 We need to get one little bit of business done first. Adam, Richard Dean, where is he? Oh, I'm not sure. Well? What's your game plan here? I have no choice, but I gotta go home for it now. Right, and then you go to them? We're gonna have to go somewhere to discharge after we do. Okay, I'm gonna reconvene the city council meeting. If I could have some quiet, please. Reconvene the city council meeting at 7.30. And we are going to... The next item on the agenda is a work session, but we are gonna have to go by that and move to the public forum, which is a time certain for 7.30. So we will begin item number four, public forum. And the first person up to speak is Mary Ann Ward, to be followed by Joanne Hunt. And all we ask is tell us whatever you want, just do it respectfully, and you have three minutes to speak. There's a light in front of you that will give you an indication how much time you have left. When the red light goes off, your time is up, and you need to conclude your comments. Good evening, Ms. Ward. Welcome. Hello, task force meetings. The report looks good on paper, but from the very first meeting, the makeup of the task force has graded on me. How could anyone, including the task force itself, accept that five white people were chosen for a seven-member inclusive task force? When I brought it up at the meeting, it was discounted in favor of patting themselves on the back for having been chosen. Recommendation number two, their recommendation, acknowledges that the task force should not have been formed. It states, if necessary, vacancies in the pool of people who comprise the public art review panels or task force be maintained until representatives having those perspectives can be found, meaning different ethnicities and people of color. What that says to me is, if you only have two people that fit the bill for a diverse task force, you do not have a task force. It was illegitimate for reasons, more obvious reasons as well. The selection committee got this one wrong. One counselor stated that he alone formed the task force. If that is true, he alone stacked the deck in favor of removing the mural. Another claims that he refused to allow people of color on it. I'm told acquiescing was the only solution. Both statements are documented. I believe they were chosen for their positions. Who would and who would not support removing the mural, not for their perspectives. There definitely was a bias for removing the mural. In the words of the donor on the task force, we never really had a prayer that it was going to stay up. More, and I'm very troubled, that qualified Burlington residents who would have made up a more diverse and legitimate task force were rejected. While a South Burlington white man hell bent on removing the mural was chosen, his position was known pre-task force. He just happens to employ the wife of the marketplace director. Even before any of the resolutions cited in the recommendations presented or invited guests were heard, some were calling for the mural's removal. It was definitely a stacked deck. My position pre-task force was known to. I was told in a convoluted way that I was not chosen because I support saving the mural, which has no bearing on why I am speaking out tonight. It was an illegitimate, if not unlawful, task force. This needs to be made right. I have requested of Councillors Hartnett and Wright that they present a resolution that de-legitimizes this sham. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Ward. Joanne Hunt, to be followed by Sophie, I can't pronounce the, so it will be Sophie from Old East End. Joanne, welcome. Hi, Joanne Hunt. I'm Interest Practitioner, Cultures for Family Medicine. I work at UVMMC. I'm here again because we still don't have a contract. And I was on vacation last week, so I wasn't here for the presentation of the UVM CEO, et cetera, to the Green Mountain Care Board. A couple of things. I encourage all of you and all of you to keep supporting the nurses. This has been a long haul. We're making progress, which is good, but it's also really difficult. Pretty much all the progress we've made has become of our good efforts and pushing hard and strong of our bargaining team. So if you know somebody, support us. Thank them. I guess I want to talk about another thing, which is the high executive wages at UVMMC. It seems ridiculous if the COO Eileen Whalen can get a 20% increase and her salary is now over 1 million that we can't afford to get more than we're getting. We often brag about Burlington being the number one this and the number one that or the top 10 that. When you figure in costs of living, we're the 47th state UVMMC is in nurses' wages. That has an impact. We talk about wanting good health care. We talk about wanting to treat the opiate crisis, the mental health crisis, health and wellness, obesity, pretty much everything you can talk about, nurses are involved. And yet it also seems like nobody wants to have anything to do with the negotiations because that's up to the management at UVMMC. The board of directors have said that even though there were board of directors members at the Green Mountain Care Board hearing, they haven't been to any of the negotiating sessions. So again, we're making progress and that's good, but I would really ask all of you to keep supporting us. We have not gone away. We're not going away. And we really believe this can have a huge impact on improving the care and the satisfaction and rewarding the nurses as they need to be. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Hunt. Sophie. And you can tell me what your last name is. I couldn't... Quest with a Q. Quest. Okay. I'm going to make the old East Bend neighbors a new organization. Thank you. And everybody please pull the microphone in and speak right into the microphone so everyone can hear you. I came here to thank on the basis of our neighborhood organization that the Department of Public Works for their amazing work on Colchester and the way they've done it all summer and will be continuing to do it in the fall both for what they're going to do finally give us pedestrian signal lights and for the way they've done it a hardly disturbed traffic which you can not believe if you've seen everything they've done. Thank you, Ms. Quest. Carolyn Bates is up next to be followed by Gail Moreau. Ms. Bates. Carolyn Bates. I went to high school at Whitefish Bay, which is the suburb just north of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And yes, they drank a beer. But I wanted to tell you that in 1932 during the recession, our high school was first built. After that, they would add grandstands, football, recreation fields, auditoriums, and over those years, never, ever did they have to tear any of those buildings down. They built them so they lasted and they're just glorious even today. And I am totally disgusted with our town for building a high school that won't even last 50 years. And I want to be sure anything we choose to build from now on is net zero. It has solar and it follows all of the green building rules and we do not go cheap. We put things in that we can maintain and we put in a contract that ensures that we always put maintenance and repair money first over anything else for that school so it doesn't fall apart and get disgusting like this one is. It's shameful. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Bates. Gail Moreau is up next. We follow by Charles Simpson. Good evening, Ms. Moreau. Good evening. I am Gail Moreau, board chair of the Heineberg Community Senior Center and former executive director of this organization for many years. Sitting next to me is Gloria Reynolds. She's a board member as well and a longtime participant. I first want to thank the city of Burlington and Mayor Weinberger for declaring August 21st as National Senior Citizens Day by recognizing the contributions of our older adult citizens and continuing the efforts of Burlington in supporting the resources and programs the city offers to this population. I am here tonight to support the resolution that will be presented to you to establish a senior study committee in light of the recent elimination of United Way funds to the Senior Center. It became apparent the need to investigate opportunities for financial sustainability of this organization, which serves over 500 older adults on a weekly basis with programs, services, meals, and opportunities for community engagement. The city of Burlington has been the main resource for the center, but there is now a need to look further to establish longevity and sustainability. This study group will offer their advice and guidance as well as take a look at a general and general holistically at services and programs provided to all of our older adults in Burlington as we look forward to an increased population of over 65 population. Thank you very much for this opportunity. Thank you, Ms. Moreau and Ms. Reynolds. She's here for support. It's always good to have support, I know. Charles Simpson to be followed by Kate Stein. Good evening, Mr. Simpson. Welcome. Thank you very much, councilman, mayor. We know that the help of the lake is a key to both the livability of Burlington and its recreational tourism economy and to our drinking water supply. We know our wastewater sewage processing capacity does not now meet demand. An untreated sewage is regularly dumped directly into the lake from which we drink and in which we swim. We are told the city will be coming to the voters to ask for a funding bond issue to enhance capacity for the system. Yet we know that well over 1,500 new toilets and showers are scheduled to be added upstream to the system. That is a system that is at present over capacity. I urge the city to require impact fees on large developers to pay for the wastewater treatment capacity that they will require and not to lay this charge to the general residents. I realize that there may be some stormwater retention capacity that is part of the permits for the large developers downtown at Cambrian Rise, but this does not address wastewater treatment capacity. This shouldn't be levied on the general public since the beneficiary are the large developers. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Simpson. Kate Stein to be followed by Lorraine Carter Lovejoy. Good evening, Ms. Stein. Welcome. Thank you. Good evening. So as you know, I'm Kate Stein. I am the mom of a rising freshman. We start on Wednesday at Burlington High School and a son who is going to be a senior this year who has cerebral palsy and uses crutches to get around. I'm coming to the support of supporting Burlington High School from an accessibility point of view. I could talk about a lot of different points of view, but we live this every single day. And I've been working. I joined the re-envisioning in 2014, so I've been working on this for a while. I want to thank those of you who came on tours, and I want to thank you for listening to our school team that we'll be presenting later today. The building as it stands is very discriminatory. My son, as I said, uses crutches to ambulate. Occasionally, he's had to use a wheelchair when he broke his foot in the middle of winter, and I'll tell you why that's a challenge. We're going to take a typical Tuesday, and I wrote it down so I wouldn't miss any of the transitions. He started at 7.15 in the band room for a jazz band. He'd go to school with friends, and they'd go in the bottom of A building, which is not the front door. They'd go in that door and go directly to band. When band was done, he had to go to PreCalculus, which is housed in E building. To do this, he had to leave the band room through the opposite door that everybody else leaves. He would go to the A elevator if it was working. He would take it to the third floor of A. He'd walk the length of the building. He'd go into the ramp from A building to B building. He'd take another elevator. He'd go to the first floor of C building via a ramp. None of these ramps are up to code. They're too steep. Then he would go outside to E building to take an elevator to the second floor of E building to take a ramp, which is actually flat, so that one's okay. Back to C building to go to English. I changed the route in here, sorry. To go to English. That took a lot of time. Then he'd have to go back to band because that was the next class. Then after that class, he'd have to go back up to pre-calculus. It's a lot of wasted time. The money that could be saved on his paraeducator is to help him with transitions like that. If the building were fully accessible and barrier free, we wouldn't need to pay for a human being to be with him. That's a lot of money you could save just in human resources. To close, I really truly believe I love the sign all are welcome. I think that's wonderful. I think we really need to go further and really make sure that everybody is welcome at Burlington High School. Thank you. Thank you, Miss Stein. Lorraine Carter Lovejoy to be followed by Shelley Waterman. Good evening. Welcome. Hi, my name is Lorraine Carter Lovejoy. I'm a community member. I've been a part of the Burlington High School Re-envisioning Committee. I'm a teacher in local alternative schools and I am a new mother. So I will have a student in the school system hopefully in a new high school in 14 years. So I have heard a little bit from elected officials that this feels rushed and to me it does not feel rushed although I've only been on this committee for the past year. I know that people have talked about this for decades. The principal last year said that a lifetime of students have passed through the school as it is now which is shameful really. We have been following a process. This committee was formed. We elected a school board. We have appointed a superintendent. We have appointed this committee that we have. We have hired designers and people to do their job to put this package together to say this is the best option for our community right now and we feel proud about what we have put forward and we expect for the community members to be able to vote on this. I want to talk a little bit about 21st century learning because that's kind of there are some buzz words there. It basically means that not all learning is done in lecture style anymore. What we are doing right now learning as a community is not lecture style. We are discussing things. We are breaking out into smaller groups to work on projects. Now students have to sit in the hallway. This past fall I was a parent educator sub at the high school which meant that I hung out with a lot of students that did not fit what you would think about in a high school that would not fit in that lecture style classroom and I spent a lot of time sitting on the floor in the hallway. The student didn't fit in the class and the teacher might not have had any work for them to do. That doesn't feel fair at all. Every student at Burleson High School has a Chromebook. A lot of classrooms only have two outlets to plug in those Chromebooks. The classrooms do not reflect how students are learning these days. I guess to close I just want everybody to think about I I guess I just want to respect the voices of the community that I've heard over and over that we need a new high school and the time is now. We've waited too long. If not now, when? Thank you Miss Carter Lovejoy. Shelly Waterman. To be followed by Maha Takahashi. Good evening Miss Waterman. Welcome. Good evening. Thank you. So I want to start out by saying that I'm a mother of two daughters who are students in the Burlington School District. Sorry. And I'm no stranger to advocating for accessibility and inclusion in the city. I was a member of the mayor's committee for accessibility and inclusion several years ago. And I want to talk about the right to dignity in this city and with our schools my daughter is more disabled in that school district in the structure as Burlington School stands than any of her limitations could ever afford her. The dignity that families have to suffer through undignified situations and I'll give you an example of just what that means. My daughter has classes in sea building the restroom is in lower sea she's a wheelchair user so in order for her to use the bathroom just in sea building again like Kate said it's a maze of ramps, elevators, outdoor exchanges just to get back into the building to use a bathroom that everyone else can use a flight of stairs for. And I want you to think about that and I want you to put yourself in that situation and how undignified it is for a 16 year old girl I want to talk about meaningful inclusion and how when a person has limitations just how incredibly difficult it is when we do not have universal design in our city or in our schools it takes so much time and energy for her to get from one point of the building to the other and it's not just physical structures it's also the attitudes that we have for people with disabilities so I want to say that my family supports the creation of a new high school we welcome it it's time it should have happened years and years ago and you have an opportunity to make a positive change in this community and to set an example for other schools in the state to say that we support and welcome every student and that we support students with disabilities thank you good evening, welcome thank you I'm Maho Takahashi I have been a part of the organization called Peaceboat which is a global educational voyage for peace and sustainability that sells around the world we have sailed with over 170 Hibakusha survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki for their personal testimonies after moving to Burlington from Tokyo I was delighted to find out that Burlington has been a member city of Mayors for Peace which is a solidarity of cities around the world for nuclear abolition since 80s so hats off to Burlington's leadership in nuclear abolition but we need more now as the world has introduced a treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons US is not catching up Shigeko Sasamori she was 13 years old at that time 86 years old this year is a Hibakusha from Hiroshima she was burnt she says that she looked like a black burnt toast and her father had to peel off each piece of her skin she had to go through 27 surgeries in her life can you imagine that can you imagine that to you or your 13 year old child and the world we live in now has so much more powerful nuclear weapons than Hiroshima and Nagasaki some people say that it's for deterrent but if it is then why are we still talking about the threat of North Korea there is what Burlington can do there is a proclamation going around the country many cities are coming together to call for US to pull back from the brink of nuclear war I encourage you all to look at it and consider signing I am delighted to share with you that Shigeko along with other Hibakusha from Nagasaki Yasaki Yamashita they're coming to Burlington next month we'll be taking them to six local schools and we'll be talking to over 2600 students in public I'd like to invite you all to come to a public event that we are scheduling on September 19th at 7pm at UVN and hear what they may have to say thank you thank you Ms Takahashi Robin Lloyd is up next to be followed by Frank Gillette thank you following up on Maho's comments about the Hibakusha coming to Burlington I'm here to support and urge you to support a proclamation calling for we call it back from the brink of nuclear confrontation I believe I've sent that to all of you together with the little flyer telling about the Hibakusha coming in September and I'm very grateful to Joan Shannon who responded and questioned me about it and asked for more details and so I hope that we can move towards a proclamation either from the city council or from the mayor at some time before the Hibakusha come on the 17th of September you may know that the there's a group called mayors for peace and there's also the the US the United States conference of mayors the conference of mayors has supported and accepted a statement from the mayors for peace which is a very strong statement calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons and a person who could not be here Judy Yarnel from ward 4 left me copies of this statement and wanted me to hand it out to all of you so I have it here I mean the president of the United States is presenting a very dangerous policy of low level nuclear weapons as Maho has described the impact of a nuclear weapon small or large is devastating on any person nearby for the rest of their life to try to survive the impact of radiation sickness and the cancers that follow from that so I hope to we will be in touch with all of you I hope individually maybe and to get your support and hope you will come on the 19th to the to the event at UVM and we'll also be in touch with the mayor's office and perhaps that's the way to go to have a mayoral proclamation so thank you thank you miss Lloyd Frank Gio to be followed by Liz Currie Good evening Mr. Gio welcome Hi I'm Frank Gio I'd like to speak for just a couple minutes about the high school I first had this idea about the high school back in 2002 so over a decade and a half ago I firmly believe that the city students need a new high school all three of our kids graduated from throughout went through the entire Burlington school system my son's a lawyer my daughter's pediatrician and my younger daughter has a PhD from Yale so the school system served us very well we're very pleased with that result what I feel is that the proposal that's on the table $70 million to build a renovation of the existing school building doesn't fully serve the needs of the people and a better solution which I proposed low these many years ago and have brought back up from time to time since is that a new school be built in what is called the north 40 near the urban reserve and that the school be built into the bank into the steep embankment on the east side of the reserve just to the north of where the railroad goes through the cut and that the level area of the urban reserve be playing fields it would be one of the most spectacular high schools in the state if not the country with a view across to the Adirondacks the access to the school would be from north avenue with structured parking either to one side or on top of the existing school I'm an architect but I haven't designed the building because I felt that it wouldn't all it would be would be a source of argument not about the merits of the concept the key the other key aspect of this idea is that we would use the property of the existing high school for the development and construction of housing and that housing of high density at least as high density as the old north end if not higher depending on the political will of you all would be used as a tax incremental financing district to pay for the new high school so there wouldn't be a $70 million bond issue paid for by the citizens of Burlington thank you thank you Mr. Gio Liz Curry is up next to be followed by Karen Downey good evening Ms. Curry and welcome thank you I'm speaking as the board three commissioner expressing my personal views as you know the district will be presenting on the project later I know you all believe in the need for a new high school I'm here to ask you to understand there's an urgent need to place it on the November ballot the discussions and planning for BHS redevelopment and have been going on for over 10 years in March of 2019 the district will have a general education fund request on the ballot and we understand that the city may be planning to place money out items on the ballot as well having a $70 million bond request compete with the school district's budget forces voters to choose between our high quality learning environment and educational programming needs and next March the baseline tax increase for the school budget will be 6% just to make up the difference between the city's gap in the property assessment and the CLA which is now over 20% so that will be the baseline it would be reasonable predict that school spending will be at least 2% due to health care increases and we have a teachers contract negotiation so right out of the door we're going with most likely somewhere around the 8% increase without even doing any numbers so second Burlington is committed to inclusion and equity but our schools do not allow us to fulfill that promise as you've heard it's unfair to our students and other staff and parents with mobility barriers to continue excluding them from participating fully in our educational process it's unfair to our students and families to consider safety and security risks that exist with the current physical configuration it's unfair to English language learners to be isolated in one section of the building when we're working hard to create an inclusive and welcoming climate and the sooner we save money on utilities through energy efficiency the sooner we can reduce our operating expenses and redirect funds to educational services for academic achievement academic achievement is diminished by the lack of natural daylight lack of thermal regulation and poor indoor quality there's a number of articles about this most notably a 2014 study of over 2,000 classrooms in California Washington and Colorado knowing that when controlling for socioeconomic status and racial makeup inadequate lighting noise and low air quality and deficient heating and cooling in the classrooms are significantly related to worse student achievement and test scores every day that goes by without a sub-standard high school exposes our city to economic risk we have a healthy economy now with a construction boom that's creating hundreds of units when millennials begin forming families school district questions your consideration delaying the project sends a message to these young adults that sow the seeds of doubt in our education facilities in the city current construction projects will be winding down thank you thank you miss currie Karen Downey is up next to be followed by sandy baird good evening miss Downey welcome good evening and thank you for having us here tonight I've been a member of the Burlington high school renovation committee since 2013 so I am a resident of Burlington I'm a parent of a graduate of the high school and I also have worked in the system for 30 years as an occupational therapist my initial involvement with the renovation committee was because of accessibility students using crutches or wheelchairs or students just needing a little more time to get from point A to point B I just want to give you some specifics with breakdowns we hear about the infrastructure at Burlington high school we hear about the problems with electrical plumbing furnace hallways that are really cold or really hot but there have been times recently that students could not get to class because sewage was erupting and building e and students would lose their entire term paper because the iPad they were using had a blip we have had students who could not use the elevator in a building that we heard about coming from the chorus up into or the van room up into the rest of the building because a building elevator has had significant problems we've also had building elevator problems in D building as well as needing a replacement in B building so we've waited many years and I remember hearing the discussion about putting the high school down on the waterfront and I believe Betsy is here tonight I heard Betsy talking about that at least ten years ago and I appreciate the gentlemen who gave the specifics on that but I also remember us talking about the traffic issue and just getting school buses the longer we wait the longer our students are not getting quality education so I hope you will put the bond on the ballot in November and we can get started with our renovation for the new building thank you thank you Miss Downey Sandy Baird is up next to be followed by the final speaker tonight Charlotte Dennett good evening Miss Baird and welcome Sandy Baird I'm from Ward 1 and I'm here tonight to talk a little bit about the peace initiative and the ban on nuclear weapons that Robin Lloyd spoke about before me and I would remind the city council and the mayor that we are part of mayors for peace I believe that's correct and I thank the mayor for doing that or for continuing that resolution which was passed by Bernie Sanders I believe back in 1986 I would also remind us in very troubled parts of the world right now a sister city in Nicaragua we have a sister city in Israel in Palestine and we have a sister city in Russia all of those cities are under various kinds of attacks and chaos has ensued in all of those cities one of those sister cities has nuclear weapons and since recently there has been a real chance of confrontation with that nuclear power by the United States to urge city council and the mayor to take seriously the idea that cities should be forming peace with our neighbors and I would ask that you seriously consider supporting a ban on nuclear weapons that Robin spoke about just recently thank you final speaker tonight Charlotte Dennett good evening Ms. Dennett and welcome Dennett I'm also here in support of the Burlington city council where the mayor signing a proclamation concerning the banning of nuclear weapons I'm also coming as a former reporter in the Middle East and I'm currently working on a book about the endless wars in the Middle East and I would urge you to read this statement by the conference of mayors specifically this paragraph whereas tensions between the US and Russia have risen to levels not seen since the Cold War and the two nuclear giants confronting each other in Ukraine, Eastern Europe and Syria and an accelerated tempo of military exercises and war games both conventional and nuclear and risky encounters between Russia and US NATO forces increases dramatically in the Baltic region and Syria and as I speak I believe there is a warship heading to the eastern Mediterranean a US warship towards Syria right now I cannot emphasize how serious the situation is there but at the same time I've been grappling with how to break through what seems to be a certain psychic numbness to quote the great Dr. Helen Caldecott about the threat of nuclear weapons and in a conversation recently with some other concerned people this sort of thought experiment came up and I'd like you to really think about it supposing we are sitting here now and we suddenly get news that a nuclear weapon has been launched towards the United States it may have been an accident or it may have been deliberate what's our response the responsibility what would our response be I can guess what the knee jerk response would be retaliate what would retaliation mean think about it think about the dangers to the planet this is very serious anyway I do urge you to consider the proclamation and also to attend the events on September 19th here the Hibakushu thank you and with that that concludes tonight's public forum and we just so everybody knows on the council and the public we are going to be diverting a little bit on the agenda the work session on the proposed wastewater stormwater upgrades and bonding will come after the schools we are first going to go to item number 5 which is the consent agenda I will recognize councillor Nodell President Rod I move that we adopt the consent agenda as amended and take the actions indicated moved by councillor Nodell seconded by councillor Buescher any discussion hearing none all those in favor of passing the consent agenda and taking the actions indicated police AI any opposed we have passed the consent agenda before going to the school presentation I'm going to dispose of some business that we have to do but they are really quick items so first I am going to um recess the regular city council meeting and convene the local control commission meeting at 7 at 8 8 11 first item on the agenda is the agenda Chairman Dean I will move adoption of the agenda agenda has been moved and seconded by Commissioner Roof all those in favor of the agenda please say aye any opposed we have the agenda item number 2 is the consent agenda Commissioner Dean I will move to adopt the consent agenda taking the actions as indicated and seconded by councillor Roof motion made to approve the consent agenda take the actions indicated any discussion hearing none all those in favor please say aye any opposed we have passed the consent agenda and then a motion to adjourn motion to adjourn made by Commissioner Dean seconded by Commissioner Roof all those in favor please say aye any opposed we have completed the liquor control commission now we have two meetings that the mayor will preside over and so I will recess the local control commission meeting and turn over at 8.13 and allow the mayor to convene the next two meetings which are Board of Civil Authority and then City Council of Mayor presiding so thank you President Wright let me call into order at 8.13 the Board of Civil Authority and the first item on the agenda is the agenda and welcome a motion on it thank you Councillor Paul is there a second second by President Wright discussion of the agenda all those in favor of the motion please say aye aye excellent we have an agenda the next item is the consent agenda do we have a motion move to pass the consent agenda and take the actions indicated second excellent any discussion all those in favor of the motion please say aye opposed and the motion carries unanimously and without objection the Board of Civil Authority is adjourned at 8.14 and I'll call into order the City Council of Mayor presiding at 8.14 as well and welcome a motion on the agenda motion to approve thank you is there a second second by Councillor Nodell discussion all those in favor of the motion please say aye motion carries we have an agenda motion to approve second by Councillor Roof excellent all those in favor of the motion please say aye aye opposed consent agenda is adopted and that brings us to 3.01 point of order we have a Councilor Nodell has a question I think did you have Councilor Bushard Councilor Bushard I'm sorry are you okay? bring us to 3.01 which is an appointment to the conservation board for term expiring on June 30th 2021 I'd welcome a motion or nominations for this position I would place in nomination the name of Ryan Crehan excellent are there any additional nominations seeing none I'll close the floor to nominations and is there any additional discussion before the vote on the nomination of Ryan Crehan seeing no interest in discussion we will go to a vote all those in favor of appointing Mr. Crehan please say aye aye I believe that is majority unanimous majority and Mr. Crehan congratulations thank you for your interest in serving on this board and with that President Wright the City Council Mayor presiding is adjourned at 816 and I turn it back to you thank you Mr. Mayor I told you that would be quick okay so we are moving back let me reconvene the regular City Council meeting at 816 and move back to the agenda and item number 6 will be the nomination from the school board and school administration and that will be Chair Claire Wool Superintendent Yao Bang and I think Nathan Lavery Director of Finance and whoever else may be coming up with you good evening welcome and just so it would be clear that there was no vote I think most people understand that no vote tonight but September 11th taking up requests for ballot items so with that you have the floor thank you President Wright and City Council once again we want to show our appreciation for the opportunity to share the work that we put into delivering you what we think is an excellent package around Burlington High School and thank all of Councils for sending the questions along in the last few months and also of course the Mayor's letter in terms of indicating some specific questions excuse me for just one minute just remind everybody again please pull the microphones in very close so that everybody can speak directly into the microphone so that everybody can hear you perfect do you want me to start over? no you're good I know you did receive our package with the specific questions so we're going to try to go through the presentation as expeditious as possible considering the time frames and then leave time for any questions that may come later on can you advance the slide? so if you look at the graphics here I wanted to kind of just start off getting sort of a national perspective one of the challenges nationally across many districts if not almost all is the challenge around capital and for years and decades many school boards have had to make the hard choice between either deferred maintenance repairs or putting money into students or staffing and usually the decision is to put into the people and then it creates a challenge down the road look at these graphics here I just happened to be in Baltimore about a month ago with a group of Burlington students and the picture on the left there I took between in a hallway through a gated off fence so this particular school had such severe deferred maintenance that they had to the city had closed down the hallway which meant that all the classrooms in that side were off limits and they're in the process now looking at rebuilding an entire school because of the challenges they have and the graphics on the other side or other schools in the east that have these sort of same kind of deferred maintenance and this is very similar to some of the hot spots we have in our schools but I wanted to reassure you that this is not just a Burlington challenge this is a real real Herclean feat for many districts across the country in terms of balance and when's the right time to do these upgrades I'm not sure I can I'm going to start, I'm Marty Spaulding Director of Property Services for the school district I want to give you a brief overview of the project and some challenges that we have with the current building structure so here's an aerial view of the high school and as you'll see it's very spread out built with a number of different separate buildings what you can't see in that aerial view is the fact that the building is built on the hillside but we all know that the high school is built on that hillside so the bottom floor of our the bottom floor of our A building is actually seven stories below the top story of our E building so it makes for very very long travel paths for anybody to navigate across that very spread out campus which and it also doesn't meet current accessibility ADA standards we have aging and outdated learning spaces as well as very insufficient building envelope with the insulation in the exterior walls as well as the windows and roofs etc because the building is so spread out there's lots of exit doors to all of the buildings which also affect our security and security to keep this campus secure from having people access those unsecure entry points slide so some needs identified by staff in the community our additional PE space for gym classes as well as our after school athletic programs some additional space for our theater programs some creating our classrooms to be more collaborative creating classrooms that have more temperature control with air conditioning creating a high performance design obviously reducing travel paths is a major priority of this project as well as creating safe entry points another detail of the project that were identified from administrative is to create ninth grade academies and we'll talk a little bit more about that later in the presentation as well as additional conference room space and large cafeteria spaces with natural lighting etc so slide some project design priorities are ADA accessibility consolidation of classrooms and student support spaces as well as department spaces to create this collaboration create a maker space identified deferred maintenance needs of the building install new windows roofs and create a more energy efficient building to reduce our energy cost upgrade systems such as our HVAC as well as lighting and storm water management enhanced building security install a new sprinkler system one of the design criteria that we're trying to meet with this project is becoming a collaborative high performance school this is a chips model chips is very similar to LEED where there's a point structure where the building would design to meet a high performance model that's specific to schools so unlike LEED where LEED is a little bit more specific to energy efficiency chips is focused on all aspects of designing schools such as acoustics in the classroom natural lighting creating appropriate display space for student artwork and etc so just a quick overview of the project slide here's a look of a concept of a new front entrance of the high school north avenue so we're proposing to construct 115 square feet of new construction that would wrap around our existing A building and then we would be renovating 165 square feet of our existing A buildings, F buildings and B building total square footage of the school would be 280,000 square feet the building's currently 245,000 square feet we would do this construction where we would propose doing the new construction around the current A building while students are going to continue to use building C, D and E once the new construction is completed we would then eventually demolish building C and D and possibly E however there is some discussion about repurposing E for other future programming unrelated to Burlington high school the proposed project cost for this renovation would be roughly $70,000,000 I'm now going to introduce our architect from Black River Design John Hemmelgarn to talk about some of the design details Good evening, again my name is John Hemmelgarn, I'm a partner with Black River Design Architects we've put together what we think is a pretty nice plan here the key pieces of this site plan that you're looking at, as Marty mentioned is getting rid of those C, D and E buildings and actually putting the parking lot up on top of the hill there where those buildings are freeing up open space where the current parking lot is which allows us to separate the bus traffic from the vehicular traffic in the drop-off as well as creating space at the bottom end of the site for our stormwater treatment you can see that that then opens up the view from North Avenue and Institute Road of the building so that it's not across the parking lot it's open space, the new building gives you a clean new facade instead of those large expanses of blank brick building that are there now I think those are the highlights of the site plan so if we can move on so while this isn't perhaps the most important floor we're going to start at the bottom to give you a quick overview of what's contained in this building on the lowest level on the left are the tech center programs one's existing one is the new aviation lab in the lower left the purple in the center is the on top program which because it's on the bottom will have its own separate entrance which was an important factor there and finally the yellow areas you see on the right are the additional PE space that was identified as a programmatic need for this project it also allows community use of this as it is down near the road it also provides some support space for the athletic fields across the street which are not available currently next the next floor up really highlights this is the level that the stage is on in the building and we've put the band and music programs there so that we really have a performing art center on this level so that we have a position on the right and at the lower part of the of the plan you can see well in our printed materials those are light blue they're kind of gray here those are clusters of classrooms and we try to keep the classrooms so that we don't have individuals of groups of classrooms that are maybe only one or two but at least four or five that are near to each other to promote the collaborative teaching that this building really wants to so this is the main entrance level more or less where you come into the building currently up in the upper right you can see there's a rectangular block that would be the new administrative area and guidance departments where you can have a secure entrance where people can come into the vestibule be greeted by someone in the office sign in to the building this way everyone knows who's in the building and we're trying to get it so that everyone is actually coming into this entrance including not only the high school population but the tech center population as well we've relocated the tech center administration to this level down towards where the kitchen is on the left you also see there there's a courtyard and I'll show you an image of that here in a few minutes but this gets you the main entrance, the access to the auditorium, the access to the gymnasium the access to the cafeteria so these are all the major public spaces in the building in addition you can see how the classrooms wrap around the outside of the building there I think that's good for that floor in addition you'll see this new entrance atrium will then have connections that we're going to build up at this next level up that connect across to the B building because the B building as Marty said steps up the hill so in addition you can see the orange spaces there in the upper right and just next to the gym these are faculty work areas that are designed to create some collaborative areas for faculty to meet and to work together also to be very accessible to the students in addition on the left those are the art rooms which are currently on the upper level of A building which is where actually that's where the on top program is right now those are isolated currently but with this plan when we connect through over to B building it really becomes a very integral part of the building actually I'd like to go back one slide I know that's going backwards here for our time but the really a key component here that you see is where the cafeteria is in the upper left that connector over to the F building that you see in the in the very upper left is very important this allows us to expand the cafeteria expand the kitchen and create an internal handicap accessible route from the front door over to the tech center that is something that now has another very circuitous route much as you heard some of the other speaking about earlier to get access or the students really they just go outside and up the hill in the snow and the ice so this is going to really integrate the tech center with the high school next and finally then this is the B building this is the last part we want to talk about is in the existing B building we're going to locate the 9th grade academies so these guys with these new walkways and connectors over to A building are going to be very connected but again have a little bit of an autonomous area within the building for the 9th graders I think that's I think that's it so go ahead the video should be on here is that right? so this is an image of as you come in the building at the new entrance kind of walking through that central gathering space or the commons or the atrium as you would like to call it looks great I don't have a clicker on that this is a view as you come across from the bus lane the other thing you'll notice as we get towards the end of this is back right when we get to the near the front entrance is there's a new elevator there that gets you access to the three main floors of this building as you come in at the front door that gets you to all those main public spaces in the building it's right there on the right thank you John for sharing and we will have an opportunity to ask specific questions around the site plan if council wishes to do that tonight just moving on I wanted to I know you heard tonight there's a big ceremony around the whole high school that predates the schedule we have on the calendar here so I won't go through all that history but just a few highlights just to indicate in 2013 when after some conversations the Black River design was awarded to redesign the BHS and BTC in 2015 there were the facility conditions assessments and you have all this in your package your own leisure in 2016 the two building project options rose so there are a number of conversations around different options building new school not building new school renovate do partial ADA accessibility pieces but we got to the partial demolition renovation expansion and then the re-envisioning committee which came out of a group of community members who really wanted to see this project take light through community process and started that process by some staff and then finally community engagement included tours and many of you have been on tours lots of communication and brochures around the project itself and then finally on August 21 the board made a motion to approve the option C which was the option that had most of the benefits and sort of the added value features for 70 million bond question to bring forward to council that date we did receive a letter from the mayor which I believe was a consolidation of questions from council and concerns and we greatly appreciate that because that gave us an opportunity to focus information that we should share with council to get your support in moving this forward so the next phase of our presentations we are going to address the questions specifically and at your pleasure let us know if you have further questions at this time or you want to hold them off to it another time but we will try to get through the initial presentation of that do you have a question that you need to Mr. President what do you plan there was an invitation to ask some questions there will definitely be an opportunity for questions how much longer is the presentation we are going to quickly go through the eight questions but some of them are in the slides that we have shown already so we will glance through then we will come back and open up for questions let's finish the presentation unless there is a question that has to be asked right now thanks the first specific question was why are you proposing this particular plan and this particular option and what other options were looked at so we will back up a little bit we did do a study on all of our buildings to identify the deferred maintenance needs which include looking at those needs for the high school one option was to address just the bare minimum deferred maintenance needs of the high schools which was identified to be roughly $30 million quickly after communicating with staff community etc the need the want to address the bare minimum of this building clearly did not address the ADA requirement challenges of the facility this was not an option that was rose to the top of the list then we the options that did rise to the top of the list was to do a renovation which was going to cost roughly between $60 million and $70 million or a new building and then the re-envisioning committee was formed to go out to gauge the community of their appetite to do either one of those two options to renovate the current building or propose a new building after lots of community input the re-envisioning committee made a recommendation to the superintendent to move forward with renovation versus new it was overwhelming support to renovate the building versus build a new facility for many factors and then then we drilled down to go to the next slide three different options that ranged between $60 and $68.5 million most of those options included the same scope of work however we were focusing a little less attention on the tech center and the number of improvements that would be doing to the tech center as well a little less focus on the HVAC upgrades specifically on air conditioning to do a baseline project of $60 million versus a more modest project to ensure that the tech center received the same number of upgrades as the high school for $68.5 the board also felt that we wanted to provide air conditioning to the entire facility the board voted to approve $70 million to cover the expense of making sure that we're air conditioning the entire facility as well slide we also looked at options for an $80 million project and what that entailed as well as like I mentioned a building a brand new high school which would cost roughly $100 million I'm wondering if for pacing we can have questions for question one from Marty while he's on this section and then we can move on to the next question would that be a little bit more... questions on each or do you want us to just go through everything different people are going to be here for different questions that's why does the council want to ask questions I guess we can stop and ask if questions Councillors have questions on this any questions from the council on this first one Councillor Hartnett so you want from $68 I hear those numbers right $68 to $7 million based on air conditioning that seems a little excessive I just want to make sure I get those numbers right is that what we're talking that is what we're talking we receive estimates from our mechanical engineers in order to provide air conditioning to the entire facility would cost an additional roughly $1.5 million okay just wanted to make sure thanks any other questions on this one Councillor Mason thank you Marty I guess I'm confused because if I look at the $68.5 million option it says AC offices and common areas so I don't understand why we bumped up another million and a half if air conditioning was in the $68.5 air conditioning was in the $68.5 to do common areas and offices but not classrooms and to do dehumidification dehumidification only in the classrooms but the board felt strongly that we wanted to provide that level of comfort to all of the classrooms throughout the complex so we can also expand the use of the building throughout the summer months thank you that's helpful thank you Councillor Mason Councillor Nodell and then Councillor Bursher thank you isn't right will the school building be used extensively during the summer months when the classrooms are air conditioned or will there be an effort to program and do some additional programs beyond what's happening now many of our buildings are used throughout the summer for summer programming and most of the buildings that are used are the ones that are currently air conditioning those are the ones that are the first choice I should say the high school also has tons of summer programming and building and there could be more we currently run summer programs in the high school now this will just give us an opportunity to increase that capacity there's summer schools and other partnership programs that happen throughout the summer great I think that it's really important to utilize that space if we're going to air condition absolutely thank you Councillor Nodell Councillor Bursher I'm going to wait till number two Councillor Bursher passes Councillor Paul Councillor Bursher so in this slide that you've got right in front of you was there any again I don't know if this is workable but just a question was there any consideration given to like for example the meet requirements of the chip certification at 65 million putting that into the chip doing that and only that of higher performance, greater energy efficiency into the 68 and a half million. So in other words, that there could be some sort of middle ground that perhaps it didn't need to be 68 and a half million, but you could somehow rather that these are at all interchangeable. Do you know what I mean? Everything is definitely interchangeable. I'm not quite sure I understand the question, but the difference between option B, the 65, and the difference compared to the option C of the 68.5, I can just give you an example with chips. Chips is based on a point structure that ranges from a minimum of 85 to a maximum of 250. The assumption of the 65 million would meet the minimum to receive the certification somewhere in the 85 point range and we were proposing to increase that point structure in the 68.5 somewhere in the middle of the 85 to the 250 more in the 150 range. Does that answer some of the question? Yes, thank you. Thank you, Councillor Powell. Councillor Jang and then Councillor Dean. First of all, thank you for being here and for the detailed presentation. And I believe that some of the commentators did explain that this process of renovation or construction has been here since 2013, is it accurate? And looks like also you already had a capital plan of 19 million dollars to 39 millions. And looks like this is like 70 million. Does it mean we need to subtract those 19 to 39 million or this is totally 70 millions you're asking for? So it is a separate piece and that is one of the questions that we'll have a finance director actually give you detail about that specific area. So if you can hold that, we'll respond to that first thing when we get to that section. Yeah, and what is the name of this project? Actually, the actual name that the school district is calling it. What is the name? VHS Re-Invisioning. Re-Invision? VHS Re-Invisioning. Re-Invision. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Jang. And Councillor Dean, to be followed by Councillor Pine. Thank you, President Wright. So I know that with each one of the options that you've offered to us tonight, there are significant investments in energy efficiency, both in terms of the exterior of the building and the systems that are servicing the building. Can you talk to us a little bit about the differences in operational costs between investing less versus investing more in the project? Definitely one of the next steps is to do some energy modeling on the project. One of the things that we wanted to do before we invested in doing energy modeling to five different options was to narrow down one specific option. That energy modeling is gonna be based on the performance of the building envelope, windows, et cetera, as well as the mechanical system. Other factors are gonna be included in those operating costs, such as full air conditioned or partially air conditioned. We anticipate that the energy costs will be reduced significantly. The building's also going to be 45,000 square feet larger than what it currently is, so there's gonna be additional space that needs to be part of that equation. But we definitely envision a reduced energy cost because of the upgrades that we'll be doing to this facility. So if I could just do a quick follow up so to make sure that I understand. So the net operational costs for the facility may not go down, even though we've added all of these additional energy efficiency measures because we've added so much square footage. We are adding square footage and we're also adding air conditioning to a building that's currently not. But the operational costs on a per square foot basis will likely be decreased based on these investments. Okay. That is true, correct. All right, thank you. Yeah. Councilor Pine, to be followed by Councilor Roof. Councilor Deng-Lart, Councilor Dean actually, largely touched on what I wanted to ask, but I would like to say that I think there's some, some detail needed in this area that I think Councilor Dean was asking, referring to. It's helpful to have a scenario under which we have options around how much additional load of energy use is a result of the air conditioning versus perhaps not air conditioning the entire facility. I think it'd be helpful to see some options there because if we invest heavily in energy efficiency and make a really tight envelope and we have great indoor air quality, all those great things, but we've increased the load so much that there's not enough savings to really offset some of the bond costs. And that's what we are hoping to see is the ability to use some of the savings to cover debt service and not have to rely on the taxpayer, rather use the savings inherent in the project to cover some of that. So that's a really important piece, I think, for some of us. Yep, that's a very good point that we'll definitely do those calculations through the energy modeling. That was one of the factors why we didn't come right out of the gate and propose the air conditioning right from the get go because of that added operational cost. Thank you, Councilor Pine. Councilor Roof and Mr. Mayer, of course, don't hesitate to jump in anytime. It's your letter and responses to your questions. So don't hesitate to jump in if you want to have further questions. Councilor Roof. Thank you, President Wright. This chart is really helpful. I'd answer a few questions that I've had, especially showing the genesis of how he went from a $30 million number up through 60, well, then 70 million. One thing that I would really like to see before asked to vote on this for the 11th would be, well, not a full accounting line by line of what the project would look like, but a general accounting for what the makeup of the project spend will look like at that now $70 million level. Is that something that you think could be produced? We have that included as an attachment in the... Which attachment is that? I believe it's F. And actually, we'll be able to speak to it at a different question as well. We'll be bringing that up. I look forward to it. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Roof. Councilor Zhang. And Marty, this is a question for you. I mean, this is a big project and a project of this scale. And we also know as a director of the property services. So you have so many other work going on. Are you the one who will also manage and control this specific project for the district? No, but why don't we hold onto that? That question as well. Cause that also be addressed in one of the questions here. Thank you. And this is actually Mr. Pine just asked when the construction is taking place, it's happening. Where are the students going to be placed? Well, that's a good question. So because of how we're proposing to do this construction by building new construction wrapped around our current A building, we'll be able to simultaneously do the work while students are still using A building. And then clearly they will also be able to continue using buildings B, C, D, and E. This was a thought process that had to be considered in order to phase this project, this work of this project that's gonna be phased over possibly two, two and a half years. So we had to figure out how to make that work happen while kids are still going to school in the building and try to reduce the number of let's say modular classrooms to be used or sending students, displacing students off campus. Thank you. Thank you. And we'll go to Councillor Shannon and then the mayor. Thank you and thank you for the presentation. As many know, I'm a parent of a current high schooler and the need for a new high school does not escape me in any way. And I like what I've seen here from the architect to understand how the new building would work. At the same time I am concerned, it's a very big decision for our community. It's a lot of money that is concerning for a lot of taxpayers and we need to get it right because this is a decision for a generation or maybe three or four generations. I was concerned about as somebody said in public forum, this is a process that has gone on for a very long time but I am concerned that the latest group that was charged with looking at this might not have benefited from the work that had been done by all the previous groups and I'm not sure how much of work that had been done previously and ideas that had worked their way up for a while and then administrations change and interest was lost if they were able to capture some of the good work that has been done by previous groups both in the recent past and not so recent past. And in one of the documents, we have a lot of documents to look through here and I can't say that I have thoroughly studied everything but there's a document I think it was called OPR Draft and in it there's table one stakeholder input sessions and it says that on May 17th you spoke with educators and the number was 10. The students and parents, apparently nobody showed up and so the meeting was canceled or there was one parent who showed up and the meeting was canceled. In administration there was input from 12 people and the community re-envisioning group there was input from seven people presumably those were the people on the committee and I'm hoping you're going to explain to me how that was not the only input that was received in creating this current plan because I think just like we heard here at public forum there are a lot of interesting ideas in the community and I don't know if the idea of a TIF district to pay for this is a real possibility if it was considered by anybody or if the many other good ideas in the community have been considered at this point so I'll let you speak to that. I'm going to start and then pass over to Marty you can talk about the OPR process as well too. So thank you for that question there that's a really good question in terms of we didn't start by reinventing the wheel. When I was here in 2015, 2016 we did gather all the information from previous groups that had worked on the high school project and started that at a staff level in terms of looking at what was provided and what the options were and there were options at that point 100 million, 200 million and at that point even there was an analysis around 90 million project and that's when we took the next step in terms of we weren't ready at that point to bring it forward and the continued analysis and then we started re-engaging some of the former community members who were part and staff who were part of the original proposals and they sort of integrated into the new groups and then they started a new process based on the information that they had previously one of the slides there that you saw that had the initial nuggets around identified by staff and community that was from the initial assessment that was done a really robust assessment that went through all staff in 2013 and gathered information in terms of what the needs and the hotspots around the high school and then so we've taken that and we've kind of sprinted from there okay let's how do we make it better and I'll let Marty talk to you about the OPR process that you mentioned. So as Yael mentioned that list from those slides that said needs identified from staff that those are the same design directives that we've been working off since 2013 what we wanted to do with our OPR process is validate that we're still working off the same parameters that were identified in 2013 because obviously lots of things had changed since then so we hired an outside firm CS associates to help us do that our owner project requirement come up with a firm document that's gonna be a guideline for the project design as well as be used throughout the whole entire construction process right into the commissioning of the project you had mentioned the number of staff that participated those were all department heads so they had received feedback from the teachers within their departments before participating in that so though there wasn't a vast number of people that were in the room that were representing a number of teachers what we clearly identified through that process is we validated that the design directives that we were working off from 2013 are very similar almost the same owner project requirements that we're currently working off now. So I appreciate the explanation about the participation from the educators, the administrators and the re-envisioning group and it seems like everybody there was remained on the same page but it does appear that there was not any input in that process from students and parents, correct? Yes, we did try to hold a student session it was late in the late in the end of the year unfortunately no students chose to come it was a voluntary option to participate no students did end up coming to any of the events we can certainly replicate that at the start of the school year. And what about the ideas that were brought forward tonight which was an idea from a decade ago or more that you could create a tax increment financing district that would help support which I think would require building on a different site where in this process were things considered that were a little more out of the box? I think we were looking at all options out of the box through this process. I don't, I wasn't here at the time that we proposed to build on the North 40 it's not obviously not land that the school district currently owns. I believe at the time that that was presented it didn't create a whole lot of momentum to move to the next level where obviously these options are, you know have validated to move to the next level to follow through with these projects. Let me just to reinforce again cause I know you asked about the community but the re-envisioning committee was a group of about 30 community members and many of them were on the previous sort of advocacy groups around that so what Marty didn't share with you is that we did have an opportunity with that group with the previous specifications from the architects and engineers to have conversations with that group as well too in terms of given guidance moving forward and at that point I don't think anyone went back to 2008 to say that's the plan that we should go through. I know there was conversations about it there have been lots of conversations but Marty and I both were not here during that period of time and that's never seen to caught on in any of the conversations we've had that leads to revisit that plan that was presented then. Or other financing ideas. Yeah, we'll talk about that as well too in terms of other financing. Thank you Councillor Shannon. Mr. Mayor, did you? Thank you President Wright. Just while we're on the slide I do think it would be a helpful clarification. You know, I think it pretty clearly a pretty significant decision and the moments leading up till now is deciding to move away from this $30 million option towards the 60 to 70 million range and I think that slide is suggesting that the smaller option would not have addressed the mobility issues, the ADA issues which is very compelling. I think no one, I don't believe anyone sitting in here doesn't believe that the ADA issues that have been described in detail tonight need to be addressed. I think there might just be some confusion over the 2016 report recommending a renovation plan seem to and maybe it's a confusion within the report but it does seem to suggest that this lower plan would address ADA issues. So can you just speak to that? I can speak to that. So that plan, so as you know that we have six different buildings actually eight buildings on the part of the makeup of the campus of the high school we currently have four elevators in order to make those buildings more ADA compliant we would need to have an elevator in each one of those buildings to reduce the travel pass to allow you to go from floor to floor in those separate buildings in order to add those elevators you would have to either build on the exterior of the building or take interior space away from that particular building other areas that would need to be addressed in order to bring the buildings up to ADA would be to add restrooms make them more ADA compliant. Again similar issue if you're let's say we're talking about C building if we currently have one bathroom in C building on one floor and we wanna add another bathroom on the second floor as well as an elevator we would have to take away existing building footprint to add an elevator on the second floor which would take away from existing classroom space we'd have to do the same by adding an elevator take away existing building footprint so in order to recapture that the additional square footed needed for classroom space we would then have to add on additional square footage to the building so it really isn't just a factor of popping in an elevator or an extra bathroom without it also impacting other additional square footed costs somewhere around the building but could you make the building more ADA compliant based on a current configuration? Yes by adding more bathrooms and more elevators as well as other features to make it more ADA compliant but that's not going to address the very very long travel pass that we currently have by going from the first floor of A building seven stories up to the third floor of E building that adding additional elevators is not gonna address that. Thank you Mr. Mayor. Okay, we're gonna have to take a little change in process here because that one question took a long time and this is a huge issue, no doubt but we can't take that long in each and every question. So what I'm gonna ask you to do is run through the Mayor's questions spend just a brief amount of time on them no and then we're gonna have to come back and ask questions separately but I wanna spend a more significant amount of time on the tax impact question. But it's gotta be a quick response to what the Mayor's questions are. We got the letter today Councilor Busher you will have plenty of time but we are going to do it this way. Okay, excellent you guide us we'll try to give you what we can. So the second question dealt with the explanation of how proposed plan will improve education of our high school students and Marty's comments just leapt off the ADA piece and I won't go through that because I've heard testimony and I think everyone kind of supports accessibility at high school so I won't get into that. The other issue that I wanted to raise for council was the two years ago we had an assessment from the New England Association of Public Schools Commission that does accreditation in New England and their report indicated significant flaws in our physical building and not being able to resource and plan for programming and they gave us a timeframe to sort of report back and so currently right now I have to report back on October 1st the plan to meet those needs in order to comply with the programming and resource needs so that's another challenge for us so another outside entity has identified that this is a barrier for our staff and our students. Yeah, it's the accreditation piece, yes. The OX77, most of you have heard about PBL, Proficiency Based Learning and by 2020 we're expected to be somewhat compliant and I say that because the configuration of our building does not allow us to fully implement that at the lightning speed we'd like to get to. Part of the challenge around this is being able to congregate teachers and students into spaces and changing the learning model. Traditional model has been subject specific, English, math, science and you're trying to teach. Now we're looking at certain terms of expectations, outcomes and skills that have to be achieved and they could come cross-curricular over a number of different subject areas and you have to read a proficiency level. So the plans that we have integrate that with the physical plant and able for us to achieve those goals more efficiently and be able to provide for our students. We are behind in that plan because of the restraints that we have and we know the plan we have with the added changes will help us reach those goals. I'm gonna have Noel Green, our principal, just talk briefly a little bit about the welcoming learning environment piece that sort of addresses part of the question as well too. Thank you. As a high school principal, I obviously am quite excited about renovations to the high school. One thing that's important to know that the challenge that we currently face is that our building dictates our curriculum. The limits within our building dictate some of our curriculum. Our teachers should dictate our curriculum, having classrooms that have the capacity to be flexible, to have a Socratic seminar, to have a group assignment in order to achieve these proficiency-based learning attributes which require that students have multiple opportunities and a variety of opportunities to access them. Our current facility does not allow that. A teacher should be able to come in each day and say, I'm gonna try this approach, but currently that is not the case. And the way our building is currently configured, there's no rhyme or reason to it. There's no pattern to it because we have to use space based on what can fit in certain areas. We need a space that's designed that has a logical pattern where we can say this fits here for a particular reason. And that's why the Freshman Academies makes sense, something that we cannot accommodate in our current facilities. Studies show that the most opportune time to work with our students in a holistic way is in the ninth grade. That's where loss occurs. If we provide a nurturing and strong education for students in our ninth grade, it is less likely that we'll lose them in later grades. So having them be in a specific area where the teachers can collaborate and work in a cross-curricular way, that is the best approach for us. And our current facility does not allow that to happen. Our buildings are siloed right now. Teachers can go months without seeing each other. The new space would be designed so that teachers would have that ability to collaborate and work together to increase the rigor in regard to our curriculum. Thank you, Noah. And I hope during the question period, people have the opportunity to ask a little more questions so we can talk a little bit more about the Freshman Academies and sort of the research around where we're going with that. But I do wanna end this question off around addressing the issue around safety and security. We've had a number of studies and analysis around our building in terms of the inadequacy of the safety and there was a report in 2015. It's embedded in the package that you have from Margolis and Healy that clearly demonstrates that our building is not suitable for the current safety patterns that we have to establish. Right now, we've last year engaged a consultant to look at our school in terms of lockdowns, holding secures and the new era we're in in terms of creating sight lines and procedures around keeping schools safe. Our school, if you look at the plan alone, you know it's not safe and students are going outside to go inside multiple doors, opportunities for individuals to come in and out and it does not meet with the requirements of the current plans to keep our students safe. And that is one of the most, utmost first priority for administration of schools in terms of ensuring safety for our schools. And so this new sort of plan would give us the opportunity to be able to ensure the students are secure as best as possible and we had to put emergency procedures in place that we can manage at this point. One of the, one of the Margolis earlier videos, a couple of years ago, and we're talking about deferred maintenance, the paneling at the high school does not even allow us to do a 911 call and for them to identify exactly where a spot of the school is coming from. You can imagine on that large campus like that, that is, you know, a tragedy waiting to happen. So we're hoping to be able to be prepared and have the facilities in a way that we can keep the safety and security of our students and hopefully never have to exercise those challenges. Slide. Oh, I should keep going. So in the moment you've all been waiting for, the tax impact and we've got senior director Lavry to speak to this particular area. You want the slides, Nate? Do I want the slides? Yeah, in a moment, I suppose. So I'll just brief introduction here. We're gonna cover a few of the high points that came out of the letter that the mayor wrote, but we're also just going to provide a variety of tax information that will be familiar to those of you who've attended some of the school board meetings, but may be new to some of the folks who haven't had the opportunity to view it. So specifically, if we can go to the next slide, please. We envision borrowing the money, probably over three fiscal years, these are estimated quantities, and there is certainly gonna be variability in these numbers in terms of how it will phase in, but we expect to have a small amount of borrowing needed in the first year, where that'll be mostly for paying, for design and that sort of thing. And you can see the bulk of the borrowing will occur in the second year, and then we envision a third kind of phase of borrowing. So you'll see this reflected when we get to some of the estimates about how the tax rate ramps up. I wanna also point out, you can see it on the note in the right, that we estimated these impacts on the basis of borrowing over 30 years at 4%. That is the product of conversations that I had with Rich Goodwin about what would make sense in terms of both interest rates and maturity. So I just wanted to point out we've had the opportunity to collaborate with Rich in this discussion. I thank him for that support. Our next slide, please. I won't spend a lot of time on this unless the council wants to get into it. I'm sure Councilor Wright would be happy to give you all a tutorial as well, but the state system for calculating education tax rates includes a variety of variables. The variable that we focus on and we manipulate, so to speak, as we look at tax impacts here is the education spending. The other variables are all held constant in this analysis. We know that over time, those numbers will change and they can move in ways that put upward or downward pressure on the tax rate. I know that the council's familiar with the common level of appraisal, for example. For the purpose of our analysis tonight, those other variables are held constant so you can really see the impact of the result of the borrowing associated with the BHS project. Next slide, please. So I'll linger on this slide for a moment. We wanted to provide some examples in dollar terms of what we're talking about. We will move on so you can see some percentage impacts and get a sense of how these things ramp up, but we felt like it was important to give people a flavor for what the tax impact would be. This is the marginal cost, that is the additional cost to taxpayers, one being an estimated property tax impact on someone whose taxable property is $250,000, and the other is the income tax cap on someone whose income is $50,000 and pays on the basis of income. You'll see that we have shown the impact by year here so that as the borrowing ramps up, so does the tax impact, and then plateaus for a period of, because that's 28 years, and that is associated with the fact that at that point you're fully paying back all of the borrowing you've done over three years, and then as you pay off the various phases of that borrowing toward the end of the bottom of the chart there, you can see that the tax rate, or rather the tax actually comes down, you get to a point where you've completely repaid all of the borrowing. So again, it's important to see and just to understand that that we're talking about something that ramps up, then plateaus, and then of course as you've paid off the bill, it phases back out. Next slide please. This reflects the same information on the previous screen, only we've turned it into percentage terms for the property tax payer so that you can see once again, the ramp up and then the phase out. Here you can see that at its peak, the result of the borrowing would increase the education tax rate for a property payer by a tick over 6.5% from the FY19 rate. Next slide please. We also thought it was important to understand the impact of what's being proposed for BHS in conjunction with the other debt that the school district either has currently or plans to take on as part of our $39 million capital plan. So we've added a second column to the chart called Other Debt that factors in those other pieces and a third column, Total Debt. And so you can see the impact of the total borrowing over the course of both the complete repayment of the BHS borrowing as well as the repayment of the borrowing associated with a $39 million capital plan and other debt we currently carry. This chart is a graphic illustration of the information that we just looked at. You can see that there is a blue line illustrating the percentage change in the tax rate from FY19 resulting from the existing capital plan and debt, and then we've layered over top of it another line that reflects the addition of the BHS project into the tax rate. You can see that toward the right-hand portion of the graph, those lines dip below the 0% here. That means that absent any other borrowing as we pay off debt will eventually get to a point where in fact, all else being equal to tax rate would be lower than today because the current budget incorporates about $3.7 million of debt service. And so when all that's paid off, we will actually would be in a situation where holding all of the variables constant, you have a lower tax rate in 30, 40 years whenever that is there. Next slide please. Okay, so that was the tax rate. I'll move a little quicker. The next set of slides is the debt service. That's the budget impact of the school which is probably of some interest to you folks. It was of a lot of interest to the school board as you can imagine. So once again, we show the same scenario here where you can see the impact of phasing in the borrowing, plateauing at a point where the BHS projects added about $40 million of annual cost to the budget to service the debt, and then it phases out. Next slide. We've given the question of the debt service the same treatment by adding in the impact of the other borrowing. So you can see the aggregate impact of both the BHS project and the capital plan as it's envisioned right now. Next slide. And we've graphed that so that you can follow the kind of spike when the BHS project fully phases in which is in fiscal year 2022. You can see where the kind of looks like almost a black line here peaks or spikes up there in fiscal 2022. One of the things that can be a little confusing when you look at a graph like this is to figure out which of the lines is actually changing. So for example, there are some times when like in fiscal year between fiscal 2026 and 2027 where the graph peaks and then takes a significant drop, that's really the blue that's going down substantially. It's not the darker line. So sometimes it's confusing to which of those two sources of debt is changing, but in that case it's the existing capital debt. Okay, so we move quickly through debt service. Now we will get to the total amount of the debt. This is relevant to the council and to the mayor because you folks have been discussing a debt policy and so we wanted to make sure that we covered this particular item. Once again you can see the kind of phase in, phase out impact here. I think the most important thing, at least as I've understood it with respect to your conversations about a debt policy is to see that in the right hand column you can see total debt associated with the school and how it's projected to peak in fiscal year 2022 at 119.7 million dollars and then it will decline from that point until we are debt free. Next slide please. Here's a graphic illustration of that. You can see once again the impact of the significant borrowing associated with the high school causing a real spike in the graph and then you steadily pay that down over the following years. Next slide is the end of question three and the beginning of question four. This question's a little broader. So this question was about, kind of about the state financing system and so to the best we could interpret it we wanted to both talk a little bit about the state financing system and also what the future of that system may look like. So in this case we wanted to first talk about the fact that all of the analysis you've seen here assumes that the school budget and ultimately that the state education fund bears 100% of the burden of the project costs. Later in our program Chair Will is gonna speak to some of the other options that could be out there to reduce that impact but just so folks know you're looking at like the assumptions based on everything being paid for with ultimately tax-supported debt. Folks also have asked about the, how the system and particularly income sensitivity impacts this. Well you saw a slide earlier that showed that those who pay on the basis of their income that the dollar impact on them, again it's all in those hypothetical cases is lower than someone who's paying on the basis of property. That's the way the system is designed generally. It's worth noting that a little over 70% of Burlington households pay their education taxes with their income sensitized. And that's, we're just a little bit ahead of the state average in that regard but it's very, very similar to state as a whole. So another question that came up was what will changes in the system, the education financing system mean for all of this analysis? And the answer is we don't know what those changes will be and so we can't say with any confidence this is how the system's gonna change and this is what it's gonna mean. What we do know is that it's been the subject of a lot of debate recently by state policy makers. There have been talks about shifting from a model that is based largely on property value to a model that's based more on income. Again, without any type of concrete proposal it's not something that we can do an analysis on and say this is what it would look like. But one other option that's out there that has been explored and discussed in the past is and that people have brought up before is state aid for school construction. So for those who are not familiar with this the state used to support through cap of state debt paying schools portion of their construction costs and that's not something that has existed in about a decade since a moratorium went in at the state level on that. Some of our legislative delegation have talked about and I believe even proposed reinstating the state aid for school construction but at this time that doesn't appear to be on the horizon. So it's something that's out there would obviously help Burlington going through this project and one of the things that we're committed to doing is making sure that even though it's kind of complicated but even though the state aid for school construction has a moratorium there's still a process you can actually go through to apply to exclude your debt from the excess spending threshold and other things. So we plan to kind of pursue the avenues that exist in current law just on the chance that state aid for school construction comes back or that otherwise that we want to position ourselves so that we would be able to take advantage of that if possible. The good news is the state's paid down it's obligation in that respect so there's no one in line so to speak but we want to make sure that even if we start to move forward with this project and something does change legislatively that we can work with our delegation to ensure that we can access those funds. That's the end of the question for her. Thank you. Thank you Nathan. And we've got to really shorten this up now going forward because we have to come back to the council for a limited number of questions at this point and I'm going to there will be some time but it's got to be limited at this point because we have other big items still to come and what I'm going to suggest to counselors get some questions out but that you can meet with the school board or the superintendent over these next couple of weeks call them and get some other answers and you should also be prepared that on September 11th there may be additional questions. We did just get the letter today with the answers to the mayor's questions so we haven't had a chance to really fully digest the answers so I don't want to you know we've got another big presentation coming up so we've got to make this brief. We're here to support the council so whenever you need to cut us off let us know and we're certainly open in the next couple of weeks to answer any follow up questions. Right. All right I will be quick. I'm a communication specialist within the school district so one of the questions we had was around what is the plan to really get the message out about this so you heard tonight about the work that went in through 2013 through 2017 which was really engaging the community and spreading the word about what we were doing and I just want to reiterate that that has been a key piece of what we have been doing for the last five years and it's a plan that we want to continue to do that so if you go to the next slide you'll see just in the sense from April until now you'll see that we have really been hammering public engagement and information sharing about the project so we've had this project covered in nine different media outlets from like I said April until now and then an additional four just in the last week as we geared up for tonight's meeting. We did three tours of the building. We did tailing at City Market on Vermont primary day. We posted on all of our social media accounts, had the OPR sessions in addition that we talked about and the last thing that we did, you can go to the next slide, is we did a survey for our community so we spread a survey out to everybody that you have seen on this message. We had 401 responses to the survey. It's not a scientific survey and I know that Councilor Wright you had had some concerns about the community that we sent it out to and you would see that it was the re-envisioning committee, people who took the tours, our staff, our parents, but it was also NPAs, it was largely our community, you are correct, still out of that 401 responses which is larger than people reply to when we ask some sort of budget they would support in March that's usually around 350, 375. This was in 68 hours and if you go to the next slide, you can see that our preliminary results showed that about 70% of the people who took the survey supported a bond of this nature. So I'm gonna go quickly as you asked. If you go to the next slide. I don't wanna spend a lot of time on a survey. I know you don't. I only added one slide for you Councilor in case you would be interested. You can go to the next slide please. And the next slide. And just wanted to break this out for you, it was about 20% of the people that took the survey were residents that did not have children in the system and the people that supported any sort of bond on the ballot, it was about 60% of the people who took the survey. So what I wanna reiterate with getting the survey out in 68 hours to 400 people with the work that we did leading up to, you can go to the next slide please. From April until now, I feel strongly that that really lays the groundwork for what we are able to continue to do. So our plan going forward from now to November is to continue, we're gonna reinstate the tours. We had great success spreading the word about those. We are going to present at each NPA. We're gonna continue to do tabling at city market. They have offered, they said, how many more dates do you want? And so we're gonna do additional locations around the city taking the volunteer efforts of our re-envisioning committee that will be led by me. So it will be district led, but it will be supported by a group of community volunteers. We will continue, we will launch a traditional and social media camp informational campaign, really spreading what this project is. What does it mean for your taxes? How long is it gonna take? We're gonna have a complete updated website and we're gonna hold more community and forums and engage the business community. We've had initial conversations with GBIC who is talking about having board meetings in the building so that they can show the business community what this looks like and how a new high school could be a benefit to the economy and to the business owners in the community. Going beyond November, that is when we really hit the ground running with the design work again. So I wanna tell people that the opportunity for people to really help us get this plan detailed is not over. But once a bond passes and we knew that we had money in the bank, that's where we can really start to hone in on the details of this project. We'll have more community meetings. We'll continue to work with the media and we'll continue to really keep everyone abreast of the situation. So I hope that answers your question. Thank you. And I think with that, we need to go to the council for questions. Again, the council got the answer to the mayor's questions just this afternoon. In fact, late this afternoon and I have a lot of chance to digest the answers. So there could be additional questions come September 11th. But let me go to Councillor Busher. And again, we are gonna try to wrap this up in the next 15 minutes. So we can't have a series of questions from everybody. Councillor Busher. So I have a couple of questions and a couple of comments. One is, one of the comments has to do with how this bond, if we move forward and it passes how it's paid down. And when you look at it, the financial impact is on really on the first 20 years. I mean, it's really high. And I'm concerned about people on fixed incomes and people, including those that are already retired and that they're going to take the biggest hit. I just didn't know whether there was another way to look at how you'd pay this back. I really would like to understand if there's another way to do this. This is traditional, what you've presented. I'm looking for alternatives. That's one question that I had, well, one statement that I have. Now, the thing that I wanted to share with you is that when I looked at your little video, the first thing I saw was that staircase to heaven. I thought that doesn't speak to accessibility. I'm sorry. Did you ever think of an escalator? I just wanted to throw that out. And then with the mayor's question, well, I'm really serious about that though. The explanation of how proposed plans will improve the education of our high school students. I really didn't hear, I'm a detailed person and the only way I'm gonna be able to sell this to the people I represent is to have some answers to these kinds of questions. Today's world, there's STEM programs. I didn't hear anything about this. I didn't see any detail about improved lab space. I actually read that report that was done in 2015. I printed it out and read it all. And I have lots of comments about that, not tonight. But there were things about different size classrooms, little areas for individuals to study, groups of people to study. I haven't seen that and I thought that went to the question that the mayor was asking. He felt you would address safety in ADA, but he was looking at how you're gonna improve teaching, how you're gonna do that. I heard you talk about teachers, but I didn't hear about the amenities for students and I'd like to know those details. With English being a primary language, are you gonna have labs for people to be able to learn English and practice their English? I really think that if there's a place for me to find that in a reader's digest version, I think that's really important for people to understand what their students will actually get from this new high school besides accessibility. Now, I have a 39-year-old daughter. She's my youngest. When I went back to school night, I almost killed myself going up one of those little ramps or walkways, so think about it. That's a long time ago where accessibility was already an issue, so I'm really rushing and I know Councillor, I mean, President Wright's gonna, I'm not looking at him, but anyways. Look at me, Councillor Bursher. I'm not looking at you anyways, but I'm really glad that on top is gonna be integrated into the system. I'm hoping that they're not offended by being on the bottom. I'm not making funny about that, but I'm concerned about really how they feel about themselves and I want, that's really important. If you're in the basement or on the bottom, sometimes that impacts how you see yourself, so I just am throwing that out. Freshman academics, last thing I'm gonna say. UVM has the freshman building where they bring people in together. I like the idea, but if you've got somebody who's really bright, I hope you're not gonna hold them back and keep them with a core of people that maybe they need to branch out, so lots of things that I've thrown at you, but I think some of those details are really essential for people, the people that I represent to say yes, thank you. Thank you, Councillor Bursher, and I'm glad you weren't looking at me. But did you, any quicker action, all that? Yeah. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Tremendous amount of great analysis because those are all questions that we ask and we don't have time to go into all that, but I would say, first of all, I think the on top is a particular program we specifically are looking to accommodate better and there would welcome a new space. We've kicked them around the last two years, actually from space to space to have a permanent home that's integrated and have that support from the building would be great. Thank you for asking the question around the curriculum piece and the student engagement piece. Excellent. One of the things I've been talking about is to have new modular spaces and maker spaces and also the technology. Someone made a testimony today about only having like one plug-in. We don't have the designs in our classrooms to integrate new technologies. When I was in China a few months ago, I've got to visit a brand new school and you should see what's in those classrooms in terms of the ability for kids to connect with students outside of their country through technology and we want to provide those pieces as well too. You make a good point, maybe we should do a little primer, specifically around the pedagogical nature of the schools in more detail than we'll have time tonight, but certain we can work on to give people what the added value is gonna be for that space. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Bushard. Now I have Councillor Roof, Pine and Paul with specific questions for answers. Specific questions that I don't need the answers to now, but maybe in follow-up over the coming weeks. I'm actually gonna, I'm not gonna go through all of them. I'm gonna go through the two things that for me are sort of must-haves. If I'm gonna feel comfortable voting on this, come the 11th. Because if it was tonight, I don't feel prepared to do that and I wanna get there and I just wanna kind of lay out where I'm at with what I'm looking for. The project budget, I did not see it in the attachments and you don't need to bring it up. If it is there, I just couldn't, maybe I just couldn't find it. And I understand that given in the stage of the design, it won't be exact, so to the best of your ability, demonstrating what those dollar amounts are and compared to the program in the new building. The second, and this actually might be a partnership here for the administration and the district, the combined debt chart for the district is really helpful to see how that's gonna go. It was also nice to hear that we're gonna be debt-free come 2050, I look forward to, I'll be here. I think, some of you might- Don't go any further with that, Councilor Riff. We know over here where you're going with that. I've already calculated, I'm not gonna be paying some of this. All right, I'll pick it up. But no, to my point, we can move on, but I'd like to see a combined debt analysis, projection of both the city and the district. We have other bonds on the horizon. We have water, we have memorial. We should be looking at, we'll have budget increases. We should be looking at what the collective impact on the checkbook is going to be so we can make that decision, that everyone can make the decision well knowing what those impacts will be. Hi, I'm gonna be here. I'll follow up on smaller items. Okay, thank you. We will certainly make sure to forward you those documents that you're looking for. We have had talked about alternative strategies to meet our debt service, one of the things that we're well aware of in our director finances. In the last three years, we've had surplus of 1.5 million, and we've usually put that back, so that's a conversation for the board. They may decide to utilize that in some way to decrease the borrowing or the tax impact in future boards. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Roof. Councilor Pine and then Councilor Powell and Councilor Mason. Sure, the first is actually just to address Councilor Busher's concern, which I share, but I think the way I understand this, that the payments that are made by residents will still be treated as if, the same as payments that are made in taxes toward the operations of our schools. In other words, the portion of the payment that a taxpayer makes to retire the debt will be treated as income sensitized. I want Nate to confirm this, because that's my understanding of how this financing will work. Yeah, that's correct. The taxpayer is just gonna get one bill. It's gonna have their education tax. It would just be higher if part of what we were using the Education Fund revenues to pay back was an additional $70 million worth of debt. Okay, so if your income sensitized though, you will still continue to benefit from that income sensitivity. You will continue to benefit from the provision, absolutely, but folks should understand that when a school district increases, it's spending per equalized pupil, the tax rates go up for both property payers and income payers. So sometimes I hear people erroneously suggest that if they're income sensitized, it's a free ride and that we can spend $200 million on a new high school and they'll pay nothing. That's simply not true. So better that people understand that there will be an impact on all payers. Thank you. The other thing is really a clarification and I don't like to be the skunk at the garden party, but the notion that TIF will be used on a new high school should just be clear that is not feasible whatsoever. So I just want to be clear about that. I worked many years at CEDO and the one thing I did do is get us the downtown TIF and I know how the waterfront TIF is structured. There's no scenario under which TIF will be used for the high school. Just want to be clear. Thank you for the clarification, Councillor Pine and also Mr. Lavery on your clarification on who pays. Councillor Paul and then Councillor Mason. Thank you, thank you, President Wright. So first thing I just wanted for the public that is not here, not present in the room, but is watching this, I think that they should know that there is a vast majority of school board members that are here and just want the public to know that there's a great many of you here, at least a majority, I think, and thank you for coming. I think it shows the dedication that you have to this issue and to doing your best to encourage us to do what you'd like us to do, which is a good thing. I don't think that, I mean, I'll just speak for myself. You don't need to convince me that there's a need. When I walk into Burlington High School for the tour that I was at a week and a half ago, and I walk up those stairs, those are the same stairs that I walked up years and years ago, many years ago, and the school hasn't changed a whole lot since I went to school. So I don't think we need to be convinced of the need. I don't think we need to be convinced of the need for accessibility. I am my daughter in a number, about a dozen other parents and teacher, parents and children work very hard to get an elevator in Edmunds Middle School so that that school was accessible. It still isn't completely accessible. So the need is at Burlington High School, the need is really at every school. For me, the issue, and I also think that this is a collaborative effort. I mean, the bonding capacity of the city and the need that you're asking for have to go hand in hand. We're all here together. You're not a separate entity from us. And I think that to me is a critical piece of this. You mentioned about the debt policy, the debt capacity, this city council, this administration, every voter has worked pretty hard over the last several years to bring up our bond rating to where it was back in 2008 and 2009. And we fought hard for that. We want to make sure that we continue on the trajectory that we're on. And so my concern, and it really isn't to all of you, but my concern is that we've only got another week and a half or so that we're going to be voting on this. We need to know what those ratios are, where we are with our financial advisor, where we are with projections towards the trajectory that we're on with Moody's. And that to me is the overriding issue. After that, there's lots of other questions about the tax impact. And I will only ask one question, but that is my one question. And we need to know those answers first. And then I think, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm trying to look for a way to get to yes. And the first way to get to yes is to know that answer. So thank you. Thank you, Councillor Powell. Councillor Mason. Thank you, President Wright. I'll sort of pick up and echo Paul's comments. My concern is one of timing. September 11th is two weeks out. We haven't heard from our advisors. We don't have a debt policy. And I am not comfortable moving forward with a $70 million project, knowing that there are lots of others in the queue without having that in place. So that sort of gets to my appreciating all of the efforts that you're doing to get this to us as quickly as possible. I've heard two reasons it has to be November. You know, I'm not yet convinced. So, I mean, maybe you could speak to why it, what's the importance. I've heard, you know, the superintendent speak to, you know, there's an accessibility issue now and it's not fair. I appreciate that and I hear that. But I'm still not convinced that a four month delay is, you know, going to move the needle. And the other I heard articulated work by one board member about putting it on the ballot at the same time as an 8% projected 8% increase. If there are other reasons it has to be November, I guess, you know, either now or over the next two weeks, if you could articulate them, I think that would be helpful. So you don't have to speak to that. My second question sort of is to Nate, I guess. I'm still struggling. I don't understand, you know, the state school financing system, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around, you know, do we need AOE or someone to say yes, because this is a big ticket item that it sounds like we don't pay for all of it. So if the answer is no, that's great, but if the answer is yes, I guess have we started those conversations or do we have the consents we need? So the answer is no. In effect, what this would do is increase the school's budget, which means that we would require more money from the education fund. The system is set up such that whatever schools choose to spend from the education fund, they get that money. But they pay for it through higher income, or sorry, higher property taxes, even if you are income sensitized, again, you pay for it through higher taxes. So it's not a question of whether or not the agency of education would give us the money. It's just a question, again, of what is the tax impact going to be on the people who are paying the bill? Thank you, Councilor Mason. I think that Councilor Shannon. But isn't there a penalty for excess spending and how does that fit in? That's a great question. There is a penalty for excess spending. In fiscal year 19, it was somewhat over $17,000 per equalized pupil. Even if tomorrow we all snapped our fingers and we borrowed the full amount of the $70 million that we're envisioning right now, we would still be below that penalty threshold. Obviously, we're not borrowing it tomorrow. It would be a number of years before it's fully phased in, but we would still be below the excess spending threshold even under those assumptions. And there are places, by the way, in Vermont that exceed the threshold. However, more importantly, the law allows for construction debt of this nature to be exempted from the penalty calculation. So we would, as I mentioned earlier, plan to go through the process to make sure that if that spending threshold is changed, for example, legislatively in the future, we still can take advantage of that exemption. Thank you, Councillor Shannon. I think that we're... Councillor Jang. Thank you, President. I don't want to get out of here without saying this. And I think right now in this city, we don't have an issue that's as important as reinventioning, that's the name, of Burlington High School. Because when I hear a constituent who been to private school, who never been to any of the public schools, who grow up here in Burlington, don't have any children calling me to let me know, you need to vote on this. I should highlight that because we should not compare what's not comparable. There isn't an issue here in this community that's not as important as this because all of us, what we want is for the children coming to school to leave the school safely to go home. And we all know what is going on around this nation. Safety is not something that we need to take lightly. And this, only that aspect, I'm not even talking about the education of the children, but just the fact that kids are coming to us leaving safely and would want to come back and also we can even use the building for all the community uses. We talked about here just right now how Burlington has become a community school, how the athletic field can be a use for the specific for the community. This need to be clear in our head as elected officials, we should take this as priority. Anything else we can wait. But my question to you is this. I would like to know what are the assets of the Burlington School District. Are there any option that can get a 10 million, 5 million or 2 million from our existing asset in contributing to the 79 million, to the 70 million. That's my question to you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much for your presentation. I wanted to say we are an anomaly in the state of Vermont. There aren't other, due to Act 46, other districts are consolidating. This council has approved incredible growth in the next two years. We will see city place. We will see Cambrian rise. We have approved housing. And we, there are many things in the queue for sure. And we understand that as a full board we come here tonight sharing your concerns and absolutely looking for collaboration on this. When is the time to address our high school? It's been 55 years. We would look to the city and the community for that support. We would look at the federal level. We look at Senator Leahy's son, who is a graduate, Bernie Sanders, a huge champion of the American Disabilities Act. This is a priority and we stand here tonight unified as a board to present it. We will work with you. We have proposed November because of the, what Commissioner Curry spoke to as well, the timing, the inevitable challenges we face as a state in public education funding. That will be presented in March. So thank you for your time. We appreciate the opportunity to share. And I think it's imperative that we as a school board meet with you to have some more information sessions and sharing so that your questions are answered because we share your concerns. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you all. Thank you, Chairwoman Wol, Superintendent O'Bang, Mr. Ellick, Mr. Lavery for the presentation and the answer of all our questions. And again to the council, I know there are additional questions. Certainly contact any of the people here, calls or meetings. And in addition, be back on September 11th. There may be further questions before the votes held, for sure. With that, now we are going to move back to the work session for another actually very important to the citizens of Burlington and the region and the state, which is the fate of Lake Champlain in our water. So while the high school is indeed very important, I think this one may be equally important. And I do apologize and thank you for being willing to wait until that lengthy item. But so my sincere apologies. Thank you, President Reiser and the full city council. We appreciate your perseverance with us tonight. Chief and Spencer, Director of Public Works. I'm joined by Assistant Director Megan Moyer, overseeing our water resources division. And make sure you use your mics. Please pull them in close and speak right into them. We've been having problems with that. So thank you. No problem at all. The presentation we have in front of you tonight is the result of a lot of diligent effort on the part of our staff and our consultant team. It is an ambitious yet pragmatic proposal to reinvest $30 million into our wastewater and stormwater systems. This is next. Not a sprint, but a marathon. Our commitment to stewarding the clean water of our community is one of the core responsibilities of Public Works. And together with the public, we have made significant progress over the generations. So you'll see in this slide here, which shows the combined sewer discharges pre-1994, which is identified in this red bar here. That was prior, 24 years ago, prior to our last upgrade of our wastewater treatment plants. We were on average discharging 170 million gallons of untreated, undisinfected combined sewer. Combined sewer in our main plant sewer shed is a combination of stormwater and wastewater. The three bars on the left here combines the performance of this year at our plant. We have processed, and this is wet weather flow during storm events, 75 million gallons of wet weather flow. We have processed, treated, and had partially disinfected another 8.9 million gallons. And then you'll see here four million gallons of untreated and undisinfected. So you compare that number to the 170 million gallon. We have made significant progress, but we have far to go. You'll see at the bottom, to save time, we are not going to go through a lot of the detail that we've discussed before, but for members of the public or others who are interested in the detail, the link at the bottom of the screen will give a lot of background. Next. Here is a quick summary of what will go over tonight, and we are going to do it quickly. Next. We have made significant progress in our tenure here over the last five years in increasing our capital funding in our water utilities. What you're seeing at the very bottom here, by year FY13, up to FY19, is a continual growth in our capital expenditures. The significant growth in blue and purple relates to our water utility and the support that the voters have made through our sustainable infrastructure plan. But even the wastewater and stormwater investments have trended up due to some careful management and renewed focus on reinvesting in our critical core systems. This was a presentation slide provided to the council as part of our FY19 budget presentation. And if we go to the next slide, you'll see another screenshot from our budget presentation, which foretold the investments that are needed in our wastewater and stormwater utilities. At that budget presentation, we talked about the need to upgrade our existing treatment systems, our collection system reinvestments, and our stormwater outfalls and collection system. And we showed down here a chart by fiscal year of what we were projecting for upcoming investments. And we talked that we would likely need a bond in the upcoming years. What has transpired over the last few months has expedited our work and brought us to today. Next. We have made significant success together as a community on the sustainable infrastructure plan. The council and the administration have made through a partnership effort a remarkable gain in attacking our deferred maintenance across asset classes. The streets, the sidewalks, the water mains have gotten tremendous attention over the last two or three years with projects surrounding this building underway as we speak. With the drinking water, we brought that into the first phase of the sustainable infrastructure plan for a number of reasons. One is to renovate those pipes requires us to disturb the surface of the roadway. It made no sense to repave a road and then have to disrupt the pavement to upgrade the water lines. Second, we had come out of Frostpocalypse, our term for the massive amount of breaks that we struggled through in 2014 and 2015 that significantly threatened the viability of our water distribution system. And as a result, we brought forward water as part of the phase one. We are here today to talk about phase two of the sustainable infrastructure plan. Next. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Assistant Director Megan Moore. Hi, thanks for having us. So the next few slides, I'm going to step through the major drivers that are behind the selection, the specific selection of projects across wastewater and stormwater, which form the basis of the proposal that we're presenting tonight. So on red, you can see places where we've had wastewater permit violations and beach closures caused specifically by infrastructure failure. Simply, things not working, such as valves, our PLC, our computerized control system. And unfortunately, on Friday, we had another failure, this time at North Plant, in which a chemical feed line was blocked and we had a disinfection failure and discharged 75,000 gallons of undisinfected wastewater. On the, well, it looks yellow here, but it's supposed to be very bold green. On the right, you have what it is we need to do in order to fix the stuff that's on the red. So specifically, and when we get into the proposal, there's a specific line item for the disinfection systems. But basically, all of the wastewater capital improvements for high-risk assets need to be invested in. We've also had, as you're aware, wastewater violations and permit beach closures caused by the impact of high-strength waste on our biological system. And in order to address that, we really need to accelerate and expand the development of our industrial wastewater program, which would require high-strength users, not just breweries, but also high-strength users to divert their high-strength waste away from the system. Next slide. Just a couple of examples, and it's hard to get a really salient picture, but it ranges from disinfection systems, which have had multiple repairs, which you can see by the different colored pipes, to disinfection system control panels where only one of those switches actually works, and a lot of the parts are obsolete. We can't even replace them. The entire system has to be replaced. We have bromine pumps. Those have not failed this year. Those are also a critical piece of our wet-weather disinfection system. We've had failures on the hypochlorite side, but hypochlorite works in conjunction with bromine, and so if we had a failure of these bromine pumps, we would be in a similar situation as we already have been. Next slide. Again, none of these systems have been upgraded since the last upgrade in 1994. We have, at the headworks, automatic gates that are no longer automatic and actually require somebody to have to operate them, which can be very challenging in trying to manage a storm event. We have corroded metal components that have band-aids literally on them and are not easily repairable, largely because once metal starts to get corroded, you can't keep welding to bad metal. You eventually have to replace the entire system. Next slide. This is a graph I believe we've showed in the past about the trends of increasing BOD, biological oxygen demand. This is not due to our added residential units. This is due to the awesome success of industries throughout Burlington, each one of which that touches organic waste does have a disproportionate impact on our system. This trend line can be, we believe, can be significantly knocked down by an effective and comprehensive industrial wastewater program. In the past, we mostly were looking only at breweries, but again, anything that handles organic material is contributing more than a domestic wastewater system. There are numerous examples throughout the nation, and we have a consultant on board who's helping us evaluate how we may be able to come up with a tiered program and what sort of long-term maintenance that's going to require investment and staffing and so on. Next slide. You're also aware of the impact of both combined sewer plant flow on main plant as well as our collection system to our overflows. While I think folks have been conflating this as a new issue because we have had these other new issues of the plant, this is not new. This is something that we've been working on since the 1990s and more recently with the integrated planning project where we're trying to go city-wide and develop a comprehensive plan. That comprehensive plan is not going to be ready until 2020, but that being said, we do know there's opportunities to keep ensuring continued progress on implementation because that is a big piece of our eventual success is to dial back on the frequency of the untreated combined sewer overflows that are out in the system as well as dial back on how much storm flow does get to main plant. Next slide. The colors are not great. On the left it's orange and on the right it's green. There's lots of other things we can walk through and that's largely what we did with this plan of high-risk assets, sewer pump stations that are close to water bodies, sanitary combined and storm water pipes that are failing. With your support we did a sewer assessment and we were able to film about 20% of our combined sewer and sanitary lines and the number that I'm bringing forward it represents the pipes that have enough deterioration that they need to be addressed in the next five years. Otherwise we're going to be looking at more sinkholes potentially more surfacing of sewage or people not being able to use their sewer system because there's a significant blockage. So we have to make sure that there's adequate funding not just to address the things that have failed but to try to stave off additional failures in the future. I know everybody has been this summer has not been great it has not been great for me and I would like to have a chance to share in the future where we are not closing beaches due to things that technically are in our control. Lastly we need to keep in mind that there's a whole suite of additional regulatory obligations that are anticipated particularly on the separate storm sewer side and so while we're not putting forward a lot of money towards that we can make sure that we can maintain progress and not sort of have a whole new suite of things that comes without having done some additional planning. This is where we start to get into the numbers. For over the wastewater system that top line you can see is our specific investments on the disinfection and those computerized control systems which failed and we're not just doing it main plant we are going to be doing it east and north. So that's 1.4 million there's a the 11.4 million dollar number and that's broken out in your appendix is a lot of the other systems ranging from pumps our screening system to clarifiers that have significant deterioration of the metal works inside these all are critical treatment processes and if they go down we're going to be in trouble. There's a little bit of money in there for some planning studies that we need to do to really set ourselves up for success for potentially future borrowing in particular east plants has long been discussed whether or not because of the nature of the collection system if the entire approach for treatment should change there if that's the case we need to know that and then we need to not obviously be repairing things as it is right we need to know that early and then change our approach at a future date and only make investments that are necessary to get us to the next five years we've got about 2.5 million that we need to spend on the 10 highest risk pump stations these are the pumping stations in the low areas of the city pump the water back up to the gravity system on the collection system side we need to re-line about 6.7 miles of sanitary and combined sewer pipe valued at 3.3 million we have I think has spoken with you all and certainly with the mayor about the need for a comprehensive asset management system one of the reasons that we are in this situation and probably a lot of the other infrastructure deficit conversations you're having is that we weren't and haven't been doing the maintenance when we should have been doing it we haven't had the money for it we haven't had the system that would tell us you need to be investing X Y and Z and this is the types of maintenance that you need to do we are doing preventative maintenance but not in the sort of comprehensive way that an asset management system would be able to model that for you so you'd have these really tight numbers to plug into your budget I don't think anybody in the city know as of yet is necessarily taking a model of what maintenance needs to happen and using that to build their budget I will say that we usually build our repair and maintenance budget number in a much more flexible way the industrial wastewater so as I mentioned we need where we're at now we've sort of created in-house we really need to expand that program to make sure that we're not unfairly targeting only a narrow group of customers when there are many customers that are impacting our BOD we're also exploring with the state the ability to potentially have pass-through loans for capital so if we actually do raise the bar a great deal and require significant capital investment at some of these businesses there is a possibility that we could actually offer them low interest 2% loans in order to help them get going faster and then another piece that you'll see getting 30 million dollars is one thing implementing it is a whole other and one of the challenges with water resources is that we haven't always had sufficient staffing in order to get all of the things on the ground we're very busy often dealing with unplanned things and some of these planned things can fall by the wayside because we're constantly dealing with emergencies and so this proposal specifically over wastewater and stormwater would have about 1.25 million dollars to be paid for by TTEs over 4 years paid for from the bond next slide on the stormwater side our primary thing that we're going to be tackling are the stormwater outfalls this is the top 5 of the top 11 high risk outfalls these are very expensive projects GAISO outfall I think was in the $350,000 range there's like severe erosion tons of earth work we're talking about some of these outfalls being on the Winooski river so I'm not even sure how we're going to access them other than excavators on barges but they do become very costly very quickly we on the collection system side we are not doing we're not doing the full or not proposing the full amount of what needs to happen in the next 5 years we did pair that back a little bit to focus specifically on roads that have been paved roads that are out to be paved and then roads that we know have a significant history of breakage ones that are completely corrugated metal pipe and we've seen collapse in recent years one of the challenges with the stormwater system as I explained the mayor is that some of these pipes the corrugated metal is so rotten out from the salt that we can't even film them in order to really say which one is worse than the other we are mostly making these determinations based on the consequence of failure a really large pipe on an arterial is going to rank higher than a smaller pipe on a residential street just because the impacts of failure are typically less on a small street the next piece actually stay on that side please the next chunk of money is addressing stormwater in the combined sewer system we've gone through so with our integrated planning project we've actually started to identify specific opportunities locations where we think we know that water needs to be taken off and when we roll those up and I think I took about 75% of them knowing that not all of them would come to fruition we would like to be able to invest about 1.6 million probably with pine barge canal CSO as the priority trying to mitigate that one because that's the one that goes off the most frequently but anything that we do in the main plant sewer shed is going to help in the main plant a new well not a new concept but something that we are focusing on exploring is the concept of a CSO satellite disinfection station at pine street barge so to the extent that we know that it's going to be difficult because of the soils and the conditions in the south end to manage stormwater we are exploring the possibility that when those storm events where we can't manage it and we do have a CSO if we can mitigate the human health risk by basically disinfecting it before it gets to the pine barge and before it gets to the lake we don't know if it's going to happen our consultants generally say that they are a lot more problematic as far as O&M but we think it's something that we need to explore for the public because of the close proximity to the beaches there's a small nugget in there for potential funding for the great streets city hall park projects those projects are going to have amazing benefits in stormwater reduction in the main plant sewer shed and so we want to make sure that there is sufficient funding that stormwater elements don't start to get value engineered out when project costs may be larger than anticipated the last piece being the separate stormwater management it's not a lot of money only $300,000 $15,000 but again we want to make sure that we're making steady progress on that there's the rest of the cost share for the asset management and the rest of the cost share for the city project management staff with stormwater totaling about 10 million and a total for wastewater and stormwater of approximately 30 next slide so when we started looking at what the debt service is on that 30 million there were two main ways in which we mitigated the impact on rate payers the first is our commitment to use state water revolving fund loans those have a 2% admin fee instead of the typical 3.9% municipal bond interest that we're seeing it also has the benefit of deferred payback on planning and design money until after construction and you do not have to pay back the construction or start paying back until after you've completed the construction so it doesn't hit you all at once you don't have to start paying interest on the money even before you've spent it you actually wait until after you've spent it you are eligible for a 30 year payback on certain longer term assets there can be a higher administrative burden the approval processes the Davis Bacon requirements by America but we do think that those balance out with the large cost savings of approximately 8.1 million and interest savings over the life of loan and it would represent approximately almost $20 a year savings to the typical customer the other piece was to use existing Pago capital to offset some debt service costs as Chapin mentioned we have been increasing our capital line and we'd like to make that capital line go further by obviously using it for debt service we did need and we planned to maintain a sufficient amount for unplanned or smaller capital needs as well as potentially to repurpose for improved staffing resiliency again this work can't happen without boots on the ground and we are evaluating whether or not we need more boots using the Pago capital represents significant savings on the principal as well as the total debt service costs and the typical single family savings is about $26 a year next slide we have a couple of other ideas about minimizing the rate impact one being trying to grab as much of the state grants and loan forgiveness subsidy as possible that money is often capped and it changes every year so we can't necessarily predict what we're going to be able to be awarded but we are going to go after that there's also some upcoming we're aware of some upcoming green infrastructure system grants we know there's at least 1.25 million that's coming up this fall it is across five CSO communities and there may be another 1.25 in the years to come there's also pollution control grants those can be up to 35% of the project but it depends on where you rank in the priority list and we will be doing everything we can to improve our priority ranking including there's a new program to if you sponsor natural resource projects with your great infrastructure projects that will often bump you up we are working with the mayor to determine on the great streets project side whether or not it is appropriate for the enterprise funds to be contributing to those TIF projects or if TIF should be paying more of that but again we wanted to keep it in there to make sure that those projects happen next slide the other side is to find to cover the remaining debt service we have been working with the administration on whether or not there's alternative strategies to the current pilot program waste water currently pays 1.1 million dollars to the general fund in a pilot and it would be great if some of that money could be repurposed or at least the program changed given that it's linked to the asset value of our infrastructure and as we improve our assets our pilot actually goes up we also as we've committed previously are looking to develop additional potential fees for service for users of service such as folks who have fire services they don't get charged anything extra project review fees connection fees and so on next slide and lastly really for the residential users and the low-income users is making sure that there isn't a better alternative rate structure out there that might reduce the impact on residential folks as well as affordability programs for seniors and other low-income folks next slide so as far as our commitments we're going to commit to you that we're going to find at least another 1 million dollars worth of grants loan forgiveness or some other offsets we're committing to finding additional annual funding to offset that debt service we will be committing to minimize impact to single family residential ratepayers and low-income ratepayers and remind you as with most borrowing that just because we get the bond vote we're still going to have to come back to you for the little nuggets that we're borrowing as we borrow them that SRF requires your approval for us to both apply for the loan as well as execute any loans so there'll be ample opportunity for you to check in on these commitments before you actually let us spend the money next slide so with the use of PAYGO funds let's see so you can see here this is the annual cumulative debt service that's incurred it's an approximate schedule at this point with our focus initially in FY19 as planned currently on the disinfection systems and then just kind of splitting out the remainder of the cost over the next four years this is our cumulative debt service this column is with the 237 of sort of reappropriated or repurposed capital line funds applied and so with that you wouldn't actually see a bond a rate increase due to the bond until FY21 and we're looking at a total 12.2 increase over the FY19 bill which when all is said and done would be about an additional $51 a year for this needed investment next slide on the stormwater side because the bond the debt service is lower given the amount is lower and we have a little bit more PAYGO money to work with we actually wouldn't be incurring a rate increase due to this until FY23 and you'd be looking at a total 16.7% increase over the FY19 bill only $13.20 a year increase next slide we didn't want to being transparent we wanted to make sure that you are aware that we probably were going to be coming back to you with some other requests in the near term not necessarily as significant as the one we just spoke about we anticipate requesting at least board of finance approval for a contract amendment to have our third party consultant evaluate our staffing resiliency plan we have some ideas about the staffing plan that we need but we want to make sure that that's vetted by somebody with deep and national level expertise who can benchmark our organization against other similarly sized organizations we also are likely to be coming back in November of this year for some amendments to our integrated planning study scope and planning loan for a number of reasons there are going to be some additional planning funds that are going to be necessary we wanted to make sure that folks were reminded that drinking water is not included in this bond proposal it is possible that there will be additional money that's needed and beyond 2020 2021 we need to remember that this is really to for lack of a better phrase keep the wheels on the bus and in 2020 and 2021 is when we're really going to start talking about the better bus that will be reducing more and more phosphorus that still has to happen and right now we're talking about being able to maintain maybe slightly increased the level of service that we're able to provide next slide back to Chapin so we're finishing up here and you'll see here this slide speaks for itself there's no bond driven rate impact in FY20 with what we've shown you the cumulative impact for the bonds that we've proposed after the two rate mitigation strategies we've already committed to would be about 64 dollars a year per average rate payer and additional mitigation strategies will lower that further you can see the benefits there fewer permit violations and beach closures and a much more upgraded plant infrastructure that will be reliable during our stressful wet weather events and lastly there's a number of green infrastructure investments that will not only improve lake quality but improve the quality of our public realm more rain gardens and more storm water features to add value in our parks and our streets next here are our next steps we're planning to come to the board of finance on the 5th the council on the 11th for a vote we are going to have a town hall for quality on the 17th and offer tours of our main wastewater treatment plant so that the residents can take a tour of our main plant we'll be going to the DPW commission doing the NPA tours in advance of November 6 should the council vote to put this on the ballot next here is all our contact information and we're happy to answer any questions down at the bottom are a number of our team members who spent long hours putting this proposal together with us thank you thank you for that presentation you to be able to intervene and fix something the other piece is we don't have as much resiliency and redundancy there could very easily and with the upgrades that we're looking at be more backup so that things turn on automatically and there's a separate pump that if this one's not working the system knows it's not working and automatically switches it so that when people who live 30 minutes away or 45 minutes away have time to get in the other piece is that we're looking at our earlier notification methods right now folks get paged when there is a wet weather event only when sort of the water starts to hit the plants and we think that there may be smarter ways of knowing that it's raining and notifying our operators so that maybe they have to check the radar and can see is there a giant you know angry blob that's coming towards the plant and go ahead and leave and not wait until the rain starts I just I would like to understand so do you only staff it for eight hours a day we staff it for eight hours a day and then there's somebody on call right I understood that so with knowing the how how these events create such negativity from the community and surrounding communities have we calculated the cost of going back to staffing it more frequently or having people take call that are in closer proximity I just I guess I feel like you know I I know what we've done I kind of do because I was on the DPW commission I'm not going to say that too loud but anyway but I would like to I'm trying to figure out what we can do as an interim measure so that's number one and the second question really is if indeed we move forward with your plan what kind of timeline are would we anticipate the improvements to be done by so that we would see relief or the or desired outcome so we would largely the issues that have happened the failures that have occurred this year we would be looking to implement those in the very nearest term possibly certainly within 12 months if not sooner those are the focuses on the disinfection systems which are the it's the main driver the failure of that has been the main driver with the issues we've had this summer as well as the PLC and the SCADA system which would provide that additional intelligence that I was talking about so from my perspective we would be in a far better position just after spending that initial 1.4 million the other expenditures are to prevent future failures not that things have not had hiccups and problems they are just slightly less problematic than the disinfection system failures so for the director then have you have you calculated the additional cost to having staffing present more often especially even I mean the forecast is so unpredictable as far as actually becoming a reality but I'm really feeling like I would like to know that cost and I would like to figure I would like to know if we can actually accomplish some of that because I think some of it some of this could be prevented or reduced the impact could be reduced yes and so we have increased staffing so when there's a greater than 30% chance of an intense storm we are bringing a staff member proactively into main plan whether forecast change quickly but we are monitoring that we are bringing people in during off peak when a major storm events coming our estimate right now on what we're staffing is it's an extra $30,000 a year which is a significant scheme of the wastewater budget of $8 million but we also only have a limited staff and when we're bringing people in off hours we're having them come in at 2 to 4 a.m. and then they're back in at 7 a.m. to work and it can be very taxing on our small staff that said we are going to continue a higher level of staffing through this interim period in addition we have changed our notification protocol as quickly as we can Dr. Spencer, I'm sorry you got to have me pull that microphone in closer again Assistant Director Moyer talked about our work on forecasting but we've also changed how our alarm system notifies our on-call staff so we are trying to take the incremental interim steps that we can before we do this heavy capital investment it is important again that with many of the events even with staff there it would not have changed the outcome Yes I heard that, thank you Thank you Councillor Busher I'm going to recognize Councillor Nodal for a motion now President Wright may I ask the city attorney for a question? Yes Is it time sensitive to approve the collective bargaining item tonight? Yes it is So I move to spend our rules to continue our work and to complete the deliberative agenda that is through 6.06 and then also item 11 the executive session executive session around collective bargaining Thank you Councillor Nodal So there's been a motion to spend rules to act on the items going up to 6.06 including the executive session Is there any discussion? I need to have a second on that motion Councillor Pine seconds and although this needs a two-thirds majority vote is you okay Mr. Mayor? Thank you All those in favor of the motion to spend rules as Councillor Nodal suggested please say aye Opposed? That passes and we have suspended rules to act on this and the other items although one or two may be postponed I now have Councillor Tracy who is at an undisclosed location No I'm kidding Councillor Tracy Councillor Tracy is in Nepal I believe No I'm actually in New Delhi There you go New Delhi Where it's currently monsoon season so storm water is certainly on my mind also in my current location and I just want to thank the DPW staff for their presentation and for sharing all this important information with us I have three separate questions regarding this the first of which is we are considering putting this on in November and I'm wondering if there is a what the cost of waiting is is there a cost increase if we wait at all at any point on putting this forward I'm certainly in favor of dealing with this as soon as we possibly can but I want to understand what the costs are in terms of waiting versus doing it in November and if that changes because I think that helps to make the case to folks and then second does this include any storm water gardens because I know I've heard Megan Moyer talk about the need to slow storm water before it enters our system and then finally third and this may be something that we can connect with at a later time or in a separate issue because it's not directly related but our bond issues I mean our not bond issues but is is code necessarily part of the solution to this is it other things other than bonding and other than investing money that we can do to have you know buildings be built in such a way in the city that really help us to deal with help with the storm water issue as well thank you thank you Councillor Tracy great to quickly answer those given the time of the evening there is a cost for waiting I think the public is looking to us at least to deal with some of the short term disinfection upgrades we have projected in our budget you will see that there is a inflation calculation for projects that we're not going to get to until a year four five but it is ultimately the council's choice of when we come to the voters there is a very robust storm water component for Councillor Tracy about ten million dollars of storm water upgrades including some of the green infrastructure that he was referencing in the rain gardens in the detention ponds and silver cells for trees and the like the third one with other strategies yes we didn't talk about them this evening because time is short but in our previous presentation we have talked about other strategies for managing storm water including in chapter 26 we have fairly robust development policies in place that make sure that new development gives us a better storm water outcome than the existing condition before the development happy to talk about the details later I'll say Councillor Tracy thank you very much thank you Councillor Mr. Mayor I'm next to be followed by Councillor Shannon Thank you President Wright I just want to say a couple things first of all I want to really thank Chapin and Megan and the teams that they're here representing for working very hard for a staying period of time to bring this plan to the council so it's in position to at least consider acting on the November ballot and this was not if councillors will recall thinking back to the budget presentations you've heard each the last two years really nothing in the presentation tonight is a surprise virtually nothing that was mentioned here tonight is new there was anticipation of needing to make these investments but there was a belief that we had some more time the plan was to be coming back in the future future budget seasons the events of this summer certainly left me and I think many others like there was a greater urgency than when we were talking about this within the spring it was extremely frustrating I know for the public to see the multiple breakages that happened this summer it was I hope that the council knows that frustration was completely shared by the staff who have committed their careers committed themselves to perform these water services at a high level and they were hit with a series of different challenges over the course of the summer there were these breakages there were the CSO events and then there was this third significant item issue that really blossomed this summer around the high strength of waste and it was just very difficult for this team to respond to it all with these different types of things going wrong and I think they have really from my perspective risen to the occasion while dealing with all of these those urgent items of accelerating these plans coming together putting forward a comprehensive plan that would to address the current system to try to avoid the breakages and defects on our existing system that we experienced this summer from being repeated at least the same rate in the future years and we're certainly not in position to promise we pass this bond and we never have a discharge again that's not what we're saying but this will allow the department the resources to move forward with fixing systems that have not had investment with the case of the main plant since 1994 and with the case of these other pumps you know something I've learned in the process of this summer 25 critical pumps around the city many of them have not been invested in for more than 25 years and really held together with very insufficient means this would give the department the resources to address that and keep these kind of critical breakages from happening in the future while coming forward with this comprehensive plan I hope it's appreciated and appreciated and understood by members of the media that are still with us tonight that the work this team is projecting the strategies laid out here so to come forward with a comprehensive plan that does have at a top line ticket is a substantial number just short of 30 million had they not been also coming forward with these rate mitigation strategies that were committed to the impact would have been about 40% higher right around $100 for the average rate user water user the strategies they put together here the better interest rates the repurposing of existing resources bring that total big ticket price down considerably effectively it's about a 40% less than it would be without those strategies and I think that brings it down to a level that makes the year over year increases modest and a total amount when fully phased in that I think is reasonable for us to at least talk about and hear where the council stands at so I just want to hit those two points I'm appreciative of this team working many of them working seven days a week throughout the summer including over the weekend and putting us in position where we at least consider moving forward and acting on a plan that I think is essentially what the public has been clamoring very loud for in recent months thank you Mr. Mayor Councillor Shannon thank you and thank you both for your commitment to the city and clean water and I know it has been a very rough summer and frustrating for everybody and I really appreciate the long hours that you have put into this for the benefit of the city and this weekend so that we can have a clear understanding of what's needed to take the next step to achieve what I think are really our community goals and I think there's no disagreement on that. I learned recently that an issue that you touched on very briefly that the corrugated pipe that is there is how we ended up with a city truck in a sinkhole and that's an issue that you said we would address but I wanted to understand if you know where all the corrugated pipe is, if that's mapped yes? Generally, I mean there may be some that is not on a map but yes, yes. Okay and when you replace that are you digging up the streets to do that? If we get it early enough we can re-line it because it's similar to the water creates a whole new pipe on the inside that's essentially a plastic pipe if they go too far then we do have to dig them up because there's nothing to re-line inside you have to have enough of an outside of a pipe in order to re-line but the benefit of re-lining storm water and wastewater pipes is we do not need to dig up the street we have existing manholes and so unlike water mains when we re-line this can happen on a street that's actually just been paved we're still good. So we have a little bit more flexibility about when we do the re-lining if we catch it early enough if the pipe's deteriorated we've got to full dig and replace. That's a relief. Are we anticipating we've been doing so much repaving are we anticipating any digging up of what we just paved to do this? I mean not at this time the number that we developed and the ones that are still on the paving list to get in there and re-line them and we believe that we should be able to get in and re-line them it's why wastewater and storm water roadway infrastructure was postponed compared to the water infrastructure because we knew we couldn't access those systems via the manholes. Okay. Thank you. I'll frame this as a thinly veiled question is there money without the bond to address drainage issues on neighborhood streets that have drainage problems prior to repaving because we're doing a lot of repavement around the city and when we repave but there's an underlying issue with drainage on the street are we able to address those drainage problems before repaving without the bond and if not will the bond help that? These numbers are not specifically targeted towards drainage drainage is a key feature of a roadway system these are targeted towards infrastructure keeping things on a larger level draining and water quality investments with drainage improvements anytime we do pave a road we are working with the street paving program in places where puddles have been reported we actually have a puddle priority that we're going to list because not all puddles are the same not all drainage issues are the same a really large one that goes into the roadway is different than one that happens to be in front of somebody's house and unfortunately I don't know if we'll ever have enough money to fix all puddles but when and where through grading or potentially addition of a storm water inlet we're able to tackle those 100% we tackle them and just keep calling about them so it's fair to say that the more funds we have available at our disposal the more lower priority but still important investments we are able to make when we have less capital money we are focused entirely on the major streets on the items high consequence of failure and a modest drainage issue may not rise to that level thank you and my last question is the Pine Street barge canal outfall I understand that we discovered that in 2015 and it's kind of beyond my comprehension how we didn't know about that when we went through all of the EPA process with the Superfund site and somehow didn't know about this drainage outfall but in the it was a significant line item in the cost and is it I understand excavation is required for a lot of this work that's an area where excavation is prohibited as far as I knew and that's been taken into consideration so couple things we knew there was a storm water outfall so we can see the storm water outfall what we didn't know is that there was a pipe connecting higher up in the watershed a manhole on the combined sewer system to a manhole on the storm sewer system so it was kind of hidden unless you happen to be standing at the outfall when it was going off and seeing toilet paper or the occasional product you wouldn't know that it was there and that's what happened you didn't know what was coming out of it we knew there was a storm water outfall we didn't realize that sometimes it had combined sewer in it on the other piece what we've developed are for projects not in the super fund site the disinfection system would probably be in pine street outside what I believe at least to be the primary envelope of the super fund site and then all the other projects would actually be higher up in the watershed so projects that would benefit the pine barge canal are up on south prospects south south street way up there south east corner of the city those are the ones that we would be tackling okay thank you thank you councillor shannon I just wanted to ask one question did you say $64 at the full phase in that's what it costs for average residential repair like five or six bucks a month on the water bill can you give me I don't know fairly sure what will this of the $30 million bond approximately $30 million what's the impact on commercial business how much of that will come from commercial versus residential since we had somebody that actually asked us to put it all on commercial I think I just sent the I don't know if Beth can bring it I think our flows by flow which is surrogate for the proportion I think only 25% comes from commercial folks and the rest is residential we can take a look at it and get you the answer we don't have it right at our fingertips okay thanks councillor Hardinett thanks the beach is before I just touch on councillor shannon's point about streets and puddles and lakes I mean I just got to put this out there because gazel av is just it's a lake it's not a puddle after it rains it's a lake out there they've been dealing with it for five years and the taxes they pay it's just it's just really not acceptable and we had another water break out there over the weekend I mean it's a streets a joke it needs to be addressed but I don't want to start that getting back to here it's just frustrating you know out there the beaches and we talked about stormwater around the beaches and possibly you know looking into special ways that we could treat that and I just hope that when we put this plan together that we put a high priority on that like I really think it's I think it's the risk is worse the reward you know what I mean it's there and you know to have our beaches closed and you know I mean particularly this summer but there's been other summers as well I mean if we can reduce that number I'm not saying we're never not going to close a beach but if we could get that number down where it was once or twice a year instead of you know 15-20 times a year during the summer I think it would be well worth the extra money to go in and take a look at that so I hope we we take that approach in that particular area thank you thank you Councillor Hartnett Councillor Pine for the final question sure I think the one distinction that is always important to remember is that taxpayers and ratepayers aren't the same some people don't always think of it that way but it's really important to remember this this happened when the city was debating a franchise fee in the 90s whether it was fair or not so our institutions that don't pay much by way of payment in lieu or property tax payments our tax exempt institutions they are probably some pretty large users I would think in this case in planning block rates would get us there to at least capture more of the payment towards us on the bond from larger institutions whose ability to absorb those costs I think are much greater than average homeowners renters so I really think it's worth spending some time looking at the bigger users paying a higher rate basically so they can contribute more to solving this problem than folks on fixed incomes thanks thank you Councillor Pine with that I think that we are ready for this item thank you very much for the presentation we'll hear from you back on September 11 when we will be deciding whether to put this on the ballot in November I'll just conclude by saying this is an incredibly important issue no question about it we've heard about it it's been the news we've heard about it repeatedly and I will just say that while I've heard a mix of opinions about whether to put the high school fourth in November every single person has told me thank you and with that we will go back to the agenda for item number 6.02 this is an issue in regard to the council rules and we'll go to the charter change chair Councillor Shannon for brief remarks and a motion thank you thank you President Wright we put this on the agenda because the charter change committee acknowledged that there's three of us on the subcommittee and we have our ideas about how the council rules should work but ultimately it's going to come to this body and we wanted to avoid some sausage making on the floor give the council an opportunity to weigh in on what's going right what's going wrong with the direction that we are headed here and then we would take it back to committee to wordsmith need to be done on the council floor and we would still like you to weigh in but due to the late hour we're not going to have that conversation tonight there are two things that we talked about in our work session but we have not added them into these rules and regulations yet and those are policy on calling in circumstances under which calling in is appropriate in works and when it doesn't and also if you want to have consequences for not following these rules we don't have anything in there at this time and we would like to hear your input on all of these matters so contact your committee members I was going to make a motion to postpone I think what I'm going to do is make a motion to table our charter change we have two charter change committee meetings coming up September 12th and September 20th I don't think we want this on the September 11th agenda so we will take it up in our upcoming charter change committee meetings and we would appreciate any input you have so I hope you reviewed it for this meeting and can weigh in outside of the meeting thank you so I will make a motion to to table this item table until the meeting in September the last meeting in September well tabling would be until we decide to take it up again rather than to time certain just a motion to table and it's seconded by Councillor Dean non-debatable questions so all those in favor of the motion to table please say aye aye any opposed we have a motion to table this and we'll take it up another juncture item number 6.03 is a resolution establishing a really shouldn't have sent a Heineberg community senior center it really is a senior center senior center study committee Councillor Hartnett thank you President Wright I'll read the reading and ask for a second seconded by Councillor seconded by Councillor I would like to just really before I get into the resolution just say that I think the city really stepped up when it's come to seniors particularly over this last year but even over the last five or six years and so this resolution is really not a reflection on really I think some of the areas that we really have approved on with our seniors but I think it's really kind of looking forward about the best ways best best practices you know sharing costs going forward and as a city how can we address these issues and I think you know some of the people that worked on this resolution they wanted me to make sure that you know I relayed that message here tonight this is not a critical this isn't being critical of the city that we want to work together in junction with the city for all the seniors across the city so I hope we can do that we had a resolution like this maybe a couple years ago and it kind of spun its wheels a little bit didn't go anywhere but I think now the fact that United Way has cut the funds and so many people are fighting for the same money that we have to work smarter together for our seniors and it's a growing population in our city and our state I think it would be well advised to put this together really get some great feedback from this committee and really act on it and so I'm hoping that councils around the table will support this thanks. Thank you Councillor Hartnett. Discussion from the council? Hearing none we're ready for a vote. All those in favor of passage of this resolution which creates a senior center study committee which will meet a number of people will be appointed as it says in the resolution and they'll meet over a period of months and report back to us next spring or at the end of next winter in March. All those in favor of that resolution please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Passes unanimously. Thank you and now we will move to the last three items which are dealing with the town center. The first one is item 6.04 it's a communication regarding the side letter to clarify development agreement for city and city. So we will move to the next item. No. I have a question. I will have to recuse myself on items 6.05 6.04 and 6.06. Councillor Dean recuses himself for professional conflict of interest and thank you very much Councillor Dean. So item roof. Thank you President Wright. I will move to authorize Mayor Murrell Weinberger to execute the attached side letter modifying and clarifying the development agreement for City Place Burlington with BTC Mall Associates LLC. After a second just to the full back. Seconded by Councillor Shannon and back to you Councillor Roof. So this side letter this is gonna be quick I'm gonna hand it over the side letter was put together by the administration and so I'm gonna ask members of that team to come up to go over the letter and be available for questions and while they assemble I'll share for those who are not already aware that this side letter is in essence an amendment to the development agreement that was signed in October of 2017 by the city and the developer of the former town center property now known as City Place. This letter as well here details deals with the changing of the sequence of events related to the release of the foundation permit by the city as well as adjusting the share of responsibility for much of the design of the public improvement aspects of the project. Thank you President Wright. Thank you for explanation Councillor Roof. And so we have the attorneys here and if you go ahead and give us some further elaboration on this issue. Attorney Farkas and Blasper. Are you just looking for an overview of what the side letter accomplishes? So the side letter does two things. One is it reassigns the responsibility for designing the streetscape improvements for bank and Cherry Street. Under the development agreement the developer is designing the two new street segments of Cherry of St. Paul and Pine Street. And after the city delivered concept designs for bank and Cherry Street the developers team was then to take those concept designs to 100%. In order for the city to manage the design process itself which the city prefers because it can control the outcome and the cost better if it's doing it itself. This letter agreement reallocates the design responsibility for bank and Cherry to the city and more narrowly defines what the developer is going to design for St. Paul and Pine. Most of the developers designs for St. Paul and Pine are there's something like 70 or 75% complete already so it made sense for them to complete that work and then the city would take on the rest. It also restricts what the developer is doing so that it's not inclusive of intersections so the city handles the intersections and the city believes it will result in a better product. The other thing this does is it establishes internal milestone dates for when each party is going to deliver 75% drawings and 100% drawings and specs and it establishes requirements for what those drawings will include what items will be addressed in those plans and it also requires both parties when they deliver their plans to also deliver originally engineers estimates for the cost of construction and then as the work progresses to report on actual soft costs expended and then to update the estimates as the as the designs are refined. In each case there's an opportunity for the party receiving the plans to have a chance to review them to value engineer is necessary because ultimately the requirement is to devise a budget for all of this work and the goal for the city is to get as much done as possible and deliver the best possible streets using the money that's available in the TIF budget. The other thing accomplished by this side letter is to permit so right now is to permit the release of a building permit for the foundation work in a way that differs from what the development agreement would otherwise require so the development agreement is written wouldn't permit the release of a building permit for the foundation work until there's a guaranteed maximum price contract in place for the public improvements which are which is defined in the development agreement to mean Pine and St. Paul Street and also those blocks of Cherry and Bank that are immediately adjacent those half blocks that are immediately adjacent to the project. Because the design for those streets isn't yet complete it's really premature for there to be GMP contract for that work and it's really not exactly possible for that condition to be met for a little while because the design work's not done. The other thing that the development agreement requires right now is for the developer to have in place a guaranteed maximum price contract for the entire private improvements meaning for the entire rest of the project and also to have it bonds in place for a construction lender. At this time the construction financing isn't yet in place and there isn't yet a contract in place for all the private improvements so at this time the demolition work is done. The developer is ready to begin foundation work and he won't be in a position to satisfy those other conditions. You know I have a GMP contract for the balance of the private improvements for a few months rather than allow the site to sit idle for many months while the rest of that progresses. This allows the work to continue in a way that is not detrimental to the city because the foundation work will continue to be benefited by you know there's a GMP contract for that work. It'll be bonded and at the end of the day regardless of anything else the city is better off with a site that progresses with a foundation in place that would support a very robust and large building than to just have it sit vacant for a few months. Thank you Mr. Farkas. Questions from the City Council? Councilor O'Dell. Thank you President Wright. Towards the end there Mr. Farkas kind of made the case for the side letter. The case really assumes I think I want to interrogate a little bit more of this issue around the foundation because when we wrote and signed the original development agreement we expected that at the point in time that we issued the the permit for the foundation that all of the construction financing would be in place for the all the impromptu improvements in the foundation on so we're weird that's not the situation we're in and so we have to think about what kind of a worst case scenario might not be a profitable scenario I'm not necessarily think it is probable but we have to think about what could go wrong and what if you had a scenario in which the developer was unable to get the construction financing would we still be better off the city still be better off with his foundation the foundation for this project then with potentially no foundation he was unable to complete that stage so my question for Mr. Glasberg which gets to this question of on net you know is it how is can you help us understand the factors that would that that drive a judgment that it's pretty flexible or not what are the limits of the flexibility can you help us understand that place sure so the question specifically is what might be the value of a foundation in place anticipating a worst-case scenario in which the developer is unable to proceed with the balance of the project that's the question yes sir correct so the foundation is based on a lot line to lot line development of this particular parcel the perimeter of the parcel will be developed the foundation will take up that entire perimeter and that is a condition both of zoning and the outcome that the city seeks for the entire block to be developed so it's unlikely in a scenario in which there might need to be a programmatic change to the building that the perimeter of a foundation would change from a technical perspective the point loading associated with the foundation where columns come down and those loads are carried down to footings could potentially change based on a different program of uses for example hallways and how those are laid out and those loads come down could potentially change however the uses that are assumed for this development residential office and retail are the predominant uses that can occur in this zone were there a scenario in which industrial uses could be introduced then loading could potentially be different but at this point the building is designed to maximize height and in turn maximize loading so it's not as though the design that is completed is one in which it leaves potential for development on the table it's already maximizing the amount of load that can occur on that site and all of that loading is based on the facts and circumstances as discovered by the geotechnical work what the soils bedrock can withstand how deep we have to go to carry some of those loads on those on those footings so in summary there's value to that foundation from a building perspective the risk that you're identifying is one in which perhaps development has stopped and we'd be looking for a new party to come in and try to pick up the project and proceed and realistically in that scenario there's either a lender or the current owner who are trying to recover that value and someone walking into that situation would seek a negotiating advantage and would likely in their analysis indicate diminished value for that foundation but from a physical perspective the range of potential changes to that foundation are relatively small the uses that are likely to occur there are the uses that are programmed now what could occur is there could be more office or more residential or more retail than might be expected but none of those are big drivers of loading and loading is just that an example would be if that became a storage facility you'd be increasing the loading because you'd have dead weight that's sitting in at all times the types of uses that are going to occur there are interchangeable in some respects thank you as I've tried to kind of understand this is you're on the foundation this has been very helpful I come to the conclusion that the risk associated with committing to this foundation is less than the risk of this site potentially sitting sitting idle for the next few months potentially if we were to say no to this and I think it's significant that that that we are requiring the developer to have a guaranteed maximum price contract for the foundation and all the financing behind that work so we have we know that the foundation will be completed I also think that the equity we have a very engaged equity partner that gives us I think a fair bit of confidence that that we're going to get to the end end of this of this project so I'm prepared to support this president right thank you councilor Nodell councilor Tracy would like to ask a question or make a comment councilor Tracy I have a question and a comment so my comment is my question is there's been a lot of rumors and I'm getting questions from folks in the community about the status of the contractor and I'm wondering if mr. Sinex is still working with PC construction or if that contract has been terminated we're not aware that there has been any termination of that contract and PC construction remains under contract as the construction manager at this time okay thank you very much for clarifying that I certainly appreciate that I think that'll help the public in their answer now when I talk about the when I think about this project I am sort of mixed on the the question that's in the letter because on the one hand I am certainly in favor of the city having taken greater design control over the streets and having making sure that that's built exactly to our standards so I don't have a problem with that however I do have a significant problem with adjusting the terms around the the permitting process such that we would all that we would allow mr. Sinex to construct a foundation without further without further funding already in place for the rest of the structure I think that we would be best served by having a flexible site if the project were to fall through such that we would be able to allow a potential new party to have complete ability to redesign the site and not have to potentially remove that foundation or substantially alter it to fit their needs we can't necessarily predict what a new project would do and I think that our our stake as a city would be best preserved by allowing by making sure that mr. Sinex follows that that portion of the agreement such that he would have to have funding in full funding locked down in order to proceed with the project I'm very concerned that this has happened at this point in the project I understand that hiccups do happen however this is I think that there's you know that there's significant risks moving forward and I just want to put that on the table right now and be very clear that I'm very concerned as to the weather as to the the continued viability of this project and I certainly hope that it's able to move forward given that that you know we've gotten this done even though I did oppose it I think that you know this is this project is started and so you know I don't want us to have an empty hole in the ground in the city but at the same time I also want to hold the developer to account and make sure that he has to meet the key condition of this agreement which is that he has funding in place such that we're able to counter and getting the project actually fully completed so I hope that we're able to do that but I will not be supporting the side letter however we'll be supporting the other aspects that that are in future items because as I said before I do support the city taking further control of the streets because I think that we absolutely want to have sure that the design to our standards and that we have control over that timeline given that we've seen this delay from Mr. Sinek's on this funding piece at this point so I certainly appreciate how others could reach a different conclusion and respect that conclusion but I'm just deeply concerned about the continued viability of the project given what we've heard and what we've seen regarding the inability of Mr. Sinek to secure full funding at this point given that this project has been ongoing for for several years and that the city has made many many special accommodations to Mr. Sinek's already at this point so I think that we need to hold him to account on this get full funding in place and then allow him to move forward not allowed to move forward in a piecemeal fashion that may result with a partially completed project that might not be necessarily able to be adjusted or flexible to fully flexible to future uses we have in the current situation. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Tracey. Councilor Pine. Thank you. I am speaking partly in response to Councilor Tracey's remarks but I wanted to also just add one myself. The just to be clear the side letter is a package deal. I believe the way I understand it is the design work and it has the foundation piece as a package so it's not as though we can pick one and say we like it and we don't care for the other and necessarily get what we want out of that so I think it's to be clear we're voting on this side letter that's what we have in front of us. I think it's hopefully becoming clear to Councilors who've been engaged in this process for longer than I have that the chances for this project to succeed or increased by allowing it to move ahead despite the fact that that was not the original intent and that was not the original wording of the development agreement. The project's viability is improved and is increased by allowing the developer to move ahead and put 56 million the remaining portion of the 56 million dollars of equity into the property. There's no doubt that the property will have more value and is more likely to result in the outcome that we all I hope are on the same page about and so I think as the Council we need to you know provide our support to move it along in that way and I think that's where I'm at at this point. Thank you. Thank you Councillor Pine. Councillor Buscher and then Councillor Hartnett. Thank you. So I will be supporting the side letter and I think that there are relative risks and I think what we're trying to do is evaluate those risks and we've heard from an attorney giving us guidance as to the pros and cons of having a foundation in the ground in place and the ability that a foundation what a foundation can and can't do as far as a flexibility of a building that's put on top of it. I am satisfied with the fact that there can be some flexibility if indeed it is not the building that we believe is going to be built and so I do feel like I think it is in the city's better best interest or better interest to have something in that spot as opposed to just leave it vacant for a prolonged period of time. I think that you know we heard statements around delays that have put the developer in the situation and that that he is confident that he will have full funding. So I feel that this side agreement is something that I believe protects the city and brings us to the next step in the process and I want to be really clear as most everyone knows but maybe the interim CEO, the CEDO director doesn't know is that you know I didn't support the project to begin with. It's not my favorite project in the world but I it is the project that the city supports and I want to move us forward so that we have retail and office space and and living accommodations for people downtown and so this step seems to be the right next step so thank you. Thank you Councillor Bushard. Councillor Hartnett. Thank you President Wright. I'm one that glad that is a package deal with the streets and the foundation because I'm voting no you know on this and probably because I've kind of lost confidence in our streets here in Burlington as well so I'm not confident that we are in the best position to have great streets from what I've seen over the last couple years and I think where we're headed so I'm not convinced we're on the right course there as well but as far as this project is concerned I'll start by saying I'm really been disappointed in Mr. Sinek's his lack of communication with the council forthcoming his timing I think has really been subpar not to the Burlington standard and I've been really disappointed in that and I hope going forward that he can work on a partnership that I think that we entered into Mr. Sinek's here in the city I feel I certainly have entered in a partnership with him because I support this project I still have you know I believe in this project and I want to succeed but I think Mr. Sinek's has to realize is that he's in a partnership with us in this city and the city of Burlington as a whole and that's contractors and that's whoever he does business with and there's a way that we do things in Burlington and quite honestly I don't think he's he's really done it the right way so far and so I hope we see a difference in his approach as far as that as far as that is concerned but I I want to see total financing in place I don't want to be in a position I do have a question for the attorney I don't want to be in a position where if something happens and a different developer comes in and he and he looks at the foundation and he's like this isn't going to work for me and and so I think you said at that point they would enter into negotiations to figure out you know I guess who would be responsible for either removing the foundation or changing I mean are we on the hook as a city for this foundation once it goes in as far as you're shaking your head that we're not no so if a if a new developer came in and said this foundation doesn't work for me and it has to be removed that would be part of that developers cost of that developers project okay and solely their cost we wouldn't have anything okay all right well that does make me feel a little bit better but still I don't want to be in that position and so I don't support this and quite honestly I've been I'm disappointed that isn't it's in front of us here tonight as well I didn't expect this I didn't see it coming I knew about it probably a week ago when we were updated by the administration but I'm in a position tonight where I just feel like I'm gonna be cautious here I'm gonna be patient and I want to kind of see this unfold and so we're talking about a lot of money and millions and millions of dollars that we're investing in our downtown and is seven months really gonna make a big difference I don't think it will so I'm I'm I'm wanting to to wait it out and and to see where the financing goes so I'll be voting no on this thank you thank you thank you counsel Hartnett mr. Glassberg if I may just offer a point of clarification going all the way back to counselor Tracy my understanding of this side letter is it does not address the requirement that the developer demonstrate financial capacity in fact that was satisfied as a condition precedent prior to the issuance of the demolition permit so the developer has satisfied the requirements of the development agreement with respect to documenting financial capacity what the side letter is addressing is an extension of the period of time during which the developer has to achieve a guaranteed maximum price contract for construction of the entire project those are two distinct issues so I don't see in this side letter unless I'm missing something anything which addresses demonstrating financial capacity to undertake the project that has been satisfied previously thank you mr. Glassberg mr. Mayor and then counselor Mason thank you president right I just wanted to share a few thoughts my thoughts on where we are and clarify because I think it can be confusing in the conversations I've had with members the media today and others exactly what is being contemplated here and I want to start by going back to what we tried to accomplish with the development agreement when we negotiated it and together set down this path about a year ago nine months ago we were very aware we were taking on a sizable project project that was in some sense a public-private collaboration and we sought to protect the city in that effort in every way that we could and as a result and because we were entering into an agreement in which the city was taking certain steps and there were you know elements of this being again a collaboration we asked for and received from the developer agreements that amount to very high standards that this project is being held to that go well beyond what a typical project a typical construction project in Burlington or really most any city would be expected to meet and I think you see those that high standard being and that trying to that attempt to protect the city really succeeding here in the conversation that we're having tonight first of all typically once a construction project secures a zoning permit and then a building permit they go in and pick up the permit and it really isn't any concern of the cities what the situation the status was of is of their financing and their ability to complete it the kind of protect the construct contracting that they have in place none of that is is something that the city normally involves itself with in this case because again because the city is pursuing certain elements is making certain investments and because we are aware of the sizable impact of this project on the downtown we were very careful and required the developer to meet these additional conditions of ensuring that they had all these elements in place at this point in the project when they are seek when he is seeking to go forward with the foundation contract the foundation construction and if he didn't have it it required him to come and get special approvals from us and and have a conversation with us and bring us in into that project and that's what's been happening here it's what's allowed the conversation to happen tonight to really explore whether there's anything problematic about moving forward as is being suggested to analyze that and to review the situation tonight this is not a this is not a opportunity we would normally have the development agreement the way we negotiated it gives us that opportunity and and we're using it and we are essentially adding an additional condition here we are saying because of the analysis provided by Mr. Glasberg and and Mr. Farkas we are comfortable moving forward with this foundation permit which will is in the city's interest to get built it will add value will literally be millions tens of millions of dollars new dollars invested in this community when it's built that will be of value that there is really no downside that we've been able to identify to being built but it doesn't let the development off the hook it says to go beyond that point all of the additional conditions for building the full project remain in place and he's going to have to come back to us again and secure that additional additional permit that would not normally be required before going beyond the foundation stage another element of the city's ability to really protect itself here they just want to make sure is clear to everyone is what is being contemplated here what what I support and I'm hopeful the council is going to support is allowing the developer to go forward with the investment of tens of millions of dollars of additional capital of theirs in this foundation the basic financial agreement of this development agreement is the city is responsible for some costs we are responsible for the public improvements the streets the sidewalks the trees the stormwater provisions but we do not pay for them until the end of the project until they're completed and they're built to our standards and in fact until the private improvements are there and complete to a level that they're generating new property taxes that allow us to be able to pay for those provisions and that remains in effect here that is not being changed in any way by by this agreement so just this is this is for these reasons and more I am I am strongly supportive of moving moving forward and I'm hopeful the council is as well and this continues to be a project that I think ultimately we will all be very glad to have seen built for the benefits it creates for this community thank you president right thank you mr. mayor any other councilor with that thank you very much I think we're ready for a vote and I mean my only comment without talking about how I'm going to vote is to say that the mall has been demolished it's gone and the success of the city going forward and being is I think the vitality of their downtown is critical that this project does move forward with that I would ask the clerk's office to call the roll councilor Bush or yes councilor Hartnett no councilor no doubt yes answer Mason yes answer Paul yes councilor Pine yes councilor roof yes councilor Shannon yes councilor Tracy councilor Tracy no thank you city council president right yes eight eyes two nays one absent one refusal the side letter passes by the vote just by the city that was just suggested by the city clerk's office with two no votes okay we move ahead now to item six point oh five no six point oh five that is resolution authorizing Bank Street and Cherry Street design consultant contract amendment councilor roof thank you president right I'll move I'll move to approve the creation of a design budget for FY 19 of $1 million for the Great Streets Bank and Cherry Streets project and approve an overall design budget of $1,454,824 motion has been made by councilor roof seconded by councilor no doubt council roof would you like to floor back no thank you okay do we need anything further on this all right I guess we're ready to vote I think we still may need well councillor is councillor Tracy still on the phone okay so we need he still wants to okay so we still need a roll call vote then so sorry we need a roll call vote with the clerk please call the roll call councilor Bush or yes councilor Hartnett no councilor no doubt councilor Mason yes councilor Paul yes councilor Pine yes councilor roof yes councilor Shannon yes councilor Tracy council roof we need to hold the phone to the to the microphone please we got it yes by councillor Tracy City Council continue right yes nine eyes one absent one recusal nine that passes nine to one the final one so nine eyes one day point of order point of order councillor roof what is your point of order I believe there's an additional motion that needs to be made on this item and I'm going to ask City Attorney Blackwood to give that reason okay attorney Blackwood yes the board and the board of finance adopted a second motion to go along with this with which had to do with authorizing director Spencer to execute a contract amendment and this was in the memo it appears it did not get on board docs unfortunately but it was adopted by the board of finance earlier tonight it was in the amendments read by councillor Nodell it was it wasn't when he just read the motion now right but it was in our actual amendments that was that was read into the record by councillor Nodell earlier yes and I believe council roof just made a kind of shortened version but his intent as I understood it was the full language as adopted in our agenda amendment I read the recommend councillor I read the what was on the recommended action but yes the assumption was to include what the consent agenda or the agenda was said at the beginning of the meeting so your call I think that's fine as long as you've clarified the record to that extent so you're not suggesting we need another vote you're saying as long as as long as both the movement and the seconder understand that was the motion they were making everyone understand maker seconder everybody on the council understand that so okay so we're good all right so the last one item 6.06 council roof for a move move them or as move it and explain it move it and I will move correctly this time that we accept the excuse me that we wave the reading and accept and adopt the resolution seconded by councillor Nodell who would like to respond this one I'm not asking for the floor back Mr. Mayor the way you've just approved and we've been talking about is with regards to this change to have separate from the the second issue the issue of the city taking over design responsibilities because the city wants those design responsibilities and thinks this will allow us to avoid mistakes and get a better get a better product the we are contracting we're expanding the contract this design contracts the city has this inner fund loan for sixty six thousand dollars would be part of how that additional contracting is paid for on an interim basis and there was again there's hours late there was extensive discussion about this and the inner fund how we do these inner fund loans at the board of finance tonight and this was unanimously recommended by the board of finance thank you mr. mayor any discussion by the city council councillor Nodell just a point of clarification so we were going to be paying for this at the end if this the design work had been done by the developer we were still going to be paying but at the end that's great this is unlike the construction costs in the design costs which again we are doing not because of any of mr. Sinex's reasons but because the city prefers this this route the essentially what this does what the change you just voted on does really is accelerate the takes the city takes on this responsibility and more of this responsibility we already were doing some of the design this has us take on more of the design and because we are taking on more of the design we will pay for that design over the next six to nine months as opposed to a couple years from now when we would have previously and that that is essentially the change here it's a modest acceleration of some yes design costs and if I may so there are I think some modest interest costs that we will be taken on that we wouldn't have taken on but in my judgment they're overriding benefits but I think we just need to be clear that we will be borrowing up for a short term period of time and repaying out kind of closing out that debt when we issue the tiff debt there costs that we don't reimburse for until the end of the project we are responsible for some financing on that as well so I don't see that as a substantial additional cost here although you're right this 66,000 will there is some costs associated with it yeah thank you thank you councillor no doubt councillor Hartnett thank I just want to point out when I think about this whole project and how we sold it to the public and how we talked about these great streets and the best part about it was we're not going to pay for until after the project's over and you know that's that was the selling point of this and I just see us you know being so inconsistent here tonight really on this project and it really strikes a core with me right that we we use it when we have to sell it to something but then when we want wanted our way we we can justify it by saying well we're gonna control it now so you know we're gonna have to pay for it or we're gonna have to we get can we get control now we get to the design way we want and I just I just think it sends the wrong message right to the voters I think it's inconsistent and I think it's unfortunate that we're here doing this tonight thank you councillor Hartnett any other city councillor councillor Shannon thank you I just want to say that this is an extraordinarily large project the largest probably ever taken on in the state of Vermont and I think that while we are making some adjustments we did the best that we could with all of the things that we knew at the time that we entered into the development agreement and each step along the way as we go through the construction process we're going to learn more and we're probably going to make adjustments all along the way so while I will support this one I also am not supporting it expecting it will be the last thing to come to this city council and I think it's prudent for us to make modifications when we have more information and we will be continually getting more information so thank you thank you councillor Shannon any other councillor before we go to the vote hearing none the clerk shall call the roll please Councillor Bushore yes councillor Hartnett no councillor No-Dow yes councillor Mason yes councillor Paul yes councillor Pine yes councillor Roof yes councillor Shannon yes councillor Tracy yes city council president right yes nine eyes one day one absent one item passes my vote of nine to one that concludes our work except for item number 11 which is an executive session and before we take the motions going to executive session I want to take presidential prerogative to say one quick thing our next meeting is September 11th this is a special meeting called by the mayor to deal with items that may will be voted on potentially to go on the ballot we know that there will be two I don't know if there's any others but I will not be entertaining other things going on that meeting that is going to be primarily for dealing with potential ballot items for November with that committee can no those are all eliminated they were they were all eliminated councillor No-Dell's motion didn't eliminate those sorry the we need a motion from who wants to make the motion to councillor No-Dell I would move that premature disclosure of contract negotiations would put the city at risk okay findings have been moved by councillor No-Dell seconded by councillor Bush here any discussion hearing none all those in favor of police a I any opposed and now with the findings have been acted on councillor No-Dell president based on that finding a move we go into executive session to include members of the mayor staff and members of the city attorney's office and the CAO okay most have been made to go to executive session councillor No-Dell seconded by councillor Bush here discussion hearing none all those in favor of moving into executive session please say aye any post we are moving into executive session but to make clear we are expecting you to come out and take action and we will be coming out to take action when we come out thank you so channel 17 will take a break and come back to cover our action when we come out which we hopefully will not be too long so channel 17 all right and we are back from executive session and we are looking to a motion from councillor Bush here so I'm going to do one at a time the first is a resolution it's the ratification of tentative agreement and authorization to execute collective bargaining agreement between the city of Burlington and AFSCME this is July 1st 2018 through June 30th 2022 so I'm going to move to waive the reading and adopt that resolution okay moved by councillor Bush here seconded by councillor Roof any discussion on the motion hearing none all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed and we have passed that unanimously and the second okay second one councillor Bush here resolution ratification of tentative agreement and authorization to execute collective bargaining agreement between the city of Burlington and IBEW once again dates July 1st 2018 through June 30th 2022 and I so move to waive the reading and adopt the resolution moved by councillor Bush or seconded by councillor Dean although any discussion all those in favor hearing no discussion all those in favor please say aye any opposed passes unanimously and motion to adjourn moved by councillor Nodell second by councillor Roof all those in favor we are adjourned