers there for you all to see and I should go ahead within community services so from an accounting perspective we look at it as a pool but we are tracking those specific two programs so we're not taking senior center money necessarily to pay for garden plots we're trying to be really good about managing those funds in discrete pools so do you have a breakout of reserves for meals and thrive we have it available but not right now we can send that out so that actually brings me to a question I was wondering about is it appropriate to consider we have multiple different programs that we're running something more successful than others with budgeting would we take a more successful program as one that doesn't meet it I think meals is a great example of that where meals as a program itself and I don't know are we at the end of that reserve when I started there the program had been run differently in the past so we were generating excess every year so when I started there was excess for that program we've been picking away at that over time as we move into the future that $180 deficit annually is going to have to probably come out of the excess of other programs or those global reserves so that's an example of one that I think in the future would be doing just that so yeah I certainly view things in that way I think in human services you're going to have some programs that generate revenue and some that don't and that's just the nature of the beast but again I think for the in particular some of the programs at the senior center and things that have a little bit more segregated history financially we're trying to track those numbers independent and be able to answer that question when a senior comes in and says you know what happened to that money that we gave the city five years ago we can very confidently say here it is, here's so much as lofty tears what we've spent I don't know if that answers your question it does what I'm thinking about is where we're in this position with OCC where we are subsidizing that cost through tax dollars with these other programs potentially can we subsidize them through revenue and avoid using the tax dollars but I guess it depends where the money is coming from and that's certainly the hope where we can but again I think to the point about keeping fees and costs reasonable and affordable that's the balancing act that we're trying to do right now with deficits like the meals program that's easily coverable by the other fees program but $18,000 within this budget is just not able to be covered by other fees at this point in time makes sense so speaking of the O'Brien Center there had been a question asked I guess around the sort of debt picture for the building and so I think these was at this point so I think these two pieces here really sort of are the primary pieces of note so certainly the $2.2 million bond set to mature in fiscal year 30 and then the ongoing obligation to Vermont Works for Women to pay back the cost of the fit up for their new space when they built that in 2008 so there's quite a bit of debt remaining on that facility which was sort of encumbered at its onset in 2008 which is well before well, except for you maybe but well before any of us were sitting around the table so it kind of is what it is and we're trying to figure out some ways to address that I've had some encouraging and positive conversations with Vermont Works for Women recently about I think there's generally a desire on both sides of the table to get the length of that obligation reduced so trying to figure out some creative ways to do that without sacrificing revenue for us or hugely impacting their pay in at the current rate that we are reducing the obligation to Vermont Works for Women we won't pay off that obligation until 2068 that's the face that I made so again, it's something that we inherited there wouldn't be a skydome by then and are working through and I think we continue to have good rapport with those guys and we're excited they're in the building and they seem to be excited to be here and we'll keep it that way and for these general obligation bonds is there a negative arbitrage if there's early payment it's through the municipal bond bank so there is not a way for us to prepay right, okay that's interesting good context and then again just a little bit of picture of the years back of the building finances again, Christine I mentioned there that he's a fiscal year 17 when we got to 22 for a deficit you know that I think that year sort of encapsulates the ideal year of what the building at least, you mean all the spaces except for the community room that we've discussed before correct is there a sense that if we did lease that piece out that we could actually get to zero here we'd be close I don't think we'd get all the way to zero but we'd be significantly closer certainly thank you Mr. Crenna I wish it was a better looking slide and then I want to just kind of lead into the emerging issues piece with a highlighted one of our more successful library programs here the direct queen Strayer which went on, we've had it twice now and it's been wildly popular but it sort of is endemic of an issue we're struggling with at the library so it's busting at the seams so that's certainly lower down on my list not because it's a lower priority but because I was putting this list together that's where it fell but it's great we have a new youth librarian Julie Monterra who's kicking some serious but she's been here six weeks and has got a ton of new programming up if you're ever looking to fiddle around with an old piece of technology on a Tuesday the Tinker Tuesdays program has been great I walked in there the other day there were 20 kids tearing apart old phones and printers and it's just been really cool to see they're starting to get that type of drop in programming going so very exciting but 20 kids in that space as you can imagine tearing apart technology has ripples to other users of the space and so we're trying to figure out how do we manage that it's frankly a really good problem to have but when you've got a 1800 square foot rectangle there's not really anywhere to hide have quiet so working on that and then obviously we've mentioned a couple times the pool replacement project will be a big piece for us moving into the future the O'Brien Center we've talked quite a bit about in February along with the city website we're going to be launching a new recreation website which we're super excited about Paul and I had the first configuration training last week and already it looks like it's going to be a much more functional tool for us which is exciting mentioned the parks planning and the recreational planning going on hoping to start to parlay some of that effort into programming outcomes and new things for people to see and do and Halloween if you haven't been in the attic here yet it is full of votive candles I've did a major purge of Sally's flower shop but as folks know the mantel has officially been passed for the pumpkin program downtown and silly as it may sound that pumpkins is an emerging issue that's a big deal for this community and I think we are going to certainly have a central role in figuring out how that carries forward but it's worth acknowledging so so that's that that's the end of my we amend the community services commission charge to specifically request so I want to figure out how we can all go correct some people at meetings right that's good the content so that's the end of that great thank you questions, comments, concerns from council questions, comments, concerns from the public it was good we asked a lot of questions from the middle of that great thank us for all of our hard work but I'd like to thank Ray for all of his hard work thank you for pulling that together and taking care of us every day we'll try and since we have all of you here obviously we really truly appreciate all that you do there was no community services department here eight years ago six years ago and it's been built up from scratch and we have been so fortunate to have so many good dedicated people here because we are aware we haven't always given it the amount of funding that everybody would like or is optimal not reality for us to be able to do that but I think people forget that over six years we went from zero to this so I hope you all have a really great pride for that because you have a massive, massive impact on the lives of people here in the experience of what living mooses like so thank you okay continue to any questions to Ray in the budget process and we appreciate it thank you all very much okay next up this evening is the Myers pool design documents review so I'm going to talk slowly as they set here so we are John will review the timeline this is officially with the stage of the Myers Memorial pool reconstruction is the transition from the community services project that was involved in visioning and facilitating the public process to a capital project under public works we are really looking at design, engineering, and construction so John will review the timeline things are going fairly well we are on track and this is the we have the design development plans at this point so this is kind of the last public attempt or the last public opportunity to weigh in on significant design changes before we go to final design, bid documents to stay on schedule for the FY20 summer construction correct to follow up on that too Ray and I will likely have a follow up meeting at either public works commission or a combined community service meeting just to maybe dive in a little bit deeper into the latest plans and get some additional feedback from those folks so as Jesse mentioned we are at design development level which just for folks that don't live this every single day design development level you have schematic design which is phase one design development is so when you kind of refine the schematic level engineering elements to get a much better picture of what you're going to be constructing so it's almost to that construction document phase and then phase three would be sort of the construction document where you can hand off plans to a contractor and they can okay I can build this and then then it gets into bidding and construction so we're at that point now where we're on the cusp of sort of finding these drawings to really get to that construction document level so this a lot of this stuff is not going to be new information but it's more of a check in status update for this project this is our working schedule right now so as you can see we're item three and then we're going to be progressing into construction documents you know starting probably after the new year and into the spring our projected schedule is spring construction starting in 2019 and then ultimately wrapping up fall of 2020 with the project so we're still on schedule for that this is our current understanding of budget based on our previous discussions so we're looking at a project with those V options taken out and then adding back in all those engineering fees, soft costs you know bidding insurance pieces that brings the total project to around 3.74 million and then we have right now fundraising goal assumed at 300,000 so that 3.45 445 million is what we're modeling for debt service for the budget which I'll be discussing in January that's the number we're using which 20 year bonds we're using a 3.8% interest that's right around 280,000 dollars annually I have two questions about this I don't know Ray if you've had contact with the pool fundraising committee the materials that I received in the mail from them refer to a 500,000 dollar goal which is not what we set for them so I'm just curious if you know about the context there I think they're ambitious I mean that's a number they've carried forward from conversations prior to you all sort of setting that number for them so I think they're continuing to carry that forward but I think 300,000 is ambitious 500 is certainly more ambitious but yeah that's the number they're using right now Jesse mentioned earlier that you had submitted this grant application would that be part of the fundraising goal or is that how does that factor in we're not anticipating that being part of the fundraising goal at this point I think that would come off that target bond number I think we want to continue to encourage and support that group to hit that 300,000 dollar number but because it's a grant we're not going to know until March 1st whether or not we've been funded for this so we're in a holding pattern and until that point we'll assume the worst as we build the budget so you could see that 3.4 come down 147,750 is what we applied for and just to refresh my memory didn't we specify that there were certain features that were that the fundraising goal was wrapped around so that if for example short for some reason of 300,000 dollars the project still moves forward it's just going to be missing a few features do you want to talk about that? yeah so I'll go back to the schedule a little bit so when we go out to bid which is item 5 sometime in the spring our plan is we will have those items listed as alternate and or we'll see how we are with the fundraising goals those will almost be bid out separately and then they can either be part of the construction project or not at that time from a financing perspective when is the drop dead date in terms of locking the bond amount the full authority will be asked of the taxpayers but when is the note closing well no sufficient when's the do we know the drop dead date sorry so we have a bond anticipation note now which is what's allowing us to pay for this work now and I believe the application to the bond bank is in May so by beginning of May we will be coming to you and saying what is the amount you want us to bond for what's going to be included in the project and what do we feel confident on the fundraising side of things and I think that will become a policy question about what does the pool company with grants and what are the construction numbers to move forward to actual taking out the bond issuance and it would be the last opportunity for council to take some kind of wild card action from a funding or finance perspective for example the injection of fund balance in order to reduce the bond obligation say council decided to commit $200,000 towards you know front loading those funds what impact might that have on the reduction of the overall amount so just want to highlight that as a important conversation to have leading up to that great so that kind of leads into so the project I mean I know you all have spent some time with us so I'll go over briefly but this is sort of the existing conditions that is currently so existing bath house existing main pool kiddie pool and filter building and then the community gardens down below proposed condition in the DD set existing bath house with the addition with the concession stands in the community room and then of course you have the pool family pool the new filter building is in the back here attached to this addition as well and then we have some new front access streetscaping here so we do currently show like for example this is the shade structure you know we will get some pricing for DD but we expect that's going to come out for construction design and that's one of those DD options so we'll get some pricing maybe a bit really great and council decides to move forward with that element we can look at it in CDs but we expect that's going to come out during the construction development strong encouragement you were so good about this I don't question that it's already on your minds but just from the impact of the residential neighborhood during construction period as much communication as humanly possible with neighbors and any sort of mitigation tactics from a timing perspective etc that you know I would hope would be in the response of the construction entity who ultimately is going to control whether trucks are beeping at 6 in the morning or 10 at night yeah it's a tough site because as you can see it's surrounded by residential properties so it's that's going to be a main focus so the project is making sure we have a good communication plan and then just kind of zoom in at the pool you know as you've probably seen before a kind of pool with 5 lanes that go from 4 feet to 8 feet deep and then the family pool that goes from 0 to 4 feet with the spray structures and the slides so this is the current slide is what was shown on the schematic design we are looking at some of the VE options currently so this is one potential layout for that slide that would be a reduced cost single loop option and then of course these are just some of the spray features that are being looked at for the family pool and then moving on to the facility so basically we'd be looking to utilize sort of the main structural components of the existing bath house demoing approximately 550 square feet of sort of this end portion here and rebuilding 1000 square feet to accommodate that concession space community room and some swim storage so this is part of that new space on the end here of the tree and this is sort of the floor plan of that facility so you can see here this is the renovated bath house space and then this is sort of a new addition here with the filter room in the back so you have your men's and women's bath spaces on either side the room concession stand and then your sort of filter room for the pools so we've had some discussions and the concessions about what level of amenity we want to have there, that's been one of the big topics and we've really kind of scaled that down to we want from looking at do we want to have an industrial kitchen with a hood or do we want to create just a space where we're microwave foods and prepackaged meals and I think given the code requirements to make that space for hoods and industrial oven we've really scaled that down to just prepackaged food and microwave type of heating and then one of the new sort of features on this set that you have not seen before is the storm water requirements so because Act 250 considers Landry Park and the pool facility is sort of one parcel in this case, we are allowed to put our storm water best management practice over on the Landry Park side which helps us, it gives us a little bit more room in that tight space on the pool side and we can actually do a surface sort of changing area versus something underground and costly on the pool side the nice thing about this as well is it gives us the ability to take some credits for the Morehouse Brook flow control plan that we're required to implement from DEC so we can use the pool project to help us meet those requirements as well so that is the end but I think what we're kind of looking for is if there's any sort of major design elements that you are thinking we should re-look at, now is the time that you can start working with the consultant to do that I'd like to start just with the shape and configuration I think this is a really just an interest time or really conversations have been had at a number of different levels and I'm very appreciative of the process and I just want to note I don't know that I've ever seen a more smooth to pat you guys in the back a smooth transition of an issue from program to public works like this and give you big kudos for that because you guys did a great job with that, thank you and no offense Ray I'm sure you've done a fine job explaining some of those things and the professionalism that was is great and we're very appreciative of the way you guys managed that, thank you are there questions, concerns from council any surprises from anybody in terms of dates, budget, questions items to flag any questions, concerns from the public again well-betted issue so thank you very very much for all the work to move this forward to my agenda just a discussion so thank you great job okay next up tonight is the University of Vermont Medical Center Elise at the O'Brien Community Center Steve I don't know if you're coming to join us I'm just certainly happy to see and thanks for being in there and hearing me blather on for a while but happy to have Steve Eiler here from University of Vermont Medical Center I think to the point of having Elise in front of you is a pretty massive milestone I think it's fair to say it's been a long journey with UVM I think there's been a ton of patience and creativity and innovation and at the core of it all I think a real focus on what's going to be best for the residents of Lewinowski which is really refreshing and positive so excited to have this Elise in front of you I think if specific questions certainly happy to field those these as I mentioned in my memo have been vetted by legal teams on both sides of the equation so we're at a point where we're prepared to present this as a fully executable document very excited to be there and just to be clear in case there's any questions it's Elise, it's technically a contract so if you it's a legal document so if you have specifics or I should say if you have general things to bring up or ask questions about from an informational purpose that's completely appropriate we also have city council here tonight if there's a specific legal implication of one of the provisions of Elise or something that you really want to try to word Smith then we would probably ask that we talk about that in executive session because it's a contract negotiation but if there are general questions as to the opportunity to do that then we'll pause to see if there's any interest in more detailed items you know first of all obviously University of Vermont we are incredibly appreciative of the entire relationship we have with using entity and we're obviously this has been a long running main artery for that so thank you very much for your continued participation in the committee and the support you provide and for this relationship that we know has been so productive not just for you in the city but for the people who live here we're certainly excited to be at this stage we had our doubts along the way but certainly at any key juncture when I turn to Ray and asked where we're at I was always able to go back to my team and we were sure Ray said but whatever we do the city is still committed to making this work for from our aquatic rehab program this is a great outcome thank you very much thanks for your patience as we move at the speed of government questions comments concerns from council I have some general questions so as part of the memo it includes like some of the programming that you guys want to do here which is exciting to read about also indicated that you were looking to do more programming in the future the idea is this within that space like you think that you can use it for additional programming for our community members yes and part of the thing that we have not programmed the existing programs the ideas that were in the letter from our president are all currently existing programs that we have up and running in other locations that we could that we will in our planning to expand to this location the other opportunity we have is to and these are all these all operate primarily during regular business hours so the other opportunity that we have for developing programs is the evening hours and weekends certainly something that we look to collaborate with the city or developing a space that that could be used for related activity I mean our interest is in having it as vibrant and busy in the spaces as we can for as many hours as we can and to be clear Ray this is includes the gym essentially right it does not the gym is not included in this footprint correct so it's everything of the former white footprint with the exception of the gym and that associated storage closet and I know like the last time that UVM folks were here there was discussion about interest in like the kitchen space for health classes but that's something still down the line nothing here that relates to that yeah that's not something that we're able to formulate at this point and then my last question Ray is I saw that like this lease includes dedicated parking spaces and I was curious if other leases at OCC have that they don't at the moment and I think it was a request specific request that came back upon the first review from UVM medical and I think the way that it's written and certainly in the spirit of the conversations I've had with Ashley Bond about it it's more that there's a desire to see access to a minimum of 27 spaces I think it is in the lease it's not we're not going to go out and put signage up on 27 spaces that says you can only park here if you're coming for UVM services it's just I think I mean we've been very candid about the fact that there's going to be some work happening at that property and I think part of it was a response to the fact that if we have a construction site at the front side of that property they wisely I think wanted to retain some access to parking so that their patients can get in and out so I think looking at the number of parking spaces we have the volume of users I think we're well within reason to sort of make that parking commitment doesn't feel like an unreasonable stretch so okay thank you for those details that's it for me other questions comments great questions questions comments concerns questions comments concerns for the public good so again to both of you very much appreciate obviously the spirit was always there appreciate all the work to get to the final place and know it's going to have a tremendous benefit of the community so thank you very very much and with that I would entertain a motion for approval if so desires this on a discussion approval item for the University of Vermont Medical Center at least at the O'Brien Community Center as presented second motion by Eric second by Helen for the discussion so you can hear none although some people say aye aye and those opposed motion carries thank you very much appreciate it next up is item E resolution establishing a housing trust fund thank you for your time hello there so I'm bringing before you tonight a draft of a resolution to establish a housing trust fund this is the result of the work of the housing commission and was also one of the recommendations from the 2016 housing needs assessment that we established a housing trust fund what I am recommending here is doing it by resolution rather than by ordinance and establishing housing trust funds have been done both days in different communities we're recommending that it be done by resolution so that we have the ability to adapt it as we're going forward because this is our first go at it so we can make minor adjustments to it rather than having to make adjustments to an ordinance we would then be able to just adjust the program guidelines and the policies surrounding it so I would any questions about it what I'm recommending here is that we seed the fund especially with funds from the Home Improvement Loan Program and put the Home Improvement Loan Program under the umbrella of the housing trust fund as one piece of it so that would be a reallocation of the $347,961.48 in our Home Improvement Loan Program funds held at Opportunities Credit Union and that's as of November 30th 2018 this is a discussion item for tonight what I'm looking for from you is any changes you might want to see different approach you might want to see any feedback that you have can you just walk me through from a process standpoint by establishing it through resolution rather than ordinance how this body would go about making revisions to the program structure and the program policy guidelines we would then follow up with going through the housing commission there are several things that I still need some recommendations on we would come forward with a set of program policy guidelines basically similar to what you saw for the Winooski Small Business Loan Program so that would come through you for a discussion and then any changes that you wanted made I could take back make those revisions and bring it back for approval can I make one clarifying point to that so I think the intent here also is that those changes either to a future resolution or to program policies and guidelines could be made with one vote of your council rather than going through an ordinance change process and once we have effort underway and a belief that we have the right structure then the policy decision becomes do we ordain that structure or do we retain it as a resolute group correct thank you I don't even know what we would I mean ordinance doesn't make sense to me like it's not you're not I agree with that you're not ordinating anybody to do anything that's interesting that's how they do it the housing trust fund in Burlington is by ordinance which I agree with your logic I don't think that it is ordinance material or at least not based on what we do in Winooski generally I have some questions and I can't I was unable to locate the criteria for the home improvement program but are the criteria the same in terms of ensuring that the funds are used to maintain or increase affordable housing for low or moderate income households? There were criteria around that with the home improvement loan program I think next up well coming soon I think that the housing commission is charged with revamping the home improvement loan program it's been an underutilized program so I think as part of this umbrella structure we would be looking at those criteria again but they are currently targeted to homeowners that are below I believe it's 80% median income but it is so this increases the band of eligible households does this go up to 120% when we use it? Yeah I believe it could So I would like to see in the next time we are in between the charter for the home improvement loan program I guess I have some concerns about I don't think the home improvement loan program was well advertised if you google it there's no information about it and so I would hate to say that I think the number three might need more definition to a more specific definition or definition in the subsequent policies it's the same point part of the confusion of the city having tried to help some individuals I don't think it's going to be the same thing I don't think it's going to be the same thing I don't think it's going to be the same thing but the confusion of the city having tried to help some of that before any of you arrived so don't take this personally anybody here and it's no reflection on the current administration having tried a couple of times to navigate somebody through the home improvement process there were different perceptions of the income level at the city staff level at the Champlain housing trust level and what wasn't. So I think that that piece is number three. I would call out specific AMI numbers. Absolutely. And I think when we talk about the 80 to 120 that's generally for home ownership assistance. So that's for first time generally and what we've discussed thus far. That would be for assistance with first-time home buyers. So that's so I can lay that out more clearly. Yeah, one of the problems with the home improvement loan program is there are several iterations in the paperwork that I have and they are different. So I think revamping that so it meets what we're looking to do today might be useful. And you know not to throw any organizations in the bus, but when they approach different organizations they have different bands of income that they are tasked with working with and can't go above in some cases. And we did find quite honestly I think last last time I looked at it the income level was you know around $50,000 or something like that per year for a family of three or four and this was again a while back. You know right now it would be very challenging to own a home in Manuski at that income level. So I think it would be great to have that kind of analysis when you bring back that same idea of okay if it's an average household with a mortgage what's that look like from an applicability standpoint. Would it be more useful for me to bring back the resolution with the completed program policies procedures and criteria rather than bringing the resolution forward now with the intention of writing those over the coming month or two? How long are we going to do this? I feel like those are what I... I think one thing that we have to do is we have to look at where we're originating the loans and that that was one of the hang-ups in it. I had written a bunch of the actual policy and realized we can't go forward until we know who we're working with on originating these loans so there are pieces that have to happen. Let's do the resolution. Just you know I think that that's that's probably the appropriate way. I just I think if there could it's I think you're hearing what the concerns are and if we could try to address those in the resolution then it'll be clear on this body's behalf without sticking their nose into operations. Okay these are the these are the benchmarks we know that you're gonna hit right in the back stops for some of those. Does that make sense everybody? Is that fair? Okay. Absolutely. Other questions, concerns? So I guess and I don't feel one way or the other about it but if you know this is establishing the fund and then we'll be setting program policies and guidelines would it be more appropriate for those definitions of affordable to be in the program policies and guidelines rather than the resolution? Is there a reason that it makes more sense here? I would say it does because you're really you're steering who is impacted by the program. It's it's there it will be the number one defining defining metrics for determining who can access the program. That is something I think the council needs to set it. I'll have it in both places. Number seven scares me. I think it should say city council or a board of commission at its designation. Okay. Unless there's concern about that. No I mean I think if we have good program policies and guidelines in place too then if there's another body that's carrying that out. Are you thinking like the housing? I don't know. I don't know. I'm to be honest with you I think that there's a bunch of items coming out of the pipeline housing where there's probably ended up being a broader conversation about how those issues items and concerns are going to be handled and whether that's appropriate for the housing commission to make that future type of I just think some flexibility there might be warranted and I think it's fine to lay it in the council's lap but to give the flexibility of it also sure at some point without a new resolution being passed say okay we'd like it to go here. I'm just wondering I'd be curious to hear from the chair of the housing commission if there's anything of the discussions we're having we're not missing that we're really big discussions within the commission you know we struggled a bit with different pieces that could help with the affordable housing question one thing I will say about the housing trust fund is that setting the little pieces that you saw for housing trust fund is like the single sure thing that we can do as a community to concur in the other other things we're considering like I see you're replacing more in this business like that are complex and it's not always clear that they work as intended thank you some places you know other places so the data has been in trouble moving forward with the housing trust fund however it ends up being configured is the number of the housing I've heard yet it's still in this okay yeah it might but you know the whole for example all those extra costs on top of the housing costs those kind of things helping back with any construction projects and make a record and stuff that's the one thing I wanted to say well I just want to I would I would appreciate an update on the IZ conversation because maybe this is not the time to do it but part of the thinking around the trust fund was that there would be some requirement of developers to either develop affordable housing or the replacement ordinance concept was abandoned in favor of okay we're going to do IZ it's important to me that that conversation does not get bogged down in the complexity but we figure out a way to thread the needle between you know continuing to see development in the city but also generating revenue for the trust fund to because this is insufficient $300,000 is nice but it's insufficient to really make a dent in some of the if I may break a project that will include a significant percentage. Well you know that's a very specific part of the IZ that was their company as it turns out because you know even just coming up with an amount that read that needle as you put it is right you know we had our nice model we were looking at on the screen and changing it just asking a little bit more of developers when they made a project to draw that essentially but you know and so it's still a part of it. Who developed that model? It was the model that was recommended by Michael Monti from CHD. It's Granted Solutions Network. Okay. So it's a very basic simple mortgage calculator ask for development. So it's like some issues with it but it's you know it's getting to the sketch of a picture right and it's and it does give real life like levers like here's what happens when you do this. Absolutely. And they did a great demonstration on the housing commission meeting you know they walked through that and had a developer there explaining like what the impact of doing one thing versus the other is. The one thing I would point out with the resolution is number six has in the resolution that it would includes in lieu payments as outlined in ordinances. So this leaves it open for that. It just it establishes the trust and then it gives us the time to work out those details. Yeah. We've had a lot of time. I mean, I'm not going to. This is a good first. And I think we need to make sure we continue to take steps. And funding in the future. Future City Councils need to get on that. But those streams of revenue would be great. Other comments, questions, concerns. We've got a pretty good working list going there. Well, similar to the home improvement loan program question that Nicole raised. Do you mind just encapsulating the discussion at the commission level of the importance to including moderate alongside low and moderate income households in regards to the definition of affordable housing. Yeah, that was it was primarily when speaking about home ownership opportunities. So one of the things that we hope these funds can be used for a portion of them and really we're talking about kind of bifurcating the structure. One of it is for home ownership opportunities and some of it is to develop affordable rental units. In most cases that would be targeted toward 80 to 120% is my understanding is those are the people who would be more likely to be taking advantage of home ownership opportunities. So that's usually where those funds would be targeted. So we're trying to leave it open so that we can do home ownership as well as rental. Is there also a goal coming out of the commission and as it's word worded here that funding would be used targeting that 80 to 120 am I for rental development. We were not that was not our plan and that was was not how we were looking at it. That was more for the home ownership opportunities. So it was more for down payment assistance, etc. If it's not clear in here in our discussions we started early on very focused on that 80 to 120 as a gap. Our ongoing discussions we realized that there is a gap there. Focusing there doesn't make sense because that's where most mobility is going to happen naturally. So even though we want to see more rentals in that model and that's not something that we realize. I appreciate that. Because I think from a value standpoint using municipal funds to support the development of rental units that the market should be supporting for people who don't necessarily need assistance. Securing housing I don't think makes sense. And that's something we were all just talking about that would be reflected in the program policies and guidelines. Correct. Wonderful. Thank you. Are there questions comments thoughts to think about? I might I might recommend that given that we've got a long break and I'm sure there's vacations and things like that but that you know eyeballs maybe get back on this later just to flag any concerns ahead of time. Yeah, okay. Just because I think we're not asking for the policy portion of it. You know I always say that because we've got week to week meetings in January so we would be able to get to it quickly anyway. Never mind. I'll leave that where it is because you do a great job of that. Let me tell you what to do. Other questions comments thoughts concerns questions comments thoughts from public. Thank you very much for progressing this and bring it forward. Thank you. Thank you. So that concludes today's regular items we have one item up for executive session. It is executive session pursuant to pending litigation which the public bodies to councils party and involves in a versus the city of a new ski effective Saturday around 10 a.m. Last Saturday I entered into an agreement to have employment at Vermont housing finance agency which is the issuer of bonds associated with this deal and then therefore recused moving forward on this issue and any items related to it. So I will not be joining council for that conversation or any subsequent conversations related to or regarding this issue. So with that, I would pass the torch to the deputy mayor without going into the crowd with the recommendation that you guys have turned to the executive session. And it looks like you have a friend in the audience who'd like to come along. So I will entertain a motion to enter executive session pursuant to statutory referenced here on the agenda in order to discuss pending litigation to which the city because of party and to invite Bob to Palma to join council and Jesse. So moved. Second. Okay. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay we're in an executive session. We convene to adjourn. I don't know if you'll be joining us for that.