 I'm just seeing that now. So. Yes. When he comes to our pie and I do believe we have a, a quorum as counselor. You will give everyone. Oh, here we got counselor pine. Thank you. So there, there is a quorum now. I know we're waiting for Karen. We do have some important agenda items upfront. So I'm going to give us about one more minute. And she felt staffer Adele, could you let me know? Is there anybody signed up or maybe president Tracy for. Public forum for board of finance. Don't see anyone signed up for public forum. If you're a member of the public who would like to speak on public forum. And you could just use the raise hand function and I can, I can find you that way. But so if you just. Or a member of the public and would like to speak on public forum, use the raise hand function, please. I don't see anyone. Using that. So we don't have anyone signed up for public. Okay. And we know counselor Jen will be right back and counselor Paul's here. So. At four 35. I am going to call this very early bird session of board of finance to order. And a motion to amend the agenda would be in order. Do I have that motion? Did I just say amend? Because I meant adopt. I moved to adopt the agenda. It's already been a long day. Thank you, counselor. Fine. And thank you, counselor Tracy for the second. Any questions or discussion? All in favor. Say aye. Great. That is unanimous. Anybody for public forum after your announcement. Seeing none. We will move on. To the consent agenda, which is the December 7th. Director of the public forum. Is the board ready to make a motion about those? Yes, counselor pine. I would move that we adopt the consent agenda and take the actions indicated that include the minutes. Excellent. Is there a second to that? Thank you, president Tracy. All in favor. Aye. Great. That brings us to item. 4. Oh, one. And I am pleased that. We have at least one of our team of auditors here. Today to present the formal findings for the general fund for FY 20. You will recall on November night. I gave you a sort of a preview. And I'm going to turn it over to rich to provide an introduction. And then we'll go from there. Good evening. It's rich. Good one here. Director of financial operations. I have with me. This evening. Alina Corsak. Who is the partner. At my Lansing. That will be providing a. A brief 15 to 20 minute. Presentation. On our results. For fiscal year 20. And if I could be made. The presenter. I will move the. Presentation forward as Alina desires. Thank you so much for the introduction, which I did get a message that my video was. Ended by the host. So. I don't know if the host wants. To put it back up. I could see if it works now. Can you see the presentation? Okay. And I can see the presentation now. So. We'll start with the general fund. And before we do that. Before we go into the balance sheet. I just want to share good news that. At this point this year. We are further ahead. We are further ahead. We are further ahead. I just want to share good news that. At this point this year, we are further along in the financial statement audit. And the preparation of the comprehensive annual financial report, which we assist the city with. Then we were at this point last year. So although we had struggles and bumps and bruises along the way, but we had that every year. And we were still dealing with the city's clerk, who was in the financial department. We are still doing this presentation at a similar time that we did last year. And during the pandemic year that we had, I think this is also good news. So on the balance sheet as rich here, it has on screen. The most important thing to you is the different categories of fund balance. You see how much total fund balance the general fund has broken out by non-spendable restricted committed assigned and unassigned and there are a lot more detail in the fund balance details tab for all of these but up and there is the fund balance detail tabs if you want to go there. But our focus is going to be and here is you see the non-spendable is just an offset to prepaid inventory and low term advances restricted typically for grants but the biggest part of that is the bank premium that hasn't been used yet. There's some committed and mostly your biggest one is unassigned. For example, you see operating on departmental five point four million dollars. That is, oh, it looks like I got a permission to start my video. Okay, thank you. Five point four million dollars. For example, for operating non-departmental you used about six million for fiscal year 21 budget and most of it is right there. So here's all your details if you want to go back to it later. And if we go back to the balance sheet. Here's where we see 11 million dollars of assigned fund balance, which we just saw briefly the detail for and our biggest number most important number here is the unassigned fund balance. And it's eight point six million dollars. If anyone wants to see how it changed. Again, we're not going to go into that tab but the change in unassigned fund balance shows you how it changed from beginning nine point four million to ending eight point six million which if you want to just briefly show that change in unassigned fund balance tab. I mean, we'll only go here if there's questions but the changes eight hundred seventy nine thousand. So if we go back now to the general fund balance. Here's we, we have eight point six million dollars, you know, which is I think another great positive thing for the city and another good news. This represents 12.9% of expenditures, which is how your fund balance policies based on as a percentage of expenditures, which is only done 2% from 14.9% last year, which was expected to be done so the good news is you met your targeted amount of 10% and you had, you know, the capacity to assign amounts for future projects and and you, you have a substantial amount not built in for future projects in assigned so the amounts that you assigned are already out of unassigned here and in that 11 million dollar assigned fund balance. So that is the most important thing on the balance sheet. The second tab is the income statement, we are not going to really talk a lot about that but here's where you could see the breakdown for revenues breakdown for expenses then other financing sources and uses, and how we go from beginning total fund balance to ending total fund balance and that's the ending amount that we just saw on the balance sheet which is the sum of all the different fund balance categories. So we'll more focus on the third tab, which is the general fund budget versus actual tab. So if you start from the top. And for example from taxes and special assessments to contributions and donations. If you look at that variance column, it's a little over 3 million. This is where the revenues came in short of budget by over $3 million. The biggest categories were taxes. So there were 700,000 for taxes but it was more the grocery seats. The grocery seats were short about $1.1 million from the budget amount. The second biggest category was charges for services, and it was mostly recreation, as you know, the way it went in the pandemic year. I believe there was about 840 something thousand that was short of budget there for recreation so that's what it mostly deals with. So if you keep going down. We have to put a little perspective to some of these numbers for example bond premium that does not fall into unassigned. So you it says though you don't take that into consideration that goes directly to restrict it to be used for future projects. So the bottom premium can be used for either that service of capital projects. The use of fund balance. Most of that use of fund balance in the final budget category is your use of assigned fund balance. And you never get an actual amount when you look at that because this is not current year revenues you're generating this is using prior year fund balance to budget for your expect some of these expenditures so that negative 4.5 million dollars that's just strictly means that you're using prior year surplus. And expenditures we are not going to go into as much detail here as we did on the revenues, but you can see that you are short of budget and expenditures. And with anticipating being short in revenues, like we said taxes, particularly gross receipts particularly recreation charges. The city is monitoring expenses and particularly in personnel benefits and some of the other items and that shows up here as a short of budget, which is good news basically you have, you know, and spend the money on the expenses that brings the positive to this budget versus actual work paper. So on the expenses. There are also some funds that roll up into the general fund, one of them, for example, is found one to which is the health insurance fund and that had over half a million dollars of surplus so that all comes out as unspent here so after the expenditures. If you go down, you see the total access of revenues and other sources of expenditures and other uses of 4.2 million dollars but you can look at it as 4.2 million dollars you have to look at it kind of in sections like we just went over to know what really happened this year. And that pretty much is a summary of general fund and you feel free to interrupt me anytime with questions. And I'll take any not there are any and if not we'll just continue into the management letter management letter. Okay. So I'm management letter rich do want to. Oh, I'll take, I'll take back over here. Okay, I think Councilor Paul has a question I believe. So, let's say am I muted. No, we can hear you. Okay. So the first thing is, I think it would be helpful going forward. If when you're doing this for presentation purposes, if you give us the figures for f y 19. It's very difficult to know. Even on any of the schedules it's very difficult to to be able to ascertain whether or not things are on, you know, where things stand on a well on a comparable basis if we don't have something to compare it to. So I would ask that the even on the balance sheet or the income statement that the last year's figures be be listed. The, the questions that I had more related to the variances with final budget was trying to understand some of the revenue figures on, and perhaps you went through this and I, I missed it in terms of, you know, what specifically were the charges for services what where were the variances on, and then where the variances were in terms of transfers in on, you know, it's just a, it's, it's just a broad number, and it would be helpful to know where, you know, where that actually came from And then under under the on this on the on the fund balance, you've listed below the breakdown and changes for the fund balance classification, and I understood what you had said about the restricted on the fund balance due to the classifying bond revenue but I'm wondering whether or not on, if that was a recommendation that you made, if that was a recommendation that you've made before on where that actually where that decision came from. And, and then the other was also, it was very difficult to know, at least for me to know, as far as from the fund balance details on the non spendable exactly what that difference was on, you know, usually with non spendables. Like things like inventory, or something like that and I wasn't really sure where that difference of $589,000 what that change was. Thank you so much for that excellent question and yell at me if I don't answer any part of that. So on the first one, I want to clarify. So here in the tab change in unassigned fund balance we go from beginning of the year to the end of the year the 9.4 million at 630 19 to 8.6 million at 630 2020. Additionally, you want us next year to have last year's balance sheet last year's income statement. Would you like the last year's budget versus actual as well. I think that that necessarily is as as as important. I mean to me I mean I'm just speaking for myself I think it's just very difficult to know with a an income statement, if you're not using comparative income statements to me on, you know, because that I you know I, I just would prefer that. Oh, absolutely. We can make it comparative for this presentation for balancing an income statement. And then the second thing I believe asked for is to go back to revenues. So on the general fund budget versus actual tab. We go up to the revenues. We mentioned how the shortage in Texas is 700,000 in Texas but it's mostly the grocery seats of $1.1 million. Specifically by charges for services charges for services is definitely by far mostly recreation. There are about 840,000 in recreation but there are other ones. There were parking and license and permits. There were across the board, you know, down due to the pandemic year, but majority of that definitely deals with their older recreation programs that were closed and the income for that not coming in. And then you mentioned transfers in. That is a big variance because there is that 4.754105 I think was the number that came from the special revenue fund called the sale of Burlington telecom that amount that was voted in March to move to unassigned fund balance in general fund that amount is pretty much the difference here in the variance column. The difference is $4 million higher than budget so that is why that transfer is different. So different drastically different than what we are comparing it to. Then we go to the I think you asked about the fund balance categories so we'll go back to the general fund balance sheet. Unrestricted I think you mentioned the unspent bond proceeds that haven't been used either for that service a capital project yet. And in the change in unassigned fund balance tab is where you could see the change in classification being made it's rolled 25. I apologize I actually am working off of the change in unassigned fund balance that tab. Okay, I know where that's coming from my question is, I see where it is. My question is, is that a change in policy. Did you recommend that is that now a policy going forward. Is there was their guidance on that that caused you to change that. I'm just trying to understand I mean that's a significant change, and I'm just trying to understand where where that came from. Yes, and overall, of course, I found those didn't change this one from committed to restrict it and although we were fine with committed. There was no fun, but any fundamental policy change. But we always see it as a restricted amount everywhere else because technically, the, all those official statements are outside the outside. And that's what restricts it so it's we thought was more meaningful as it's an outside restriction to be called a restricted instead of committed fund balance and we talked to the city actually a lot about this and which remembers as October November and everybody agreed that restricted would be a more meaningful way to classify it this year. I don't disagree with you. I'm just saying that I, because it is a, you know, to me it seems like it's a bit of a change in what we would be doing going forward, we're not going to now go back to what it was before. Right. To be that way, going forward, right. Yes, going forward that amount is going to come out there when it's appropriate to be spent for that service. All right. So the non spendable you mentioned. Yeah. And the, so the non spendable decrease by 589,000 and the fund balance details show Burlington Town Center Champlain Parkway and downtown Westlake as the remaining balances that don't have near funding sources that are still in non spendable. And if I, so the biggest one that went down was the Burlington Town Center where that deficit was higher. And that's why the non spendable is down this year, which means, you know, the scientists more. Okay, I mean, I know other people have questions I guess that's the reason why I'm saying that it is helpful if you use comparable, because if you don't have comparable. That's the reason why I'm asking the questions because I have no way of knowing that answer. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you for your suggestions. So we'll definitely do them. And did I miss anything. No, that that's. Thank you so much. Thank you. Okay, we got a question from counselor pine. If you could on the on the income statement, it looks as though there are general fund lines in the general in the income statement under expenditures for, for instance, I think I saw, for instance, community development is in there as a, as a general fund expense, I think it's helpful. I just, I want to make sure that both the public and the board of finance that we acknowledge that this is just for some of these expenditure items, these are just portions of the activities that fit into those headings. So for instance, for the community development portion that 1 million and 12,000. That's a, that's a section that's a portion of an entire department's budget it, it, it may give the information that that is covers the entire function of government under that heading because I just, I think it's important that we figure out how to characterize that information so when someone looks at this they don't think, Oh, that's it, you know, because there's the whole non general fund portion that isn't here to be captured and I understand why it's not but I just want to make sure that that's clear to everybody really. That's an important clarification. When you look at the capital and it's finalized, the other government funds are going to be right next to this column so you will see a total community development in the comprehensive and your financial report. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, that'll be much clearer than thank you. And then I always get a little bothered by the item in, I don't think it's in the, it basically lists the city council is a $2 million budget item, and it's kind of a, it's a heading it's a, it's a terminology that I think we grapple with, because it's, it's includes regional programs it includes just either is it's a 2.7 million under the budgeted amount original budget amount so I think we need to work on the way we describe it I think to the average. You know resident taxpayer that looks at this is going to wonder, what is that so. So we do have regional programs in there and something that maybe the city culture could expand on the construction maybe segregate more. Thank you I'm just trying to make sure it's clear to everybody when we look at this what we're looking at but that's it thank you. So, would you like me to proceed with the management letter. If I could just make a thanks so I'm not seeing any other hands so yes go ahead. My apologies I just wanted to just simply on mention on counselor pine brings up a very, very good point, which is that we need to, we need to change that classification. It's really not an appropriate classification I mean, general, you know regional programs is listed separately is a line as a line item in the budget. It has nothing to do with the expenses of the city council, it has to do with city expenses, and, and in fact, the decision about where some of those funds go is not even doesn't really. I mean there's input from the city council but it is the mayor's recommended budget, and I think, I think it's only fair that going forward, we take that out of the city council line item. And it's, it's extremely misleading. You're of course exactly right this this roll up is by the school the department code, but there are additional accounts, and the camera is not finalized yet so if it's something that you want to make a change for this year. There's still time to do that. I think that'd be great. We will do that. Thank you. Thanks very much. I'll be quiet now. Let's go to the management letter. Thank you. Which would you like to pull the management letter up. You see it. I still have seen the general fund budget versus actual rich you might want to stop sharing your screen and then reshare your screen and you should be able when you reshare your screen you should be able to have the option to click the window that's the management letter. There we go. Thank you very much. So here we have the management letter for this year. And again, I want to keep stressing the good news is that even though in the pandemic year we did not have more comments this year than we had in the past it's four comments this year four comments last year. That's good news. And same as before we do not have any significant deficiencies or material weaknesses weaknesses so this is what we call other matters it's just other recommendations for suggestions for improvement, which could strengthen your controls or procedures or operating efficiencies. So the first one here is improved controls over journal entries and adhere to a formal closing schedule. So actually an improvement from the previous year on the closing comment. We did see plenty of transactions that were done a lot more timely than they were in the past. So we are commenting here on some of the major ones that were still done way after the fact. For example, the COVID $1 million approved in March 2020 transfer wasn't really done till October 2020. So that's just an example. So we are really looking forward to seeing more timeliness in the future. And some of the areas we struggle with every year and you know this year was one of the struggles was capital assets for example that that was a struggle area and that the city does have a plan and is redesigning their processes and we decided in the procedures to get that improved more timely the next fiscal year so this is the city's response and I think it's a great response and that we are looking forward to getting all these improvements that are going to happen next year. The second comment to you guys I used to hear in this improved capital project accounting still here this year but I'm guessing this is the last time. So, still for 630 20, it was really hard to see the status of projects like today live it was hard to see what unspent proceeds were by individual projects and different things like that but the good news is, the city already started doing some changes to hire the firm in April 2020 and already July of 2020 the processes and controls I would say changed significantly with a brand new structure brand new funds and brand new way of how this is going to get recorded. I think there's been a lot of work that got done to get this moving along and to define and implement best practices. So, so there is a way in the future to look at these projects alive and know what but today balances for a particular project. So the third comment, I'm not going to go into much because there was a separate report done on this. The one thing I wanted to mention is that we did think we should put it also in the city management letter the fact that a lot of times we came across when we did a test in the lack of original documents like driver's license for certificates that were not retained and of course, there is a higher you have to test and verify through the process that their information is accurate, but we also recommend that going forward, all the source documents retained, they get copied and retained and the city. So the intention they immediately changed procedures and from what we understand starting this December, the human resources department is required now to retain all this information for their employees. And the city has also done some other. I'm just going to hold you there for a sec. In the interest, we, we still have quite a few items you got to get through before 531 we have other matters so why don't we, why don't you just pause there and we'll not going to cut off discussion here but the counselors have had the management letter are there questions about remaining items at this point. Let's go straight to the questions instead of further presentation counselor Paul. Thank you. Actually, you were just going to be getting to this one was the last one and I just wanted to simply ask because I haven't, I haven't seen in management letters recently. You know, I can't remember all of them but it would seem as though on the improved systems for identifying federal awards on it appears like this is a relatively new finding and is it possible that really to a large degree on the staff who has been pulled in many directions because of COVID on that this is something that just had gotten behind on this particular year on because again I haven't seen this before that I can remember. Is that, is that a fair, is that a fair assessment. You're very fair and your assessment this always been a struggle but this year the, the duties being reassigned redesign just to keep up and, and the person was in charge of this last year is not the person was in charge of this year so. Yes, your fear in your assessment that did cause the this comment and the issue that they had to bring up the software was never really too conducive and looks like the city is implementing procedures to get all of this on track. Okay, and then just as a comment, Mr Mayor I just wanted to say that, you know, two of the items that were in last year's have been, have been to have been fairly well addressed one of them. The other two I think are to some degree, a response to the very unique times that we're undergoing a time when the clerk treasurer's office and many others were really, really stretched and just to give acknowledgement to the hard work that they have given. And also, just simply that, you know, it's not, it's not unusual. We don't need to reinvent the wheel if we can find on, you know, when it comes to some of the pension issues that when it comes to some of the capital issues, if we can find either some of the ways to outsource that on maybe have a pension administrator that is not in house on may actually even save us because they'll pay us they'll charge us by the employee on. I'm just, I just think that maybe at some point we need to try to make that, you know, and have specialists that do this kind, some of this kind of work it's a huge learning curve and, you know, there's just a lot to know. And just be my, my only comment and thank you. That's all I have to say. Thanks. Thank you, Council Paul. Further questions about the management like President Tracy. Thanks Mayor and thanks for the presentation. Thank you on the first two. Just the staffing issue that was identified with not having senior staff and just wanting to get a little bit further clarity on if there is a plan to get senior staff or if it's a capacity issue because of coven related matters just wanted to get a little clarification on that. And then second question was on the second point, just wanting to understand when we anticipate the consultants work to be done and then when implementation would take place such that we would be able to directly address the issue that's raised there. Catherine, do you want to respond to that. Yes, I'll start with the issue around senior staff and then ask rich to jump in on the issue around CLA as he's been managing that directly. A few months ago, this board approved us adding a senior accountant position, which I was really grateful for and a lot of the reason for that was last year's management letter. Recently we went through a recruitment process that was not successful because our candidate, our, the candidate we made an offer to declined based on salary. He had a better offer so we are back to the drawing board. And I will report back to you but those efforts are ongoing. And I have encouraged our staff and I would put a plea out to this body, and I will recirculate the job description just if you could put it out to your networks, that would be really helpful. And rich, if you could just give a very quick update on CLA's capital accounting work and when that would wrap up. Thank you. So, CLA, over the last four or five months, they have done a really good job streamlining our process, where we're able to do life to date reporting that's made a big difference. We've tightened up policies and procedures on that. What we are looking to do over the next six months is, you know, transition that back to the clerk treasurer's office. Now that we have a system that's been built with support of other departments on DPW being one of them who are in really good shape on that. But again, Council Paul, it suggested this other areas that could be outsourced. That's exactly what we're going to be looking to do with the new year. We need to streamline our grant reporting. We need to streamline our fixed assets. And we're looking at CETO as well as new items. So, again, we're going to keep CLA engaged to help with the handoff or transition back to our team. And again, we're looking for additional work to be done over the next calendar year. Thank you. Thank you so much. Appreciate that. Those, those clarifications. Any further questions about the management letter would be great if we're able to wrap up this discussion the next two, three minutes here. So maybe time for one more question. Okay, seeing none. Thank you for that presentation. Thank you, Catherine for your team and really the whole department head team for all the work that represents and certainly welcome, welcome news that the way that this is sugaring off. We are doing conservatively better than we thought we feared we might at this point with the unassigned fund balance, which as we've talked about before, and this now confirms puts us in. In the future, but better better place than we thought we might be at this point in the pandemic. So I think we need a motion. Sorry if I missed this was our motion at the beginning of the meeting already there was okay so are we ready for a vote on the motion. Actually, sorry, just to clarify, we need, there was not a motion we need a motion on both the financials as well as the management letter Mayor sorry. Great. So we could probably do those, perhaps do those together. If anyone's ready to make a motion. Council Paul. You're on you. Sorry, Council Paul we can't hear you. Council Paul, can't Council Paul we're not hearing you if you can hear us. Okay, um, there we go. I'd really appreciate it if someone could get us off share screen. So there's too many things to really be watching. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm, I would be, I would make on, on 4.01, I would make a motion to, to approve and recommend to the council with the understanding that full comparables will be listed before it before this is approved on. I don't know if this is going, I don't remember if this is on the consent agenda for tonight, but I'd really like to make that point that we should not be approving financials without having comparables from the year before, or the period before it's it's it we're not being informed if we're not having that information. So I'll make the motion with that understanding. Second. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your question. All right, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed. The motion carries unanimously. Thank you. I'm 4.02. Are we ready for a. Recommendation regarding the management letter. Council Paul. I'll approve the FY 20 management letter. With the city's response. Excellent. Is there a second second by council pine. Further discussion. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed. Motion carries unanimously. Thank you to the board and thank you again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You know, definitely. No, there's some additional work called out there, but also considerable improvement over the last year and. You know, to do that amidst everything else. Handling. Really appreciate. Your work. Thank you for the presentations. And. We'll see you again soon. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Thank you, Mr. Dillon. I would move to approve and recommend the city council authorize the general manager of BED to execute a three-year contract extension with the option to extend. For an additional two years with the CSWB to continue BDs operation and maintenance of the wood and yard waste depot. It's meal generating station. Subject to the final review and approval by the city attorney's by the city attorney's office. Excellent, thank you, Councilor Pines, seconded by President Tracy. Discussion, questions, looks like we're ready for a vote. All those in favor of the motion, they say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. And that brings us to 4.04, authorization to amend the University Place EVM city agreement. We talked about this at last Monday's meeting. Are we ready for a motion here? Or is there further questions? Just have. Go ahead, Councilor Powell. I just have one question, and that is, so the amendment, the second amendment that was made was to, the second amendment was to change the dates of deemed consent from to December 31 and the city's contribution to January 31st of 2021. The third amendment is to change the date from December to July and the city's contribution to August 15th, 2021. So first I'd like to try to understand, I mean, that's a significant, I mean, we're talking six months or so, seven months. And just wondering why we feel that it's gonna take us seven months when we're basically, it doesn't look like there's a whole lot more that's being done that would take seven months. And then the other is, I would like to try to understand what you mean by the memorandum of understanding to address boundary line adjustments. So the University of Vermont who we're partners in this agreement with would like to be in an MOU with the city before they provide their selection on the alternatives. So before the two parties can come to agreement. To do so with the MOU, it's around the boundary adjustments. And that's not something that's a small amount of time to come to good understanding where the concept is gonna be what the MOU is gonna consist of. And so really it's the MOU that's gonna take the time. It's not that we're really that far apart on the concept but knowing the climate that we're in with the pandemic, both the UVM and the city are facing a little bit of financial uncertainties. And so we wanna make sure that we're being responsible with what we do set forward for the proposed concept. All right, so the July 31 date was more intentional given the fact that it would be after the end of the fiscal year for the city on August 31 is two months after the beginning of the fiscal year. And that was an intentional decision and to be able to have a hopefully a better lay of the land financially by then. Correct. Okay. All right, thank you. Councillor Pine. If I could just clarify or ask for confirmation of my understanding that the city's plan for the 10 year capital plan received the support from both UVM and Champlain in the form of their agreement to cover debt service payments on a portion or I should say on the $5.65 million bond issue that was made in 2018. And that I think they covering the entire debt service for the entire 20 years. Is that the way I understand it or is that just a portion of the debt service? They have their own bond. We listed as an institutional bond as we are tracking it and they are covering the entire costs both the debt service and the financing. But 5.6 is the capital work that we're able to do from that bond. Okay, and that is work that's adjacent to the two institutions by definition that are not necessarily. No, Councillor. Councillor, Paul, if you, sorry, Councillor Pine, this was our success of getting them to, we separately floated the 27 and a half million dollar sustainable infrastructure bond. We had this overall $50 million sustainable infrastructure plan that was paid for by a number of different sources and the institutional bond was one and they basically were agreeing to really, I think for the first time contribute to the overall city infrastructure. We have allowed them to give some input into what city infrastructure project we would pursue. But the one exception to the kind of, generally they were just contributing to the overall infrastructure plan. The one exception to that is this project, the university place where we had a specific agreement with them that this would be part of what we use the proceeds for. That's helpful. I think just for the purposes of both the council and the public, it's important that we just clarify that because the initial reaction was, well, wait, why are we putting all this money into university place when we have other infrastructure needs? I think it's important to just keep reminding folks that this is essentially an investment that the city is making really in return for a much larger investment contribution from the university and Champlain to our overall infrastructure costs and needs. And so I think I just wanna, I wanna highlight that because I think it's important that it not be viewed as a standalone project. That's all. I appreciate you highlighting that, Councillor Pine. I think it was a little understated in the discussion last week and reminding us of how this fits into the larger negotiation is very helpful. Thank you. Yeah, that's it. Okay. If there's no further questions, we do, do we get a motion on this yet? Okay, President Tracy. I move to approve and recommend that the city council authorize the mayor to execute a third amendment to the agreement between the University of Vermont and the city of Burlington regarding participation in the city's 10-year capital plan substantially consistent with the draft submitted here with subject to final review and approval by the city attorney's office. Thank you, President Tracy. Is there a second? Seconded by Councillor Paul. Any further discussion? We'll go to vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. Excellent. That brings us to 4.05 Vermont coronavirus workforce stabilization and grants award. Chief Locke is here, speak to this if necessary. How would the board like to proceed? Is there a question to your Councillor Pine? I'd like to move to approve and recommend the city council approve the acceptance of the Vermont coronavirus EMS workforce stabilization grant award in the amount of $121,107 and the funds be distributed to personnel through payroll as outlined in Chief Locke's memo dated December 10, 2020. Seconded. Seconded by Councillor Paul. Discussion. Great. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Carried unanimously and great. Thank you for bringing this forward, Chief. And just two quick things on this as we move on. One, Councillors may have seen the news that it's sort of another indication that our EMT firefighter teams have been on the front lines of this pandemic is that per the kind of CDC guidance and the state decision, we have begun to vaccinate starting last Thursday, our, some of, there's a staggered shifts but the vaccination of our firefighters has begun, which it's a really hopeful moment in this pandemic. And then secondly, I just want to reiterate for anyone watching in the, and Councillors that this is, these are not the only employees that are getting this kind of hazard pay. This is a special grant available for firefighters. This is an addition, this is sort of separate from the other essential city workers who have been at risk during this pandemic who received hazard pay last week through the approvals that you gave last week related to the other state grant, the Elger grant. Thank you, Chief, for being here. Take care. We'll keep going here. 4.06, reclassification of the BTV STAT analyst position as a senior policy and data analyst. We have Chief Innovation Officer, Brian Lowe here to speak to this if needed. Are we ready for a motion on the second? More questions. Councillor Pine. I would move to approve and recommend to the city council the retitling and reclassification of the current regular full-time exempt non-union grade 19 BTV STAT analyst position to the regular full-time exempt non-union grade 20 senior policy and data analyst position as recommended. Thank you, Councillor Pines. Seconded by Councillor Powell. Discussion. Great. All those in favor of the item, please say aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. I do want to say, Danielle, thank you for your work to get this scored and ready. And thank you, Brian, for bringing it forward. And good luck with this critical position. 4.07, authorization to apply downtown sales tax reallocation program regarding the Redstone Development Project at 54 South Gnusky Avenue. Thank you, Grace, for being here. I did see, I think our co-sir from Redstone is also one of the attendees if necessary. Richard Luke, thank you for being here. It's been a while since we've had one of these projects. So we've got all this horsepower here to speak to this if there are questions, but how would the board like to proceed? Councillor Paul. Thank you. I think for the benefit of the public who might be listening to this, it would be helpful to have a two-minute thumbnail sketch of the program and then going into it. Great, I think that's a good suggestion. Grace, are you prepared to do that? Sure, absolutely. So the downtown sales tax reallocation program is a public-private partnership program that is run by the state, the ACCD provides it. It gives a municipality that has a designated downtown district the opportunity to partner with a developer to move forward development programs in areas that can be challenging, namely expensive to develop in, to build in. So it does not take away any sales tax that would be coming to the municipality. So it wouldn't take away any sales tax that would be coming to the city of Burlington. But what it does is it gives a developer the opportunity to be refunded for sales tax paid to the state for building materials purchased for a development project. And what we're asking for today is approval for Redstone to apply for this program with Burlington in our downtown district in partnership with Burlington so that we can be approved to participate in this program. If we're approved, if we apply and are approved then Redstone will be reimbursed for building materials purchased for a proposed new development on the corner of South Winooski and Beale Street. And that will result in 69 micro units, also known as studio apartments that are really it's an exciting development proposal for a lot of reasons that it really matches a lot of the city's long-term goals and there's gonna be a lot more to come when we talk about the actual development of these apartments and whether or not that's a fit for the city but right now we want to at least capture the opportunity for Redstone to be refunded for building materials which will help to make this development proposal possible financially. And that application has to be in to the state by January 4th. Great, thank you for that summary, Grace. How would the board like to proceed? Councillor Jang. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Grace, for being here. And when you say building materials is it from start to finish of the project? Any building materials? It wouldn't be any building materials but common building materials, steel, wood, electrical conduit, some of the higher ticket items. So in this case, we have an estimate that Redstone has prepared because they have estimated project costs and we know about what they're thinking that they would be reimbursed. So this program, I believe it's all right with Eric for me to share. This program would allow us to perhaps capture $115,000 in savings, which given our longstanding or our very trusting relationship with Redstone, I know that these programs, these types of savings are really critical to making the numbers work so that we can move forward with responsible development. I just want to clarify just maybe I don't, I think I have this right is the, what happens to these sales taxes that are paid is they are reallocated to municipal, the municipal project piece. So the money doesn't go back to Redstone, it goes into the sidewalks, curbs, new street trees, utility system upgrades, that kind of related municipal expenses, isn't that right? Grace, do you mind if I jump in? Please do, yeah, I'm like, yes, go ahead. So we have one precedent for doing this with the city of Burlington on the Hilton Garden Inn project downtown. And the way that project worked and the way we anticipate this project working is the sales tax gets reallocated from the state to the city. And then the city cuts a check to the development project. The funds have to be used on the development project side to pay for things that are in the realm of infrastructure. So reconstructing as the mayor suggested, sidewalks, curbs, planting street trees, installing stormwater infrastructure. There's a variety of things that can be considered municipal infrastructure, but it's stuff that we as the developer are paying for and building and then the money's coming from the state through the city back to the project. And just so we're clear, I mean, this is important and I don't want to diminish the importance of the dialogue here, but just so people, I think it's helpful for people to have a sense of what we're talking about here in terms of dollars. So we're looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of 7.2 million of total construction costs, somewhere around $2.9 million worth of building materials. So, and then the way it works, state sales tax is 6%, but the state backs a million dollars off of that and says a million is deducted from the total. They're not eligible for the first million. So it's really about 1.9 million that's eligible for reallocation. 6% of that is about 115 grand. So it's not a lot of money in the scheme of things that we're talking about. It helps, every last dollar and especially the last dollars make a tremendous difference in project finance. Right. In the scheme of what the city's looking at right now, we're not talking about a lot of money and it doesn't cost the city anything. There's your good clarifications, Eric. Thank you. Councillor Jay. Yes. So the question that I was asking, it has an end. I have a point that I wanna make, and thank you for all of that explanation. But my point is now, knowing that there are at least 2.9 million of construction materials, where will it be purchased? Is it in Burlington or through the state or how much of it is also being purchased outside of maybe the state of the lot? That's my question. So the materials generally are purchased by our subcontractors and vendors. It's not something that we as the developer purchase directly. There'll be a small amount of materials that we purchase directly, but the vast majority will be purchased by subcontractors and vendors. The same way you would see in a municipal project. The city of Burlington doesn't go out and buy concrete by the pound. They purchase it through their subcontractors on infrastructure projects. So our subs and vendors will purchase the materials. The majority of those materials will be purchased through suppliers in the state of Vermont. But there will be some suppliers that will be outside of the state of Vermont, but like all items that are purchased that come into Vermont, Vermont sales tax has to be paid whether it's purchased in Vermont or not. You go on Amazon, you buy something, they charge you Vermont sales tax and remit that to the state. The same thing happens here. Yeah, thank you. And yeah, that's a great point right there. Now, the accumulation of those 100, maybe $50,000 of tax, sales tax that will come back to the other projects, maybe within the city. Will you accumulate them all at the same time? Or it will be like incrementally as we move forward with the project? So this application will be for this specific project. A project can only apply if it is within the designated downtown of Burlington. This project site happens to be within that designated downtown. So this project is going to apply to the state to potentially receive an award. If we are successful with the city in receiving an award, then the city won't receive any funds, nor will I until the project is actually being built. The way it worked on the Hilton Garden Inn, for example, the city actually got the majority of the funding pretty early in the process. We requisitioned for 50% of the funds in the middle of the project and demonstrated to the city that we had completed 50% of the project at that point. And it wasn't until the end of the project that we received the second half of the funds. Okay. I know we will talk about this project another time, but maybe push for your subcontractors to invest more within the month. But thank you, Grace, for being here. Thank you. Yeah, and I'll leave just, you know, along with us. Eric, Eric, Eric. Yep, sorry. Just in the interest of time, we really were six minutes over on this meeting already. So if we're, are there essential questions for the item before us? If not, it'd be great if we can move to a motion. Councilor Pynne. I move to recommend the city council approve the attached resolution as recommended. Thank you. It's our second. Thanks. I got my councilor Jang. Thank you. Any further questions? We will go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. Good luck with this project, Eric. Sorry to cut you off there just in the interest of time. And I will just echo it does this. There's a lot to be excited about the project. We look forward to talking about it later more. Thank you. Next item is the 4.08 approval to amend contracts for city hall renovations. Thank you, Martha, for your work on this. How would the council like the board like to proceed on this? I would I think it's an important item. I want to make sure we're ready for it, but I don't want to rush it if there is a desire for discussion, but we do have the next people here. So council pine. I was going to move the actions. They are very long resolutions rather than read them and take up time doing that. I would move that we approve and recommend to the city council on both counts. Excellent. Thank you. Is there a second second by President Tracy? Discussion questions? That's our pop. Thank you. First, I just want to I just would like to say, you know, not not in response to anything that anyone specific has said, but just simply that if we are running over, the reason we're running over is because we have items that we should be asking a lot of questions about. And if it means that we go over, then it means that we have two packed in agenda. And while I personally would prefer not to start any earlier at 4.30, we probably should have had more time and started the public forum, started the council meeting at 7.30. I did get a chance to talk with Martha and with Chapin today. And I think what's, I personally think that it is important that the public know not only what the overall project is, that this is the second phase of several, what exactly it is that's being done. And because this is, you know, still a lot of money. And I think people should know what we're doing. And as well, the reason that part of this is being done is because some of the equipment that we're replacing is really at the end of its life, but also what is involved with, you know, getting us closer to net zero, what the expectations are for the equipment that we're installing. And then I was hoping that Martha, maybe you could just speak to in the report that you gave us, one of the consultants gave a list of all of the costs, like the ventilation with no energy recovery, the ventilation with energy recovery, and just so that people can understand that while there is a significant upfront cost, I mean, obviously you've got to replace a roof at some point anyway, which I thought they should have counted that. But where this gets us to in terms of overall savings and what those savings, where those savings are going to go in terms of the revolving fund and how that helps us in terms of getting closer, even closer to net zero energy. Thank you. There is a lot of media information in that memo. And as we work towards this, this is phase two of, it will be ultimately many because it brings us one step closer to our net zero, but there are many other things that we need to do to that building. Buildings never stop having a need and this is a beautiful old historic building. This phase in particular is putting new mechanical, all electric mechanical equipment in the attic of city hall and bringing in an ERV, which is an energy recovery unit, which will bring outdoor ventilation into the building. In the attic, we will be insulating it, which will help our thermal barrier. And when you insulate it, city hall being an older building, it got its ventilation through its walls and its ceiling. And so as you start and close that envelope down, you need to bring in outside ventilation. So this is going to bring in outside ventilation for the building. It is going to make the building itself more comfortable and it is setting us up for in the future, if we are able to do either geothermal or solar to get us towards that net zero energy move that we wish to do. This move in itself is going to reduce our energy consumption by 10.3%. The annual savings on that is about $21,000. And we hope that it might be better, but that is the estimated savings. We are getting $35,000 in incentives from Vermont Gas and Burlington Electric. Both as energy savings and the incentives go back into our Green Revolving Loan Fund. So the council approved $500,000 from the general fund many years ago. And we have done one project previously, which was solar on 645 pine. That costs $350,000. And we have revolved it by, we now have $450,000 in that fund again. So we've put $200,000 back into the fund from the work at 645 pine, but also the other small projects that have one or two rebates or an incentive and leddie, which had a large project as well. So all of that helps it revolve. This one has a longer return on investment 15 to 18 years, which is actually pretty good. But it will bring in money that $21,000 a year will go into the Green Revolving Loan Fund and we'll still have the other dollars that are still revolving into it from 645 pine and leddie savings. So it will help grow that back again and be able to do another project in the future. Karen, I see you looking for it. And it isn't involved. Isn't it also true, Martha, that this work, in whatever form we did, regardless, this work does need to be done? Yes, yes, the unit that is in the attic right now was 1979, most of the mechanical equipment has a 20 to 30 year life. So we're at the end of that life, if not beyond. And so it is time to replace it and it could not keep the third floor comfortable at this point. So we couldn't maintain our temperatures so that our employees or public could be comfortable. And this will make that possible. So even though it is a higher potentially upfront cost, given the payback and given the life of the asset, it still is smarter to do it this way. All things being equal. Yes, 100%. Thank you. Thanks very much. Okay, Councillor Jang and then Councillor Pynne. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Mayor. So, Martha, I mean, I don't have a question and I think we've been talking about this project for quite some time now. But it's just a thought. Will it be possible maybe to start to think about the older city building because mostly they all historical building, right? And what's a plan for them? Because what we don't want is just deferred maintenance in front of us again, like what happened with Memorial. Do you have a plan? I don't need an answer, but maybe- We have, Councillor Jang, we have presented that plan and the past we have laid out in specific detail how what the priorities are for whether updating each of the buildings, happy to reissue that report to you. Yes, but maybe if you send it to me this, okay, I'll email you, thank you. Okay, thank you, Councillor Pynne. I'll be really quick. As someone who occupied an office on the third floor for 18 years, the wind coming through the windows was enough to ensure lots of ventilation. So it shouldn't be a huge issue as long as those old windows remain and those were built in 1925. Those windows were installed. They are the original windows. So beautiful historic windows, but super leaky. I used to have to caulk my own window at one point because it was so cold, things were moving so much on my windowsill. So that's what we lived with as city workers. I think the employees really deserve to have a decent place. We would often get too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter on the third floor. So thank you for everything you're doing. Thank you, Councillor Pynne. I think this is going to be a big step forward. Further discussion. Are we ready for, I'm sorry, I think we did get a motion already in a second. So we will, if there's no further questions, go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. Great work, Martha. It's exciting. Thanks for going forward. The, we do have, we have two more items, which I think we will try to get to if they are going to take extended times, we'll make a plan to do them otherwise. 4.09 is the open space addendum contract, conservation legacy fund disbursement request. And thank you, Scott, for being here. And just to reiterate, I'm in no way trying to cut off discussion if we need more time for these items, we can take it. But if we are able to do them quickly, that would be the last to move on. So how would the board like to proceed on 4.09? Councillor Pynne. I would move to recommend the city council approve the use of the conservation legacy fund as recommended in the action on our agenda. Thank you. Second by second from President Tracy, further discussion. Go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. Thank you for being here, Scott, for your work around this. Thank you. And the final item is for board of finance approval only. This is reclassification of a limited service position at the BPD, something basically required by our rules when a limited service position has run a certain length of time. Councillor Paul. Thank you. So before making this motion, I would just simply like to state that we'll try to be brief that it's most members of the board of finance are very familiar. I am not a fan of limited service. I think the city sometimes overuses limited service. If there are sometimes there are good reasons for it, but oftentimes there are not. This employee has been limited service for three and a half years. This is a violation of our personnel policy. The longest that an employee is supposed to be a limited service is three years, something that actually I would like to change down to two years, but that's another story for another time. So I would like to make a motion to approve the reclassification as stated in the recommended action, but I would also like to further recommend or further make the motion that this employee receive retirement benefits from the date that they should have started receiving them in accordance with the personnel policy, which means that retroactive to June 26th of 2020 until today that they would receive full retirement benefits. If anyone's interested in the amount, I did ask the CAO, it is approximately $5,100 that would go to this employee's retirement, but I feel quite strongly that we should do that. So that would be the motion that I would make. Second. Great. Clear in the recommended action on Board Ducks that this is retroactive to the June 26th. You wanna say anything further about that, Catherine? But that's not what the motion really implies. I have looked into that and that is not what my... My understanding of what the motion is in is intended. Is that right, Catherine? It is what the motion was intending. I appreciate Councillor Paul making it more clear. Excuse me, and we'll make sure that it's very clear in the notes. One thing that did come to our attention as we were discussing this because it's an unusual conversation is, for instance, the employee's side of the contribution and not wanting her to have to make up all of that at one time. So we're able to be flexible with a payment plan. So that is certainly our intention. We'll make sure that's reflected in the notes and we will work with her and H&H, our retirement administrator to make sure that happens. Thank you, Catherine. Further discussion? Councillor Jiang. It will be quick, Catherine. Was just wondering how many employees in limited service contracts do we have? Approximately. It's about... Thank you for the question, Councillor Jiang. It's about 12. Thank you. President Tracey. How will this reclassification fit in with the ongoing work to transform BPD? That is... I think this is a training position. Go ahead, Catherine. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. This might be a better question for Chief Mirad, but because this is a training position, it is my understanding that this is critical moving forward as we are in the midst of that transformation. This position will be very important for that. Chief Mirad or Danielle, anything you'd like to add? Chief Vaughn, I was gonna say that is my understanding as well. She's working... You're very quiet, Danielle. Sorry, can you hear me now? Yes, we can. Go ahead, Danielle. I was just gonna say that is my understanding as well, but it looks like Chief Mirad has joined us. You're right, Danielle. And thank you very much for the question, Council Member Tracy, and for referring it to me, CAO Shod. Yeah, Constance Crisp is invaluable with regard to our training. She sets up training. She makes certain that officers are maintaining training. She works very hard on our Citizens Police Academy. We're doing it online for the first time this year, and she is coordinating that. During the time of COVID, we have had a number of officers on what we call reserve status in order to maintain a distance from the two sides of our schedule. And officers have been doing actually more training than usual in-house training. We don't have a budget for any kind of external training. And so some of her work, travel arrangement, for example, has been a little bit smaller this year than normal, but she's been making up for that by putting together entire curricula that involve issues with regard to legitimacy, with regard to policing morally in urban areas. And she is really, really a key player as we keep up with the officers that we do have, as we envision thinking about other kinds of positions in the training that those positions will require. And as we think about taking, for example, our use of force training and really bringing it up into a new standard that avoids, for example, strikes and prioritizes different kinds of holds and things that's done by our use of force instructors, but it is arranged by Constance. Okay, thank you very much. Okay, further questions? We're ready for a vote. All those, Councilor Powell. No, sorry. I'm on site. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. And that is the end of our board of finance agenda. So without objection, we are adjourned as a board of finance at 5.55 p.m. and I hand it over to you, President Tracey. Thanks, Mayor. I appreciate that and appreciate the counselors bearing with us. If I could be please made a host. We have a number of counselors, I think, and other staff who are in. Thank you very much. I see some folks who I think are, need to be made panelists. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that before we get rolling. And then I will call to order the full city council meeting at 5.56 p.m. Again, thanks folks for being patient. Appreciate the vigorous discussion at board of finance on a number of items. Before we dive into our meeting, we do need a motion on our agenda. Councillor Stromberg, are you able to please make a motion on our agenda for this evening? I am. I move to amend, adopt the agenda as follows. Note presentation slides for agenda item 3.01 per acting chief, John Murad. Note written materials and motion for consent agenda item 6.11, communication capital committee regarding approval to amend contracts for city hall renovations per Martha Keenan. Note revised checklist memo and motion for consent agenda item 6.12, communication, shape and Spencer, director Norman Baldwin, PE, assistant director, city engineer and Susan Molzen, PE. Senior public works engineer regarding rail yard enterprise project, advancement to preliminary engineering phase per Susan Molzen. Okay, so we have a motion on the agenda. Is there a second? Seconded by Councillor Pine. Any discussion of our agenda? Okay, hearing none. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Aye. That passes unanimously. Okay, so we are now moving into our agenda. So we have number two, which is a communication from Eileen Blackwood, which has to do with city place with expected executive session on that item. Before we go into motions on that, Attorney Blackwood, are you able to share just a brief synopsis of what it is that why we're having this executive session and any information that you might be able to update the public with? Sure, you will recall that the city has filed a lawsuit against Burlington BTC mall associates related to the construction of public improvements. And that litigation is pending. The parties agreed to engage in mediation and we have now done so and are coming back to you to discuss what was where we are in that mediation. We do not expect you to come out of this executive session and take any action tonight. But we do expect that we will get some feedback from you that can help us lead to hopefully a future action next month in January. Great, thank you for that, very much appreciated. So given that that is the case, we have a need to hear from our legal counsel as well as our consultant, Jeff Klossberg in executive session to understand what it is that was achieved in mediation. I'm gonna provide further guidance. So based on that, we will, in order to go into executive session, we'll need two motions, one a finding and then based on that finding to go into executive, a motion to go into executive session, is someone prepared to offer a motion on the finding? Counselor Hightower. The counsel find that premature general public knowledge of information related to the recent confidential mediation sessions, the city's strategy and legal advice related to the pending litigation with VTC mall associates will put the city as substantial disadvantage. Okay, we have a motion from Counselor Hightower. Is there a second? Seconded by Counselor Stromberg. Any discussion on the finding, the motion on the finding? Okay, hearing none, we'll go to a vote on that. All those in favor of the finding, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that passes unanimously. Now, based on that finding, may I please have another motion to go into executive session? Counselor Stromberg. Based on that finding, I move that the council go into executive session and consider pending litigation and confidential attorney client communications pursuant to 1VSA 313A1ENF. Individuals to be invited into executive session in addition to the council and mayor, the mayor's office staff, city attorney, CAO, Jeffrey Glasberg, downs rank, Radcliffe and Martin attorneys, Tim Sampson. Okay, we have a motion to go into executive session. Is there a second? Seconded by Counselor Pine. Any discussion on the motion to go into executive session? Okay, hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Hearing none, that passes unanimously. So, for members of the public, we will be coming back into this meeting so you don't need to get, you can wait for this. We should be getting back in, I would imagine closer to probably 645-ish at this point, given that, but it's not altogether clear how long this will take in executive session, but we will come back to this meeting. So, please wait here. For counselors, you'll receive another link for the executive session in your council inboxes in just a moment. So, please keep an eye out for that and join the meeting there. But again, members of the public, we'll come back to you in just a little bit here and rejoin this meeting to continue with our work session, public forum and our deliberative agenda. And share an important update about the city place project. And I've got a extended statement, I'm gonna share with you and then I will take questions from the media about the virus if there's more on that and city place. So, here we go. So, for nearly two years, Brookfield, the largest real estate developer in the world in 2019 and the managing partner of city place Burlington project has made public, private and written commitments to resume the stall project and complete a transformative redevelopment of the former month. Since last November, these commitments have included providing materials in support of the city's testimony to the Vermont Economic Progress Council subscribing Brookfield's intention to start construction of a modified project in August. Meetings with members of the public, making similar representations in January and February of this year. And most recently, a letter to me on June 4th, confirming the company's intention to work in good faith to put a new development agreement in place by the end of this month. Despite repeatedly affirming its commitment to the project and with its promises to the city unfulfilled, at the end of last week, it became clear that Brookfield is pursuing steps to abandon management of the project and returned Don Cinex and his Devin Wood investors group to that role. That result would be unacceptable to the city of Burlington because it would constitute a breach of faith and a betrayal of trust. Brookfield should keep its commitment to the people of Burlington and see the project through to completion as it has repeatedly promised. If it does not, the city will do everything in our power to see that Brookfield suffers consequences for this breach. On Saturday, after consultation with city council president, Max Tracy, I directed our attorneys to issue a default letter documenting Brookfield's failure to perform pursuant to the development agreement and alleging bad faith and fraud. Further, the default notice includes a hold on the destruction of communications and documentation to preserve materials for possible litigation. I'm releasing this default letter publicly today. We will be posting it shortly after this press briefing. In a lawsuit, the city would at a minimum seek city ownership of the land for the reconnection of St. Paul and Pine Streets and damages for the developer's failure to rebuild and upgrade eight blocks of public infrastructure in time to use tax increment financing. The TIF law includes certain deadlines that may be impossible to meet because of the developers and actions and thus endangers the ability to construct the plan of $20.8 million in new public infrastructure. Brookfield has paid and reimbursed the city for approximately $500,000 of costs since its delays began, compensating the city for all expenditures related to the developers' delays and supporting downtown marketing efforts since the delays began in 2018. Sorry, the city will continue, will pursue continued reimbursement for the city's additional costs as this proceeds. In addition, the city will use all available mechanisms to ensure that this site, though privately owned, this is not publicly owned land, this is privately owned land, we're still gonna use all available mechanisms to ensure that it is transformed into a vibrant mixed-use neighborhood as soon as possible. In response to the notice of default, Brookfield's attorneys have initiated new contacts with the city. We will give the developers a short window of time to return with an acceptable proposal for moving forward with the project. If an acceptable proposal is not forthcoming, I will protect the city's interests and achieve the city's long-standing public goals for this project through aggressive legal action. With that, in one sec, I will take some questions. Our first question today is from Liam at VPR. And Liam, you should be able to enable your microphone now. Hi, Mayor. So when you say Brookfield re-established contact with the city, can you be a little bit more specific? I mean, what exactly did they say and what are they promising or talking about doing now? What I'm talking about, Liam, is they got this default letter on Saturday, their lawyer reached out to explore whether there's a route to avoiding litigation. And so we've had brief conversations with them since. I do think there are numerous ways in which Brookfield could avoid litigation and we're encouraging them to do so, but they have very little time for that at this point. After so much time has passed already and given their recent actions. How much time are you giving them? I don't think, Liam, I expect we'll have an update on this, probably not in the remaining time this month in July, but we're talking days or a short number of weeks here and you should expect another update on where we are with this, certainly in August. Days and a couple of weeks. I mean, that is a couple of weeks you're looking to hear back from them. You know, Liam, I think the exact timeline will depend on what Brookfield does. If they take swift action to try to make it right with the city, we'll give it a time to let that play out. If they continue to go down the path they have been, we may act very quickly. And you know, you've long supported this project and you were supportive of Brookfield taking over, you know, are you not supportive of the project if Don Sinek's sort of trying to get a sense of where you're at? I mean, it sounds like you're objecting to Brookfield pulling back from the project. I mean, do you still think Brookfield is actually committed to this project and would actually be willing to see it through if they run on your letter and kind of work with the city going forward? Do you still have confidence in them as a company at this point? So again, you know, the reason we issued that a follow letter is because at the end of last week it became very clear Brookfield is not currently intending to make good on their commitments despite all the things that they have said in the past and numerous different forums. And that's why we sent that a follow. Brookfield is, you know, the largest or one of the largest real estate development companies in the world, they clearly have the capacity to implement a project like this. They've done it many times in many parts of the world. It's within there. One of the reasons I have been supportive of working with them, giving them time to adjust the project and find a way forward is because clearly they have the ability to do it. And while certainly our trust in their statements is very much shaken by recent events, if they were to, you know, I think there's things they could do to change that if they chose to do so. I'm not saying that's necessarily likely. I do think they could do it and there's a way for them to move forward. So, and I think I answered your question there, Liam, but if you want to refine that and I can try again. I'm good for now. I'll let some other folks take a... Yeah, great. All right, we have... Oh, there's somebody in there. Do you have any questions here in the studio? Okay, no, good. The mayor's office, go ahead. Great, we have a full queue. So next up is Ross. Ross, you should be able to enable your microphone now. Hi, can you hear me okay? Yes, I can hear you, Ross. Go ahead. Great, thank you. So a bit of a two-parter. One is just, can you first explain what that communication was at the end of last week and how it became clear to you that they were no longer committed to doing this project? And two, with this project being now delayed for years and frequently referred to as many as the giant downtown whole, what's message to the community just about the fact that this is at best another delay on this and at worst, a full stop on certain future now for what's been a headache for many people in the city and even the greater community. Thanks, Ross. So the final straw in this is a meeting that took place last Thursday in which it was clear, or feel made it clear they were moving to sell their remaining interests and leave the managing role of the partnership. And that is the final event that led to the assurance that a fault on Saturday. Clearly, yes, you're right. This, the fact that Brookfield is choosing after all of their past statements to move in this direction is a setback. How big of a setback is to be determined and the last statement that had been made by the developers about a project schedule had a 2021 construction start. Certainly it's within the ability of the developers to still keep that schedule if they respond to this default and start moving forward with the permitting work and financing work that is necessary to actually get this in the ground. Whether they will do that, whether they will find a way to do that is entirely within their control and we will see. Certainly we are taking this step out of the sense that at this point as a last resort, this is an action the city can take that may have some role, accelerating decisions by the private developers about their partnership about how they move forward and that the after default could play a positive role in finally achieving some action from the developers. We'll just have to see how they respond and how this plays out. Our next question is from Aiden. You should be able to enable your microphone now. Hey, so last actually took the question, one of the questions I was gonna ask about what happened last week that really sparked this. But can you kind of expand on why the handoff back to Don is concerning from your point of view? Why it's concerning? Yeah. Well, look where we are in, for years worked hard, did everything the city was supposed to do in this public-private partnership to transform this problematic, declining, suburban mall into a vibrant mixed-use neighborhood. This is land that the city doesn't own but if we're gonna do it right, if we're gonna restore the public streets and upgrade the public infrastructure around that area, the route to achieving that is through a public-private collaboration. And we're very committed to that. The city did everything it was supposed to do by the agreement and we ended up in this place where construction started and then stopped and now we've had two years of basically a dormant site. So that history came as a result of attempting to make this work with Don. So we do have concerns about trying that again, for sure. And I think since this is likely, since a real chance this will become a matter of active litigation, I think that's what I can say about those concerns for now. I do encourage, there is an expansion on this in the default document that again will be posted after this conference. So did Brookfield identify who they were going to sell to? Were they gonna sell their 51% drift to Don or another party? Yes, they made it clear that they were that they were separating from Don that there was, I think it's best since what we know, what is clear is that they were attempting to leave the partnership and put it back, put the management of it back in control of Don Sinek's and Devinwood, that's really what we know. We are not privy to the details of their partnership. So I'll leave it at that. Our next question is from Dan. And Dan, you should be able to enable your, your microphone to ask your question directly now. Oh, can you hear me? I can hear you, Dan, go ahead. Oh, okay. So Mayor, have you talked to Don? Have you had a conversation with him about this, this turn of events? Don was on this call, I referenced last Thursday, it's the first time I've had any direct communication with Don. So I haven't had any direct communication with Don Sinek for a long time. I was not on that call very long. I've not talked to him since. I'm sorry, what was the last part there? I have not talked to him since last Thursday. We've communicated our concerns clearly. I think he's well aware of it. Okay. And the default letter, I'm sorry, could you just explain what leverage it gives you? Well, I think it does several things, Dan. First of all, it makes abundantly clear that the developers, if they want the city to continue to play the role that we agreed to in that development agreement, if they want the city to invest up to $21 million of tax and current financing funds in the public infrastructure that runs through their property and is adjacent to their property, that they are losing their window to do that and that we are not satisfied with the current state of the engagement with the city. And if they care about that $20 million investment, they better change directions quickly. It also lays out, I think, very clearly a detailed case for why Brookfield, if they continue down the path they are on and simply attempt to ignore the public and written commitments that they have made to this community, to the people of Burlington again and again, why that is something that they should suffer very severe consequences for. We didn't rush to this decision in any way. For years, there had been calls for us to follow Brookfield and you've passed press conferences like this, I've explained why we weren't doing that, that the fastest route to redeveloping the site and achieving what the people of Burlington want on this site, a vibrant mixed use neighborhood with jobs and homes and the generation of substantial new public revenues, that the route to getting there is to work with the property owner and I think it made a lot of sense to up until now attempt to work with Brookfield. Again, clearly this is a organization that has the capacity to deliver on that vision and they were telling us up until last week that they intended to do so and they told us that many times in many settings, often in writing, that has all been detailed now in this default letter and I believe we are in a very different position to pursue damages and remedies today as a result of those two years of good faith work on the city's part to see the project forward than we would have been if we acted sooner. So I think that lays it out there again, hope that's clear. That's good. The one last thing, can you force the sale of that property to the city? I'm anticipating, what if it just sits there? Nothing happens, Don can't do anything, Brookfield won't do anything, can you force a sale so the city can take over? Well, I do think we have several routes for reclaiming the land that is on the official city map now as a result of the work that we have done in recent years, the rezoning, the vote of the public. I see there being several routes to securing the land for the reestablished St. Paul Street and Pine Street. You're asking a broader question, can the city actually, even though this is not public land somehow get control of the site or force a sale in some way, I would say our options there are less clear and are ham-dasting a broader question in law and decisions that the legislature has made to limit the ability of municipalities to exercise eminent domain. However, as I said in the statement, we, from my perspective, we care a lot about what happens on the site, that we care a lot about the dormancy of that, continued dormancy of that site being as brief as possible and we will use all available mechanisms to ensure that the scenario you laid out does not transpire. I will add tens of millions of dollars of private money, not city money. The city really, it's important for the public to understand, it's often misunderstood. The city has spent close to nothing in sort of out-of-pocket costs since the delays began. We, because of the agreements that we negotiated and put in place, we have received approximately a half a million dollars in Brookfield since the delays began to cover the city's costs and to even address some of the impacts on the downtown and the delays. The developers are in a very different place. They have spent tens of millions of dollars, we're told more than $50 million over the life of this project and generally investment of that type creates real pressures to find a way to make a site productive. They're making zero income on this now. In fact, they have only major expenses on the site now. One would hope that the market forces at play in addition to any leverage or pressure that the city can bring to bear from here will limit the time but I would have said the same thing two years ago. I probably did say exactly the same thing two years ago. It's shocking that we are here two years later and the largest developer in the world has not found a way to make an investment in one of the most vibrant downtowns in America and it is a great disappointment and hopefully they will change course. They clearly, this is within their ability to change course and get a project done. Thank you. Our next question is from Courtney and this is the last question I have in the queue. So if I'm missing you, please send me an email and let me know. Courtney, you should be able to enable your microphone now. Hi. Hello, Courtney. Sorry, Courtney, I accidentally muted you. I think you're unmuted. Okay, great. So Mayor, just to clarify, can you say what the city would be asking for in the lawsuit? What sort of remedies would the city be looking for? If we get to litigation, I tried to articulate it as much detail as I can at this point, Courtney, in the statement. Certainly, if we continue down this path, there will be further detail but at a minimum, we will be seeking ownership of the land for reconnecting St. Paul and Pine Street. We'll be seeking damages, compensation for not just having the land without cost but actually funds to build the public infrastructure. That was what fundamentally, the city is supposed to get out of this agreement that has been in place for years now and that we've done everything that we were supposed to make good on this agreement. We were supposed to be received through this tax agreement financing mechanism, tens of millions of dollars to invest in the public infrastructure in the downtown that would greatly enhance and strengthen the downtown. If because of Brookfield's inaction actions, that is no longer available to us, I think we're owed that money through other means. And I think it's their willful actions that have endangered the possibility of this financing. I think that's a big problem and it's a big financial problem. It's $20.8 million in public infrastructure that were planned related to this development. Certainly, we're gonna have more legal costs, more project management costs with Jeffrey Glasberg with our attorneys, likely other out-of-pocket costs now as a continuation of the delays that began two years ago. We have been successful because of the commitments Brookfield has made in writing in the past in getting those dollars reimbursed up until now. We are gonna seek continued payment from them for those costs which are gonna continue going forward. There may well be more in a shoot, but that's what I'm confident in communicating to you now. Great, and so you mentioned that the city has not spent a lot out-of-pocket since these delays began, but I guess arguably the city has lost out on property tax revenue since there's been nothing there. So do you have a sense of kind of how much the city has lost over the years in that sense? And would the city maybe attempt to recover that through litigation or other means? Yeah, great, Courtney, the lost revenues, property tax revenues is more modest and I think a lot of people believe it to be. We still receive, the property owners still owe one of the largest tax bills in the city on that site even though it's currently vacant. Because the building was taken down the approximately $800,000 a year in property taxes that that site owed the city was reduced through reassessment by about $150,000 a year. The, that is revenue that I always want to make sure people understand has not. That foregone revenue going on three years now has not impacted the city's budget or the school's budget in that those were revenues, that because the history of this project, the long history of this property in Burlington's TIF district, those, that reduction in revenues was supposed to be and has been a short-term reduction in revenues flowing to the tax increment financing district. I do think that it is very much on the table and likely something we were already planning because I think you indicated previously publicly, we were, there was only supposed to be a one-year reduction in property tax payments. That was the developers promised continuous construction once the demolition began. So it was only supposed to be April of 2018 that there were the current level of reduced improvements on the site. So it was just supposed to be the one tax year following that April that there were reduced payments. I do think the developers are liable for the fact that that has stretched into more than a year and that was something we had announced would be part of our negotiations in seeking a new development agreement. And if we are pursuing litigation, we will certainly be seeking a teammate hole for that shortfall, which again, isn't been entirely within the developers control and that they, I see is clearly responsible for. Again though, I hope that's clear. You get what I'm saying, right? These are revenues that sort of hit the kind of operating budgets or the city or the schools because these are revenues flowing to the tech district. Yes, thank you. And then just another question. What do you need to see from Brookfield at the end of this kind of short timeframe that you're giving them to prove themselves? What is it that you would need to see from them to show you that and to avoid litigation? You know, Courtney, I think there's multiple different things they could do to make it clear that they were not abandoning the people of Burlington, that they were not abandoning these past commitments and we're gonna play a productive role in moving the site to the vision that has been promised. And so I, because of that, it's in their court and they could come back in a number of ways that would satisfy me. They will have to satisfy not just me, but the city council, which is aware of this default and which I think shares my frustrations with the developers. I'm not gonna spell it out for them. They know what they need to do to turn this around and make good on their commitments. Right. Is there anything you can say about, you know, are there any actions the city could have taken before now to potentially prevent this from happening? I think like over the life of the project being stalled, people have raised concerns that the city has maybe been too accommodating to the developer and I'm curious what you would say to that. Yeah, I was trying to speak to that this before. I mean, I think we have been clear over the last two years that ending the agreement, defaulting them was something we had considered and there were moments where we came close to that. But here to four, a couple of things had happened. One, it was our analysis, the analysis of the professionals that we have working on this project that our shortest route to achieving the vision on the site that everyone wants in a mixed-use, vibrant neighborhood. The best chance of getting that sometime soon came through working with the current property owners. They were the current property owner and they clearly had the capacity to do this. We weren't talking about working with some fly-by-night developer. This was, again, the largest real estate development company in the world or at least they have been at times during the period we've been working with them. They've done projects like this again and again. I think it made a lot of sense I defend the actions that we took there. We came, there were moments where we considered default, we articulated clear demands in the fall of 2019, another moment where we were frustrated and were nearing separation and they were responsive at that time and the city got hundreds of thousands of dollars and improvements to the streetscape and significant re-conceiving of the site, new design work that I think validated those prior decisions. The fact that those were the, I think those were the right decision at that time. At this time when it became clear that everything that has been represented to us that they were about their commitment, they were moving away from, they really left. We always said this was the last option, the last resort and we're at that last option now. I think we've done what we could throughout this process given the limited role that the city plays here. I think it is something often misunderstood and worth remembering here that the way this agreement was structured, it was structured to protect taxpayers, it was structured so that the city's investment comes at the end, the risk is all being taken by the developers. What that, the kind of flip side of that is the action is all in the hands of the developers at this point in the project to move forward and the city's ability to accelerate the project is limited. So the good news in that is that taxpayers have been protected. The bad news in that is when you have a developer that for whatever reason does not move the project forward the city's recourse is limited. We will be testing the limits of that as we move forward if we do resort to aggressive legal action and we will be using every mechanism we can to see that the dormancy from here is as limited as possible. And then just my final question would be there was some action on the site yesterday. Can you just clarify what that was or is maybe still happening there? My understanding is there's been some activity on the site related to the fact that the encumbrance permit that the developers have to occupy parts of the right-of-way and to compensate the city for occupying parts of the right-of-way for construction activities is going to expire soon and given that construction is not underway we've made it clear that we expect the right-of-way to be even more fully returned. They did partially return the right-of-way to the city in the fall of last year, but there were still some impacts. They are now taking steps to further reduce those impacts on the public right-of-way. So does that mean they're rebuilt? They're, I don't know. Are they rebuilding the street or no? No, the St. Paul and Pine. My limited understanding, Courtney, of the kind of technical elements of this is that yes, they did need to rebuild elements of their site to properly retain the, I believe there is some rebuilding that they needed to do largely on their property, I believe, to properly reinforce the restored return public right-of-way. That's my understanding of it. If you want to, Jeffrey Glock, the city's consultant on this could give you some additional detail there if you're seeking that. Okay, that's it for me. Okay. And I believe that's all we have for today as well. All right. Great. Thank you, everyone. I appreciate seeing a big group on the Zoom today. And we will be, back in touch as soon as there is more to share about the situation with city place. As I said, in my answer to the questions, I do not expect there to be a further update before the remainder of this July is done. But I certainly expect there will be considerably more discussion as we, in August and we will keep the public informed of material developments. Thank you all for tuning in and we will see everybody again soon. Yeah, so. Members of the public hope we're just coming out of an executive session. I'll get with you once moment. I'm just trying to bring all the counselors back on and a few more counselors to get on and we'll be right with you. So just before we get into, we've already approved your agenda for members of the public and we just had a work session. I mean, an executive session on city place. There is no action coming out of executive session. We'll be looking for action likely at a January meeting. So there's no action reporter for further votes on that matter. So once we get everybody on board, we'll be able to move into our next item, which is a work session regarding BPD staffing. We may have to. Adjust it so that we do public forum. In, in between and continue the conversation after public forum, just in order to make sure that all point, all counselors are able to ask questions or, you know, that we're able to have a fully formed discussion. We've done that in the past with different items. So I'm certainly open to doing that again, especially given that we do have a lighter deliberative agenda this evening. I believe we do have all the counselors on board. I'm seeing. I'm seeing everyone. Counselor Shannon on. Yep. Okay. Good. All right. I believe we have all the counselors. I think. Okay. And I think all the folks from BPD who are presenting are with us. Chief Murad. I will. Turn things over to you. Thank you for being with us. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. Council member Tracy. I'm going to share my screen if that's all right. Yes, go ahead. So thank you again for having me and letting us talk about this issue. It's a very important issue. It's one that is frankly. At a pretty significant point for us with regard to staffing. We shared this document with you this past weekend. There are a couple of slides at the end that are add-ons made by the staff. We have a couple of slides at the end. And we have a couple of slides at the end. And we have a couple of slides at the end. I'm going to go into this past weekend. There are a couple of slides at the end that are add-ons made by myself and in consultation with the director of police transformation and with Mayor Weinberger. We'll share this version as well. As soon as we're done with this presentation, but I'm hopeful that the council members had an opportunity to review this over the weekend. And I'm hopeful that we can get through this. And I'm hopeful that we can get through this. And I'm pretty much exactly identical to a version that we shared with the media and the public two Fridays ago. And also shared with you, council member Tracy prior to that. So I'm hopeful that everybody's had a chance to look at it so that we can move through it. With a little bit of alacrity. I recognize that there has been. The evening has been delayed a bit. And I'm hopeful that we can get through this prior to public transformation. We start really with a picture of what you already know. The council voted in June for the racial justice through economic and criminal justice resolution that included a requirement for the BPD to a trip by 30%. Which essentially took us from an authorized headcount of 105. And that's an authorized account that we never achieved. We generally have a targeted headcount that is below that. So we're going to go to 74 prior to being able to hire once again. As we talk about the process of hiring, I think it's very important to understand the length of time that recruiting and hiring takes that when a person applies, it is a long period of time that the total period for police training, excuse me, for pre-academy movements. And the process of having the pre-academy steps that is a background check that's interviews. That's the tests that they have to take both for physical tests and also academic tests and a psychological test. And the various interviews that occur at the department level, then combine that with the time that it takes to get through the academy program, which is only held twice per year. And therefore we are limited in our hiring to either the January, February class or the August class. And then we have the longest post basic field training program in the state. And that takes us for a total time from start to finish of 14 months. In the last class we had out of 260 applicants, we hired six and send them to the VPA, but only three graduated. Our current staffing is down 15% from our previous average staffing levels of about 96. We're at about 81 right now. And that's 81 effective. There are people who are on our books who are not effective. They're not able to be deployed. Some are currently away from military deployments. Some are in their final stages of their employment. They've submitted retirement papers, but they're still on our books. One is long-term injury and will never return. But 81 is where we are effective right now. And we will start a new tour, which is the structure for our patrol in January. We operate on three, four month long tours per year. The new tour, we anticipate being at about 79 prior to that starting. I have at least one officer that I anticipate losing for another job. I have another officer who was, is on family and medical leave now owing to the birth of a child. Congratulations to that officer. And we are thinking that we're going to see lower numbers as we approach the next tour. And then during that tour, we anticipate going lower still. It is important to note that we, when we get to approximately 76 total sworn officers, and that's all officers, including myself, including the other deputy chiefs and lieutenants, that's a sworn officer, a level three certified Vermont police officer capable of carrying a firearm and affecting arrests. When we get to total 76 or 36 officers available for patrol, and those are officers in the rank of officers, senior officer, corporal, the people who actually pick up the radio when it's, when 911 calls, when people need them, when we get to 36 available for patrol, we believe we will no longer be able to staff an overnight. This is a picture of our tour and it's important to see just for the sake of understanding that we have two sides, that at any given time when we have eight officers on patrol for our 44,000 residents here in Burlington, and those two sides work an overlap one day because our officers work for 10 hour shifts per week. There's a left side and a right side. Almost all the diagrams in this presentation show both sides so that we can visualize the totality of our officers, but our proposal diagram will only show one side at a time. And I just wanted to point that out first. Additionally, I want to point out that there's something about the availability factor. We discussed this a lot back in June when we were talking about the budget process. The availability factor means that officers are only available for 86.3% of their time. I don't have an officer for 100% of his or her time. They are guaranteed contractually available leave. Now the availability factor does not take into account additional leave, such as leave that happens when officers have accrued time, leaves that happen when officers are sick, when they need to go to training, when they just feel like taking a day off. Here is our historical average sworn staffing. It's robust. It is strong. It allows us to have a swing shift. It allows us to have a street crime unit. It has a full complement of specialized positions, like our school resource officers, like our domestic violence prevention officer, like our community affairs officer. It has detectives at CUSY. It has the requisite number of detectives in our detective bureau. It has 50 officers available for patrol, although that's 46 with the availability factor. And this is our current staffing. Here at 81 sworn effective, you'll see that there's a red eye over one officer. That is an officer who is injured, has a long-term shoulder injury that is awaiting surgery and will not be able to be an effectively deployed officer for some time, is performing invaluable service, but nevertheless not road service in our ID unit for the time being. This is 41 officers on patrol. This is the last stage at which we have an emergency response officer at which we have a community affairs officer. For the next tour, as we discussed starting January 3rd, we are down as we expect to be at 79 sworn effective. We will have removed our community affairs officer and reassigned her to the road. We will also have officers that we anticipate going to other job opportunities, and those are marked over with those red X's. As I stated before, we do anticipate that when we get to these kinds of levels, we're going to have to really think about what staffing we're able to conduct on, for example, our overnight shift. These are probable departures, additional departures that we know of, people who are exploring other options, but are not yet in the process for taking those other jobs and therefore are not X's, but there are question marks on them, but they're highly likely to be going. We also have that family and medical leave act there and I have two military deployments, long-term military deployments that I anticipate being affected sometime in the coming tour, which goes from January to the very late May. Again, I do want to take a look at that slide again. With 73 sworn personnel and 33 officers available for the road, we will reassign not only our CAO and our ERO, both of whom are already off of this diagram, but also our DVPO, an incredibly important position with regard to domestic violence prevention, and we will end our midnight shift. That doesn't even touch our retirement eligibility. By September 2021, we have a number of retirement. That's seven eligible for retirement by February and an additional five for a total of 12 eligible for retirement by September 2021. And these sworn personnel are eligible. They may not go. You'll see there that two deputy chiefs are among them. I'm hopeful they don't leave. They're invaluable. Deputy Chief Sullivan, Deputy Chief LaBrec, terrific partners in the work that we do here, but they are retirement-eligible, as is the case with other officers. If everyone that we anticipate going, all of the probables, all of the ones who are already in process and all of our retirements were to depart, we would be at 59 sworn effective by September. And that is a department cut in half. That is 28 officers available for patrol. And again, with the availability factor, that's not 59 officers. That's 51 officers at any given time, and that's puts about six officers on the road during the day and during the evenings for the entire city and no one on the road for the midnights. So again, that's our historical. That's our department now, historical. Now, here is the imminent change that we anticipate going from 42 to 36. And that is something that would end up, as I stated before, ending proactive midnight patrol coverage. Why midnights? Because as our heat map displays, that is the time when our calls for service are the lowest in order to maximize coverage during the time when our call volume is highest, we would maintain the fullest amount of coverage possible on the days and the evenings, and we would lose those midnights. I don't take that lightly. That is an incredibly unusual step for a city of our size and our character. And I don't believe there's any city of our sizing character that has no midnight service. But the city does not permit having a safe number of officers available for proactive patrol. What would it mean? It would mean ending overnight coverage and having no in-person police response between 3 a.m. and 7 30 a.m. There are some possibilities for how we address this, leaving an officer in the building, leaving more than one on overtime. But that is not a level of service that can actually deploy to high risk events. It is a level that is really important. We are working on getting to them after things have happened and picking up the pieces. We are working on determining how we do this. We had a long session today with department leadership. We consulted with the Vermont state police about how they run their overnights. They do not have overnight coverage. They use on-call coverage response. And we are trying to determine how we can live up to our obligation to keep Burlingtonian safe despite the fact that we are in a difficult situation. As I stated at the very beginning, hiring new officers takes an excess of 14 months. And at best, if active recruitment were allowed to begin today, we would maybe be able to put somebody in the new August 2021 class. And we don't know that there is going to be an August 2021 class. The February class has been delayed until March. We don't know the repercussions of that for the August class. Irrespective, if we were able to do that, we would probably be able to do that in March of 2022. And I fully anticipate losing more officers between now and then. Not simply because of retirements or resignations, but because the officers who have left this department have stated pretty clearly that they feel a lack of support in the city. Not from our residents, but a lack of support in the city that does not engender officers wanting to stay. And I work regularly to try to ensure a role to fulfill an important one. But it is a challenge and we are in a position of frankly crisis with regard to staffing. I'm hopeful that we have these assessments that are coming out of the racial justice resolution and that will give us some senses of alternatives to police service that perhaps have a shorter hiring time frame approximately eight months versus 14 or more. Because a problem well understood is a problem half solved. The assessments haven't started yet. And it's been half a year since the resolution. I am very, very intrigued by what they're going to produce. But in the meantime, it's incumbent on us to make certain that we are offering as much service to the city as possible as we are losing the resources to provide that service. So where do we go from here? There's a two year plan that assuming assessments were to determine that the police should restaff we could be able to do so in about five to six years and get back to the staffing that we were at before. And I don't believe that the assessments necessarily will say that we should go back to the staffing which we were before. There are examples of divertible services, things that we can put on other kinds of resources. Those resources, as I stated back in June, have to exist before we start drawing down our resources when we are the only ones who respond or we will end up in the situation in which we find ourselves, which is having no one respond. We can build out resources. And I think that is a path forward that meets both our community stated needs. It meets a lacrity with regard to getting some resources on the street faster and sooner rather than later. We could talk about our community service officers who are described here, the CSO, community service officer. That is not a sworn police officer. This officer does not carry a firearm, does not have arrest powers, but they perform a number of tasks for us. We currently have two. One on each side of the day shift. I am envisioning having additionals. And CSOs will probably want more money if they have increased responsibility. That is going to be a bargaining position. But I think that we can give them the ability to perform additional rules without having to really rethink other aspects of our deployments. And then there is the community service liaison, which is a social work position based largely on the existing social worker we have in the department, Lacy Smith, who is a tremendous resource for us. Hiring CSOs and CSLs is not, however, an instant proposition. They don't take as long to vet and hire and train as police officers, but it takes time. And the total time for solo CSO to get on the road is not insignificant. Seven and a half months and probably more like eight. The last time we hired CSOs, we had ten applicants, two of them made it through our process and we only hired one. This is the public safety continuity plan. This is a plan that has been discussed with the mayor, with the director of police transformation. It's been shared with you for quite some time now. It was shared with the public and the media last Friday. It is a way forward that may provide the city with something like the services that were achieved by 96 sworn, while staffing fewer than 80 sworn. And it depends on the results of the two assessments. The two assessments are integral to how this involves or works. It depends on the ability to hire and identify CSOs and CSLs. And most importantly, it depends on the viability of offloading police services to these positions. It will require about two years or more to implement fully, but that's versus five years or more to restaff police. It does, however, require more than 74 officers. This requires about 78 officers in this diagram, where we have in red or brownish and we have green CSLs pairing with officers and co-deploying. This does not replace the Howard Center street outreach. This is a service that, frankly, I would have wanted those green CSLs even if nothing had happened to our staffing. They are an enhancement. The CSOs, on the other hand, are a way of recreating our services in the aggregate. We can't rehire or remake cops, but we can recreate the services they provide in the aggregate. And when I talk about our head count and the request that we're going to be asking of you, it has to do with a head count target. For a lot of years, there's been confusion over our authorized head count, which is always a number that we can't achieve because of the way hiring takes. The time that hiring takes, the resources that go into it, and the limitations of having only two police academies. We also do higher lateral officers, sometimes in the state. I will say frankly that there are no in-state police officers that will come to Burlington at this time, but we can get officers from out of state. That is not a large-scale replacement plan. We get those one or two at a time and usually spaced out, but they're not limited by the academy. Nevertheless, the academy and our stringent background in hiring practices mean that we are never at our own authorized number. And so we have targets that get us to the adequate services. For us, that is right now about 84 based on the fact that in the previous years, we've had about six, it's 5.6, but about six difference between the actual account that we achieve and the authorized. If we were authorized to be at 84, we would achieve 78, which is the number necessary for that plan that I described and the continuity plan that we showed. So we seek your approval on these. We seek assistance from the city council to meet this crisis that faces the residents of Burlington and an immediate increase to the officer cap from 74 to a number that allows us to again begin to recruit and hire. I'm not entirely certain what will happen as I explained the academy may or may not happen in August, but the very ability to do that would perhaps stanch the outflow of officers who are otherwise thinking because they don't feel certainty about this department. We also seek your conceptual approval and input into the CSO and CSL plan, although again what comes out of the assessments prescribed by the resolution for racial justice and by the joint committee is going to shape those positions as well and how they deploy or if this is a slide that I wanted to take an opportunity to share and I know that we're crunched for time. This is about how we have worked and how we are understanding out. We want to understand our community. We want to be able to work better with the community. We have put ourselves out to it. We have trained. This is more than several dozen for 47 or more trainings of different types over the past several years and we have more to come, including one that we're just initiating with a trainer named trust loving from the Institute for racial equity and iterative long-term process, not just a conversation and a development and the director of police transformation participated in interviewing and assessing this client, excuse me, this candidate for us to become her client. And we want to talk about building understanding in because it is a two-way road. We want to meet our neighbors on their terms. We want to know the people we serve. During the protests we made certain that we were engaged in crime and crowds when invited but otherwise we maintained an absence of presence so as not to create problems from that. We know that it's incumbent on us to take the first steps because we're public servants who took an oath. As are you, the city council. And so that first step is something that we want to take with our neighbors but we also want those neighbors to come in. We invite you, the city council to come in. We want our neighbors to understand us just as we wish to understand them. And we want to take that opportunity to come in. That's the beginning in January. And this is a tremendous opportunity for people to understand how police work. The work that they do, what they do in ways that frankly I think for example the director of police transformation has come to understand. And that level of understanding is the only way we're going to see a path forward from all this. This is an inquit plan of mine, a question that I don't want to answer, but I think that when we share this after this presentation it's something that you, I hope you might take a look at to see if you're interested. It's not something I envision working out of North Avenue. And that's it. And so I'll stop the screen share and entertain any questions that you may have. So chief, I appreciate that presentation. I don't want to dive into questions and then interrupt questions before we get into public forum. So I'm going to hold us right there. We'll dive into the questions in just a moment. I do want to go into the public forum. We don't have too many folks signed up for the public forum this evening. So that should be just momentarily. So I apologize for that in terms of the timing for this evening. But I will have us come back into discussion and want to have that be a more clean kind of conversation. So I'm going to go into the public forum. I'm going to go into the public forum. I'm going to go into the block of time where we have a continuous set of questions as opposed to interrupting it with public forum. If you are a member interested in the public forum, the way you can sign up for that is using if you go to BurlingtonVT.gov slash city council one word general. I asked that folks please be respectful. We've had some issues recently with that. And so I just want to encourage people in the public forum to please stay focused on any issues that we're debating and discussing and stay away from personalities. I also would really like for folks to just over the course of this meeting to please respect counselors and allow them to speak without interruption throughout this meeting as again, that has been an issue in our discussion. I'm going to go into the public forum. I'm going to go into the public forum. I'm going to go into the tone from the beginning. If we could, now that we're heading into the public forum, if we could just please get the timer up. As of now, I only see one person signed up for the public forum. That person is Jeffrey Pizzatillo. And I don't see Jeffrey Pizzatillo. Can use the raise hand function. I'm not seeing Jeffrey there. Give it just a little bit more time in case anybody else was wanting to sign up. One thing I will also notice that we will have a public hearing on a report from CEDO and that will be another point at which we'll accept public comment, but only on that particular report. We'll hear about it before, but that's another opportunity, but only to weigh in on that later on in the meeting in case that was something that folks were curious about. I am still not seeing anybody having signed up for public forum. I do not see the one person who did sign up for forum for this evening. So that being as it is, I'm going to go ahead and refresh just one more time and see if anybody signed up. Yep. Still haven't seen anybody who's signed up. I don't see any inbox. I'm going to close the public forum and we'll go right back into the discussion of the presentation we just heard. I see Councillor Paulino. I have two questions. One is with the request for your plan slide page 23. When do you plan doing that? And then my second question is which is most important to the public. I'm sure there's a large group of councillors concerned about the public input regarding no police coverage between midnight or I'm sorry 3 a.m. and 7 and there's been some different interpretations on those hours but I think 3 a.m. and 7 is what we're talking about. Under page 23's plan you're 78 sworn what happens between 3 and 7? Is that for me? Thank you. Thanks for the question councilmember. Under the public safety continuity plan, those proposals what we have there is there is a midnight shift. We have a midnight shift because the C.S.O. positions allow for us to diminish the daytime and the evening shifts without compromising their ability to meet the highest volume of service each day. The highest volume of calls for service each day. But we do have a midnight shift under that model. I just clarify on that. I think we're a college town and we want to make sure that once we're up and running and there's an incident you mentioned different levels of midnight shifts. Do you have a midnight shift that would respond to almost any incident between far as close at 2 a.m. sometimes people hang around for 30 minutes to get pizza they walk home. We're right into the 3 a.m. So we're working on that and we're trying to think about how we would or would not have a midnight shift. What we have right now our staffing allows us to overlap our midnight and our evening shift for that very important time that you're pointing out Council Member that time period where people are at the bars they're having a good time. Let's be clear it feels very different right now in Burlington because none of those things are happening. They are going to happen again when we are past this pandemic and we will be there's going to be a certain sense of cabin fever. I think we're going to see an explosion of activity and a lot of people wanting to be among one another wanting to be with friends and we're going to see a much, much higher amount of call service than we have even in past years. So what do we have we normally have an evening shift that overlaps with a midnight shift during that important time from about 10.30 until 10.30 approximately. And we also on Fridays have two evening shifts in so that we're actually augmenting even further the number of officers available for that very important time. That's what allows us to be able to meet calls for service and have proactive presence in the downtown area at the corner of church in Maine. What will we have in this plan we'll have a single shift of evening officers available until 2.45 or 3.00 a.m. on nights when it's clearly busy supervisors will indubitably to keep officers older over for a little bit of overtime until 3.30 or 4.00 to see how things ease out but then there will not be anything and if we have an officer in our facility for the sake of facility security that officer is not going to be deployable by him or herself. So what we're talking about is the need to either call in the Vermont State Police and their system is that they are called out they're home they're asleep they have to change they have to come in as well but our officers many live outside of town and so we're talking about long responses to calls for service and we don't yet know how that looks because we've never been here before you bring up one more point that I'll just quickly make can you just talk have you seen this happen in other cities and I'll be right up front with my concern a lot of your police resources are tied up by let's say you know a lot of your resources go are used up by individuals that are the same and my concern is that if we don't have coverage that that group of individuals or person may be probably just a few but you know you guys have intimate relationships with these individuals because you have repeated police encounters with them you'll see some kind of increase in whether it's disorderly conducts or you know some kind of larcenies because they know there's no police coverage in certain areas things like that have you seen this happen in other towns is that a legitimate concern so great question many excuse me sorry great question many of the towns in our excuse me many of the people that you're describing are not actually folks with whom we have many encounters after about midnight that kind of services is stronger during the day and then in the early evening and while they sometimes appear on church street they're not necessarily what we are addressing at bar closing for example bar closes a different kind of phenomenon and it comes with its own issues and it can have instances of significant disorder but it's usually kept at a minimum by the presence of officers my last question just how do you plan on bringing us forward a proposal do you think it's going to be a resolution or what's your plan to this on this I would defer to the mayor or to director Dodson this is our proposal I've just given it to you and presented it to you and put it into a different format and put it into a letterhead etc then I'm happy to do that I believe a resolution can change a resolution but I don't know those things and I would defer to either the mayor or Eileen or those who do I'm happy to do whatever I need to do to take this proposal and put it in the format that makes it appropriate and proper but this is the proposal it is not a perfect proposal it's not the best option it is having more officers but that is my bias I am looking at a way to make this work with a drastically reduced head count because even what we're asking for is still a drastically reduced head count and with other kinds of services that meet what we believe the needs of our constituents to be and have heard from our constituents they say their needs are and we are looking to do that because it's also a quicker way it's not immediate and we are I want to be clear on this no matter what comes out of this discussion permissions etc we are going to face a staffing crisis in the next several months that is going to put the overnight at risk and quite likely end them for some time period even if we are in the process of trying to hire more CSOs and identify CSLs etc they're not going to be ready in a time frame that is going to beat the level of attrition that we are seeing and the the departure of officers so I'm not for attrition but for example for military deployments I don't actually I think you gave me the answer I don't actually need to see the plan or the resolution I kind of just wanted to know what stage we're at so I appreciate you telling me that this is your plan and I see the mayor wants to speak but thank you I'm done President Tracy great thank you Paulina thank you President Tracy yeah I my thinking on this is we're coming here tonight in this work session format to lay out this proposal for going forward we're here to get your thoughts get your feedback this is a plan that we think this plan or something close to it needs to be acted on and acted on soon if we are going to be able to continue the level of public safety services that the people of Burlington expect or at least minimize the lengths of time and the gaps in service in which as you've heard from the chief we may inevitably at this point face some period where we're going to have to have some restricted constrained services but moving the council moving forward with the two actions that were laid out in the presentation of an increase in the authorized cap understanding and I really do think this is a helpful new way of thinking about I think we've always been kind of I think the conversation has always been confusing and somewhat frustrating that we have talked about an authorized cap and it's always been seen as something of a shortcoming that we're not meeting the authorized cap when the reality is it's almost impossible for the department to stay at the authorized cap for any sustained period of time so we would be the proposal that we are here to get feedback on is increasing during this period while we were doing these evaluations understanding this may change further the authorized cap back to 84 understanding that that will mean that we likely function until some additional changes made more in the 78 sworn officer level which we think is pretty close to what the council was seeking with the resolution this summer with 74 it's relatively close the other change that we are seeking is a conceptual approval of the CSO CSL plan thinking again is we're here tonight to talk about this in a work session happy to take feedback on this in the formal settings in the days ahead we would then come back with all the documentation necessary for formal action sometime in January is what we're thinking. I had councillor Pynnex go ahead councillor. Thank you if it would help I think the council and the public to hear about some ideas that could in fact address the short staffing that concerns that you're raising and one is one that I raised in the presentation you did 10 days ago is really the issue of the officers that are deployed at the Burlington international airport I'd just like you to speak to the timing of making that type of change I understand it can't happen overnight but could you speak to that if that change were to be implemented what that would entail I think that's a good point. Thanks councillor do you mean what it would mean for us to cease having authority over the airport and officers at the airport yes if they contracted with a different department there are other law enforcement agencies they could use that's so I wouldn't be in favour of that I think it's Burlington's airport and I think it should have Burlington officers I will also say that some of the officers there are more senior officers they would have brought them back to the road so we'd lose those officers anyway they would not become road resources I believe that Burlington would have to pay for that service excuse me pardon me I believe that Burlington would have to pay for any contracted service if it were for example to bring in either security or sheriffs etc and I don't believe it can be security I believe it has to be level 3 law enforcement officers according to the TSA The funding for that right now is not a general fund obligation at least that's my understanding we have more work to do on that but I understand that there are contractual obligations I also understand what you're saying about officers who are close to retirement and who get placed there for that reason I do think that we have an obligation to look at it and to really ask the question of the really ask the question just because we have a contract doesn't mean we can't ask the bargaining unit to consider it in light of what we are facing as a community that's just that's one thing the other is the university has close to 20 sworn officers and since the university presence generates significant demand on our police force what would prevent the university who has those are all I believe deputized state troopers essentially who are sworn officers at the university is that correct they're level 3 police officers in the state of Vermont I don't believe they're deputized state troopers okay so they could in fact patrol in our downtown at bar closing hours is that correct they can and they do but they are not close to 20 they're actually lower than that and they themselves have staffing concerns have them take over some responsibilities at UVMMC for example and those are things that we're happy to look at I think that expecting them to pick up the slack that's being caused by this by our headcount issues is a little bit unlikely I understand it may be unlikely to you but the university is a public institution and they had 18 sworn officers last summer so we're not too far off in terms of numbers I think we as a community have made some decisions around how to allocate resources and I just want to be mindful of the fact that if the university presents drive some of the demand for police services it's not unreasonable for us to say to the university we want you to contribute to this issue of public safety so I don't see that as a disconnect there I think it's actually an important thing to see as a connection so that we can be looking for opportunities to bring in partners not finding flaws in the ideas thank you okay I have Councillor Carpenter to be followed by Councillor Hansen go ahead Councillor Carpenter Councillor Carpenter you're on mute sorry I'm following up actually on Councillor Pines thinking and I have sort of similar questions and sort of a couple of comments one of my thoughts is one of the flaws I guess of the 74 number was premised on some research done by a professor and a national association that more or less pegged the 74 at a reasonable number of officers for community of our size but didn't really take into account the airport so my math says something like perhaps the number is 74 plus the 8 who really don't serve the general citizens of the city of Burlington they're a function we need to provide it it's very necessary it's we have to do it in whatever form it takes itself in the future but for me the 74 number shouldn't be including the airport police because that's not a function of our downtown our neighborhoods and that was maybe my convoluted way of saying I really feel comfortable with the fact that something above 74 is the right number because I think the flaw was including those airport police however we handle them and I also agree with Councillor Pine around and this is sort of another conversation but pressuring the institutions around picking up some of the slack caused by their their own constituents and really pushing that a little bit and I understand there's a long history there but I think in this conversation of transformation we need to do that and then I guess my final comment is that during this next month when you come back to us I think it will be important to get input from the joint committee and others that are working on this in my opinion it sounds like something we need absolutely pursue I think it's the right focus looking at the CSOs and the CSOs and kind of factoring in the sort of head cat with that airport plus but using this next month to get feedback from others than just us on the council thank you Councillor Carpenter I have Councillor Hanson to be followed by Councillor Hightower great thank you so yeah there's certainly reason for concern here and just want to start by acknowledging that and appreciate appreciating that I do believe though that we can we work together creatively and collaboratively we can address some of these these challenges and just wanted to give some context around things and how I'm looking at this you know in June as Chief Moran mentioned we passed the historic racial justice through economic and criminal justice resolution and the mayor signed that resolution and put that into effect and the administration is is the executive branch of of our government you know and we rely on the administration to carry out the policies that we pass I think in some areas we've seen really strong implementation of this policy framework from June for example the racial equity inclusion and belonging director Taisha Green I think has been doing phenomenal work in terms of the cultural empowerment and community engagement and most recently supporting you know BIPOC owned businesses and through a small grant program in some ways we're really leaning in to this work and implementing this however I think in other areas I haven't seen or felt the administration you know fully committing to the policy framework that we passed and in particular that third and fourth resolve clause the around reducing the size of the police force and using general fund dollars freed up from that reduction to reduce the demand for police services through providing more social services and you know much of what was laid out through this process so I think policies can't be successful if there's not a full commitment to implementing them and that's not to say that this policy was perfect and no changes are needed from us as policy makers but I really want to see us come together about how we can actualize this vision that we laid out together and that we supported together back in June the vision of more restorative models of public safety and public well-being that really reduces the need for policing and simultaneously transforming how we do policing and I think that's really our job as a city I think a huge part of that is supporting the work of this joint committee in terms of engaging our community and assessing our police department and really building up these alternative models of public safety I think Chief Murad pointed out something really important that is we've missed some of these key deadlines in terms of that work with these assessments and we can't move forward until we have these assessments in place so I think we need to we need to be asking you know how we can better support the joint committee and how we can better get that work done so that we can really build up these alternatives and then in the immediate term we need to also make sure that public safety doesn't decrease and that we're not moving backwards in terms of shifting some of the alternatives that we do have in place into traditional policing roles which is what we just saw there so I hope that that's kind of a framework that we can look at all of this through and I think in the immediate term really looking at the data and listening to our community and looking at many options and I appreciate Councillors Pine and Carpenter for talking about some other options that we could maybe dig a little deeper into and then the final thing I would say and just a question I have I think there's been a good amount of fear in the community coming out of some of this presentation and I think there was a fundamental question that was not included that needs to be clarified for the community which is really you know how has public safety fared in Burlington since June, since the resolution and how are we looking in terms of that whether it's you know violent crime or traffic injuries or calls for emergency service and I don't necessarily expect an answer right now but I think that is really fundamental is where we at in terms of public safety right now thank you I can give you an answer right now our type three calls the most serious type and that's spelled out in previous presentations have gone up our call volume overall unsurprisingly owing to COVID-19 is drastically down in the vicinity of 20 something percent and that's to be expected because the kinds of low-level calls the kinds of calls that come with mid-level public disorder associated with bar closing for example are not happening our more important criminal violent calls are up up six percent and that's a trend we're seeing around the country although thankfully in Burlington we haven't seen it to the same extent major cities are seeing upwards of a hundred percent increases in shootings etc we've seen a hundred percent increase as well but it's only because we've gone from a tiny tiny number to a slightly less tiny tiny number but we've still seen that we've seen gunplay we've seen stabbings we've seen upticks in those kinds of activities have we seen changes in our response to it not yet because at the moment we are still at a point where we're able to actually deploy resources on all the necessary shifts that's going to change and it's going to change just as the world starts to reawaken and this is not meant to be fear-bongering this is not meant to be alarming this is meant to be factual I'm spelling out where we are and there's no quick fix for where we are thank you I appreciate that and I think yeah if we could get I would really appreciate it if we as a council and as a community could get a little bit more information on that in terms of just these numbers overall what is what is the demand what are the needs of the community and how well are we responding to them currently just basically a snapshot of where we are the city just launched an incredible new tool a dashboard that's online available to anybody and people can run any combination of kinds of things they want they can type it by they can analyze call by type over months over years they can see patterns that are evolving by specific categories of crime or by the larger types that we have type one type two type three they can see patterns in arrests in use of force in traffic stops it's a really really amazing piece of transparency to facilitate the citizenry's ability to actually dig into these numbers for themselves and to see where we're going and these numbers are what they are none of this is meant to be a position this is these are impartial data as in Tracy great thank you on the go ahead man yeah I'm all set thanks so I just want to pick up on a couple threads here and agree with some of what I've heard and kind of hopefully breathe some oxygen into the comments that I think have suggested this there's an avenue for collaboration and problem solving here I do feel need to address some inaccuracies as well that have been stated let me start with the positive I appreciate counselor Hanson's comment that there's signaling some agreement that there's cause for concern about where we are headed and a desire for collaboration to avoid a negative outcome here I hear in that an acknowledgement and what that where we are headed right now is troubling and is not something that has planned for or that we really that I don't think that the people of Burlington have signed up for there has been no deliberate process around stopping any of the public services the public safety services that the police currently provide we get nearly 30,000 calls a year to that the public expects the Burlington Police Department to respond to and no there's been no decision by this body or any of the bodies that we've delegated police decisions to to stop responding to some of those calls and I think there is going to be a great deal of concern if we get to the point where we are no longer able to provide these services and don't have a new plan in place and I do feel need to make it clear this is an outcome that the Mary Claire was coming if we made this reduction in the cap to 74 and that is why we provided this compromise in the budget resolution so it is true that there was unanimous passage of the of the racial justice resolution there was a way though for this council to acknowledge that the planning work cannot been set in place to serve the public with only 74 officers and that is why the budget resolution that we submitted to this council would have kept us between 85 and 90 officers and would have avoided until the planning was done the situation we face and that lost by the narrowest of margins a seven to five vote so I don't fully agree with this idea that the community has in some definitive deliberate decisive community engaged way decided that we no longer want to allocate resources to addressing these public services anymore at the same time even though so there was this sort of began in this moment of division around that vote I think that there is an opportunity for us to come together here now and avoid bad outcomes or at least sustained bad outcomes here with some form of collaboration I hope the council sees in this proposal real movement until those assessments are done and we don't know what those assessments are going to say but until those assessments are done we are putting in front of you a proposal that would have us functioning at this 78 sworn officer level as a target which is counselor carpenter points out is a pretty close to 74 and be pretty close if you consider it's within the adjustment if you adjust for the airport officers so that is a potential area of common ground and I would also say this increased reliance on non sworn officers non armed individuals is also something that it strikes me is very consistent with many community conversations and conversations we've had with the council about where we want to go and so I would hope the council would see in that to a possible area for common ground and I appreciate chief mirad for putting in the analytical work and his team for putting in a local work to bring this forward and to respond to the moment we're in and to give us something meaningful to analyze and dig into so in that spirit I hope this is accepted I do want to respond to this idea that somehow the administration has not properly supported the joint committee here and I just can't agree with that assertion I do agree that the work that is happening there is we are having collectively challenges with it the reason that I created the director of police transformation position in part was so that the administration would have the capacity to engage the joint committee and these other police transformation efforts we have been attempting to provide all the support that we can to those committee processes unfortunately to this date as recently as Friday we continue to have really I've never seen a council process that does not engage the administration fully as a partner in moving forward and that continues to happen as recently as Friday and at some level the council continues on this issue uniquely to hold the administration at an arms length and essentially an attempt to keep us out of this work is what many times it feels to us that's not where we want to be we want to break that down and fix that I don't think we can make progress on these issues unless we are working together and we are here to do that and we look for the council to be a partner in that Thank you Mayor, Councilor Hightower to be followed by Councillor Jang I wasn't going to talk about this but I also feel like I have to correct something that the mayor just said but generally I do think there are a lot of positives that I also want to address so I guess first of all I don't feel like the administration hasn't been supporting the joint committee process I feel like the joint committee process I think from the beginning or from the first session that we had I at least tried to be open about the fact that I think it's a 10 committee process there's our P's involved there's the creation of our P's as a 10 person committee it's going to be a slow process I think if anybody didn't think that that was a naive thought and so I think we knew from the beginning that it's moving along and I don't think I don't feel unsupported by the administration in that effort and the effort as chair of that joint committee the other thing that I want to say is I also don't think that there's been deliberative efforts to keep the administration out of the process I think we went through one RFP process which we kind of made it up how a joint committee which is mostly made up of police commissioners who are just seven ordinary citizens engages in an RFP it was my first time chair of a committee so we chose a process and we engaged in it Kyle Dotson gave comments I think on the second RFP not in the first we went through the entire first RFP process with help from the CD attorney side and that was in my view point sufficient and good the second one it seems that there was more engagement wanted nobody reached out to me to ask for that engagement so if I have left them out I apologize like I said Kyle Dotson made comments to the RFP that the entire committee saw I wasn't aware that I was supposed to do a different process I don't think I am supposed to do a different process for the second RFP I'm continuing kind of along the same the same process that I did last time because it worked well the last time and so that was kind of where I stand on that joint committee at least and then the second thing I want to say is I have been reflecting a lot on policing and restorative justice for another reason that I have to because we have two our meetings on the SRO task force every Wednesday and I do think I do think that it's it's been a very divisive issue and I think that anything we can do to make it less divisive is helpful both to the police department the community as a whole the BIPOC community and I guess in the spirit of restorative justice I also want to say like of course there's a lot of hurt and mistrust on the part of the police department because you know there's they feel under attack both you know from I mean also especially from I think some of the city leadership and I think that makes sense and it is hard to be in a position where a lot of the way that you have been doing your job is being questioned and I maybe say that I've you know over the past year had the opportunity to talk to a lot of both our sworn officers and others in the police department but every year and I understand that this is a difficult time and I think we're all kind of looking for a way to move forward I think on I think like none of us are surprised that like you know we're losing that we're at lower numbers right we passed a resolution in June seven months ago that said well this is the point that we want to get to so this isn't this isn't a surprise like none of us should be surprised by this work session I think one of the things that we haven't done as well has been proactive about solutions and I'm not throwing that at the mayor's office or the administration I think that's collectively we've not done a good job of being proactive and coming up with solutions I would maybe say I do hope that the director of police transformation takes a more active role in that than the rest of us since that's what we've done but I think all of us have let the ball drop on this extent so I want to say that collectively I think something else is coded in a bigger article so I want to make it clear that I do think that was kind of the city's leadership as a whole and then the other thing that I want to acknowledge is it's hard because you have a lot of people who are like who just want to do their job you know like they're good people and want to do a good job but we still have these outcomes that have racial disparities we still have SROs with racial disparities we still have policing data with racial disparities and in order to address that I feel like we have to be okay with saying we want to change how things are and I know that was a really long way of saying that I do think it's the time to be a little bit more collaborative in our approach and but that I don't think we should be afraid to embrace change as we do that and so that wasn't that wasn't a detailed solution but I guess I just want folks to know that that's the viewpoint that I'm coming to any proposal with and then the other thing that I wanted to ask and this is just a small question to chief Mirad is for the kind of person applies because you had this kind of process where it's like one month city application filled out and submitted one month one month and I'm wondering is that necessarily a six or seven month process or is that something that can be sweet squeeze like you did for some of the other positions you had like oh interview board and personal history questionnaire in the same month as opposed to all broken down that's just for my own understanding so those things that's an average that is an average for how long a process takes if we had more recruitment officers or people performing that if we had additional detectives to perform the background checks which are usually the longest part of the process we could make that a faster process it's still ultimately going to be limited by the frequency with which the police academy offers the physical test and the academic test and the psychological test it's going to be limited by our access to our polygrapher and whether or not we can get people in for polygraphs and it's going to be limited by ultimately the frequency of the academy itself so those are by far the sort of the things that make it most limited but with regard to the process sure some of those some of those pieces can actually be stacked on one another but that's not something that's sustainable for a large for a large number of applicants great that's good to know thanks for letting me monologue and I'll pass it on to the next councillor councillor jane thank you president Tracy I don't know where to start to tell you the truth I mean I think especially when we're here sentiments around solution I mean I think all of this we we thought down and had lengthy discussion about way of governing in general yeah way of governing this is exactly what we've been talking about in in June yes we want to reduce let's reduce but through a process the same exact non-officers non-police officers that will come to just do the real assessment the work that is needed to go to to to make decisions and it's just funny how I'm hearing here how the narrative is changing right now but what we want is move forward yes and I do also remember we're not talking about city council we're not talking about defending the police we're talking about reallocation and today we having this conversation again it's just very funny and also so much have happened with our police department that I have problem now understanding what is right and what's not and makes me want to now heal from the community because it seems when we dysfunctional we will need a blind eye that could help us and wanted to ask the city attorney this question the proposal we received today from the police department is it too late to transform it into a bullet item and ask the voters of Burlington to have a say on this Brittany Blackwood apologize I stepped away for a second the proposal we received today from the police department I was wondering if it is too late to put it on the bullet as a bullet item question to ask our citizens to weigh on it for the 2021 bullet item and what is the question that you're contemplating the question is should we increase the number of police officers from 74 to 78 and also to at least how many community officers you talked about I think that would be the kind of advisory question you could ask citizens to weigh in on and no it's not too late you still have time to put questions on the ballot and when will it be too late we can no longer do it sorry I think we've said that 25th is the last time that we can have changes or additions to the ballot and get the ballots printed and out in time okay so now maybe this is a request to the mayor we don't know yet if this is coming through a resolution we but I'm just requesting to please consider having a question ready just in case we want to go that route is that possible Mr. Mayor what administration so I think I've heard so as the city attorney says is possible in the sense that we can't seek input for this kind of thing if the question would be possible for us to draft something sure I could work with the city attorney's office and draft something I wouldn't recommend that route Councillor Jang I would tell you for a variety of reasons maybe most significantly is we would be looking at holding off until March on making any decision here which I feel real urgency on these decisions I think we need we will be certainly proposing it not that we wait until March but that the council approve action in January for us to move forward with this plan okay yeah I mean because I'm saying that maybe the votes won't be there because I do not agree with the whole proposal but I think I would want to hear an advisory from my constituents that's why I'm saying to please have it Rezi if you can okay we will we'll be in touch with you to do that and I hope you're not right that the votes are not there and that there will be a willingness and I've heard some indication tonight that there might be areas of collaboration here or a big area of collaboration I hope that's the case okay thank you now this is a question for Chief Mirrod it seems there will be 12 police officers before 2022 that will retire okay right it are eligible for retirement yes sir councilmember thank you for highlighting can you explain then what eligibility for retirement means does it mean 65 I am eligible to retire but I can choose to stay couple more that's exactly it two of our officers at the airport they're corporals but they are senior tenured police officers have already reached their retirement dates they could leave today my deputy chiefs could leave today actually I believe deputy chief Lebrac has to wait a couple weeks but for all intents and purposes they could leave today others are getting to their time for example this is one of our best community officers and he is going to the airport as a supervisor because he no longer wants to be in the community the stresses these officers are feeling are remarkable and that is going to play into the level of retirement we see in other instances officers will stay for example both those officers at the airport they're looking for 25 because it changes their pension calculation are they going to do that if they are brought back to the road or if we continue to see the staffing crisis that we see I can't answer that question but I can say that we have officers who are chased by this they are overwhelmed by this they have been essentially living this since this summer it has been an incredibly difficult time to be an officer inside this police department wonderful thank you so the point that I wanted to make is also is it possible from your standpoint to at least start six new hires knowing that we have 12 that might retire but at least have six new active hires just to start the process theoretically it is if we were given authorization to do that then we could start that process can we find six hires that is an open question and certainly we would do all that we could to find six hires I still believe in this police department I believe in the city I believe in the mission that is keeping people safe and I believe that we can attract people to join us in that effort but it's not going to be easy the entire profession across the country is facing a problem with recruitment and retention and getting new officers in those positions is a challenge okay yeah and you you will need to have the authorization from the council to at least start those six new positions as I understand it yes but others can clarify for me whether that is the mayor or the city attorney but as I understand I cannot do anything until we get to 74 and because of the way that attrition works because of that balance and your head count and your targeted head count effective getting to 74 means that by the time we actually get people into a solo cruiser and performing the job we will be well below 74 we will be again my projection for September is 59 and if we were to then start hiring and to try to then get recruits into the January of 2022 class they would not be solo officers until November of 2022 and by that time we will have fallen farther and we will only get six at a time in that is only going to take us at best from 59 to 65 and that is if all of them go through the academy and make it through the academy and make it through field training and that is not our norm so the ability to catch up to where we already are is a daunting proposition and that is going to be irrespective of what the assessments come back with as to recommendations and then what the joint committee accepts as from those recommendations. Thank you President Tracy I am almost done. Now this is more of my personal analysis about the whole situation to me personally the analysis that I was inviting council to go through take that route do the study to me it has not even been done yet. It seems Mr. Mayor, Deputy Mayor you are talking about a staffing need from an insider but how many police officers do we truly need as a college town I think that question no one has answered it yet and why should I add 78 police officers not knowing how much we truly need don't you think it's better to maybe concentrate our efforts around the non police officers that you want to hire the community liaisons and then for us to collectively again come together work under collaboration and do the study and then find the appropriate level of staffing police officers we need why do we want to do it this way with no study well I do want study the study has not yet happened we have not even identified the second the second RFP we've had their applicants but they haven't been vetted the first RFP for a visioning process a facilitation process has not yet been contracted and has not yet begun and so these are long processes and in the meantime we are losing officers and the calls keep coming in and Burlingtonians keep calling the plan that I've proposed is the best option that is not the best option for which we can choose it is an option it is not the best option overall it is the best option that I can think of to try to meet both the needs of calls for service and a time frame that is not so long that we continue to actually get smaller and smaller there is a tipping point I don't know where it is there is a tipping point where the department cannot keep up with its own nutrition and actually collapses and that I'm not I'm not saying that's a likely tipping point I don't mean to be putting that out there because that is a statement that is alarmist but it exists I don't know where it is so where are we with regard to those processes that otherwise would have informed the kind of proposal that I've offered tonight we're nowhere with those processes in actually starting them there has been a lot of talk there has been floating there have been somebody was identified as the right client for one of those RFPs but hasn't yet started others are coming in and I hope that we get great candidates for that and that we get things that I've always I would have loved I would love to have the bandwidth to actually perform the kinds of analyses that I'm hopeful these RFPs will perform but in the meantime we have an obligation we have an obligation to those who call us we have sworn to keep safe and this is a way of trying to approximate that kind of level of service without the numbers thank you no further questions hey I don't have anyone else in the queue right I see you counselor pine anyone else on first round I'll go to counselor strongberg then counselor Shannon then I'll come to you counselor pine go ahead counselor strongberg thanks president Tracy I don't know if I'm going to be able to say this eloquently but what we're in right now is a little frustrating but it's not because we're here it's because I'm listening to a lot of us contemplating going back on this resolution that was historic and meaningful and not perfect you know I mean that's it doesn't solve the problems that we're seeing but I do want to address kind of the the fact that you know as a counselor I honor anything that has passed but also as a counselor I don't have the same jurisdiction or the capacity to carry out implementation because I don't have the time or quite frankly the compensation or resources to do that I can support resolutions I can help I can provide input write language connect with people help people connect with resources but it's the responsibility of the administration and the mayor to effectively implement policy and I do want to see some ownership of that here and then on another front our focus should I'm very frustrated because the press conference on Friday seemed to me needlessly divisive and there was an aura of urgency and you know kind of more of a threatening and fearful attitude around these cuts and I feel like we didn't we didn't need to take that approach as a city because I got a lot of emails from community members and folks concerned about that and I didn't know what to say and I thought that wasn't necessarily productive because this is supposed to be a group effort and the fact that that press conference took place the Friday before the Monday that we were voting on police oversight interesting another thing I do want to say is you know as frustrated as I am in this moment I want to I do want to reign that in because I know that we can be productive and collaborative or smart people and there are a lot of minds around this table and I think we can come up with a way to have meaningful coverage during overnight shift with the proper personnel without going back on the promises of initiatives of this resolution that so many people have dedicated so much energy and time and mental health too and that they cannot get back and that has to mean something so I really I want to collaborate and I you know if we want overnight coverage bad enough which we all do we will find a way to make that happen and I want that to happen but I don't think we should be going back on bringing back more officers armed officers so I do think you know this is something that you know there will be some type of compromise but I don't want to take away the overall initiative to that meaningful resolution that so many people worked hard on so thank you Thank you Councillor Stromberg Councillor Shannon go ahead Thank you I'm hearing frustration on the side of implementation it seems that this is a vision of how this was going to be implemented back in June and hearing Councillors are disappointed with that and I wanted to know if the sponsors of that resolution could tell me how they worked collaboratively and creatively with BPD in creating the proposal for a 30% attrition of the sworn officers what was the vision at that time and what was the plan that's not being implemented um well I think from the beginning there was a go ahead Councillor if you'd like to answer go ahead yeah I think that from the beginning there was a recognition that we would need to have that we would need one I think what I talked about a lot was piloting some things so that as we kind of get to the community visioning process we've got a better understanding of what works and what doesn't work and then that there should just be some short-term capacity in terms of helping with some of those high kind of high high I don't like high level of interaction I remember the word that Chief Murad uses for this but like those individuals that take a lot of time there may be not a lot like high risk or anything like that but it takes a lot of time from one officer to deal with those people and so there was immediately and I had conversations both with John Murad with Lacey Ann who's one of the social workers in the Burlington Police Department with Mayor Weinberger on some of the short-term solutions and so one of the first things that we just talked about which I really thought would happen right off the bat was the community those community social workers to deal with some of those higher event or some of those yeah like high intensity kind of situations low risk high intensity situations and there was I originally I think wanted both of them to be supervised by Lacey who got some pushback in terms of I didn't know the HR processes so I was like that's fair I don't know if she's that's the thing and then I wanted and we were hoping to see one of them in the police department given kind of the success of Lacey's role and then personally for me I wanted to see one of them outside of the Burlington Police Department to kind of pilot what it would look like after we finished the community assessment or something like that to be outside of the outside of the police department and so I think we had those conversations for a few months and seemed like we were making progress and then I assume other needs other things kind of overtook what we were all thinking about so we started to have conversations about what some of those short-term short-term things would look like so people who call the police department over and over again how we can find longer term solutions for those folks and then I think we I think that did not come to material is so Chief Murad was consulted and there was a plan with Chief Murad to create other positions is that correct I believe so yes I was mostly talking to the mayor but I believe Chief Murad was part of the discussions with the mayor and what was the estimated amount of savings that were expected through attrition I asked for that figure and said that we were not able to determine that and we should have another we should have another cycle in six months to try to figure out what that would be that was not available two or three months after the resolution I'm talking about before the resolution so Chief Murad was consulted before the resolution and you asked for that information prior to moving the resolution I think the savings on attrition were asked for before and after the resolution and both before and after okay sorry I'm sorry to interrupt you that's okay I think really this isn't an interrogation counselor Shannon if you have questions for counselor please ask but we don't usually engage in this kind of back and forth with questioning other council members so I'm asking through you President Tracy how you choose to distribute the questions is up to you okay alright well what I'm saying is that I would like for you to please avoid having an interrogation so let's try and I do that by asking my questions through you President Tracy and you can decide who shall answer them if you would like counselor Hightower to finish her answer please let her finish the answer I have more questions okay go ahead counselor Hightower yeah I'll answer this one last question we both I think several of us tried to get that answer because I think both Chief Mirad and others in the administration said that that number would be difficult to get at given that we didn't know what the rate of attrition would be my understanding from the time that we adopted this is that we were warned that in fact when you have attrition and when you decrease the size of the police force we don't necessarily have savings because you haven't reduced the number of hours of policing until you reduce the number of calls coming into the police department so while I appreciate that there is a desire to reduce the number of police officers and use those savings to then reduce the number of calls I don't see it doesn't necessarily follow that way but I think we're seeing fewer police officers to cover the same number of hours and you have to pay over time you can actually increase the cost of policing as you decrease the number of officers so moving this forward without a map of both the cost if there are savings how those savings are going to be in the position that we are in today we have known that since June so I don't think it should surprise anybody the Chief Murad came out a week ago with a plan to avert disaster and I am grateful that he has continued to work to provide public safety to fight for public safety to look for common ground and to look for solutions we do still have disparities and I don't know why anybody would think that reducing the number of police officers would somehow improve these disparities that people are hoping to get at when police officers are more tired and overworked and demoralized I don't think there's evidence that they do a better job that way clearly we need more people to do this work we can't hire police officers in the time frame that we need them we are on a steep downhill slope we need to stop the bleeding we need to find solutions we need to hire more people whether they're police officers or community service officers we need people to answer our calls our community wants public safety and I also think that while we've been okay so far because we've only gone so far down the hill and we've done it while basically our community is sleeping due to COVID and everybody is in lockdown as that starts to open up and as we have even fewer police officers thank goodness our community is looking down the road at what is to come and letting us know so that we can respond to that now and I hope that the council will respond I have not seen a lot of collaboration leading up to this and I hope that we have that collaboration in the future and I hope that we embrace the police officers through this really difficult time and that we work with them and that we value their input and that we let them be part of a collaborative process because that is exactly what we need and we need this assessment that we thought we were going to have a report on in October now I don't know who laid out the timeline and figured out what the process what the steps were and I don't want to report back in October but that hasn't happened and I don't think it's fair to blame the administration this is not the administration's initiative it is the initiative of this council and BPD doesn't feel under attack by city leadership feels under attack by this council so I hope that we will start doing what we claim we're looking for working collaboratively and I think that chief Murad has really extended an olive branch to us and I'm appreciative thank you thank you councillor Shannon I had councillor Pine and the mayor wanted to get in but I also saw councillor Paul who has not spoken yet in this discussion so I wanted to just see councillor Pine my apologies I had another point but thank you for that councillor Pine to be followed by the mayor thank you president Tracy what I'd like to ask for is I read the use of force report that the police commission got last week and there's some helpful data in the drop in use of force that I calculated from 2016 to 2020 about a 45% reduction in total cases the racial disparities continue to persist where blacks accounting for about 7% of our population at the rate of 4 times that percentage are victims of use of force or should say are subjects of use of force instances I've also the department has reported that the traffic stop numbers have decreased by over 60% I think it was close to 65% in the last 2 years and it would be helpful if we had a set of data that could help inform the council as we go through these difficult decisions because the chief earlier mentioned that level 1 and level 2 calls I think if I have them correct have actually decreased and that's true nationwide but level perhaps level 3 calls have gone up I don't think I have all the levels right but what I'm asking for is some of that data that was put together by innovation the innovation department that really gives us a more data driven picture of what's happening for so when we say there's 30,000 calls a year does that number change does that number still about 30,000 has the nature of those calls changed it would be helpful for us to have that data I don't think it's data that needs to wait months and months for a consultant to give us I think we would have that data hopefully easy to get I think that we have that type of data and we make data driven decisions we're all better off because I feel like there's a lot of hypotheticals a lot of suppositions here about what might happen if this happens and that happens and I feel like we're still operating in a fairly hypothetical framework that would be really helpful and the last thing is really more question is has the police commission or the joint committee had a chance to talk about it's just been out for 10 days and I know they met maybe last week but they're not meeting again until after the holidays I just wanted to see if these issues have been brought to the commission to get their input into where we're headed so thank you I have shared staffing concerns with the commission I've shared them actually going back longer than I was sharing them more specifically publicly and they have been dialed into our departures on a regular basis the data of which you speak was all provided in June every single category you're talking about long-term pictures of type 1 type 2 type 3 overall call volume, traffic call volume all of that was in the presentations that we made in June in hopes that just as you're saying data driven arguments would win the day with regard to the question of whether or not a 30% funding was the right course for this city there is now a online platform where that data can be generated on a month-to-month basis and driven by anybody if the council prefers to get a specific get it delivered not making it themselves but get it delivered that's something that we certainly can look at and I don't believe that I think that's something I can't speak for the director of innovation but I believe that that's something that we could arrange again that online platform makes that kind of data crunching quite easy and available to anyone but the data of which you speak specific types the calls etc all of that was provided in June and it was provided I thought pretty clearly I can't hear you sir the data that you say is now accessible on a dashboard how do we how do we get that I I don't know the link off the top of my head it's available through the city website so it's a linked portal from the city website and it is an online data platform that was premiered at the same city council meeting where that use of force report was shared excuse me not city council my apologies my apologies police commission meeting thank you I have the mayor and then councilor Hanson thank you president Tracy again I just feel need to respond to several points made by counselors on behalf of the people in this administration who are working hard on a huge number of issues including these policing issues and absolutely work to implement everything that we're supposed to implement again we've had a counselor suggest that somehow the administration didn't implement something we were supposed to out of the June resolution we've had I believe council high tower please clarify that she feels supported by the administration in the joint committee process if I understood her statement carefully I believe she was if I understood it correctly I believe she was stating that we are offering support and we have not failed in that respect if I misunderstood the statement council high tower please clarify the other suggestion I think was that somehow there was you know the resolution didn't have anything else in it that was clear about what we were supposed to implement I mean one thing is being implemented too well which is the number of officers are declining are treating as as was called out in that resolution and they are are leaving more quickly then that part is happening fast and it is not a good thing that that is happening the suggestion was made that somehow proactive efforts which are not specifically called out in that resolution because to counselor Shannon's point none of these discussions about what we might do in response to declining officers started until after the resolution passed the resolution was introduced and passed in a very short period of time in June none of the analytical work about how we would respond none of those discussions began until afterwards counselor high tower is correct that there have been a number of discussions about where we would go from here in the fall out from that and this is us here with this proposal which was ready at the beginning of the month we offered to make this presentation to the council at the beginning of December and was pushed to the resolution was passed we are coming forward with a comprehensive full some proposal for responding to the reduced staffing I'm not perhaps a suggestion is that isn't fast enough I this is us coming forward following up on those conversations having begun the complicated conversations of consulting with outside partners having be done the analytical work to figure out how such professionals would be integrated into into our current shift structure this isn't stuff that just happens overnight this is it takes a great deal of analysis and work chief mirad has done that while going through very challenging months in policing at the same time I think we could all agree and while we are fighting a pandemic and and so this is the idea that somehow we haven't done this fast enough if that's what's meant you know I agree that we have not moved quickly since since this challenge was put in the before the administration if if there is something further meant that we as I think perhaps counselor Hanson suggested that like we should have solved poverty we should have solved the country's problems with drugs we should have solved these larger social issues so that there wouldn't be a need for policing anymore by now I mean that I hope everyone understands that we are thinking about long-term change there that is not something that is within the city's short-term ability to have an impact on such that it would drive down calls on that period of time thanks mayor I have counselor Hanson thanks I just want to say you know I think it's important to not forget or lose track of how we got here into this situation and how this all started and we really got here because there was a lot of pain in the community and fear and mistrust and an unprecedented outcry from the community that people didn't feel safe and didn't feel comfortable being policed by our police department that that was what we witnessed this summer and that fear and mistrust and that pain is still there in our community and we have these and particularly among people of color and we have these reports saying that that issue hasn't hasn't improved in that time and you know so many of us watch these videos of community members being brutalized and there wasn't the response to it we didn't administer justice in those cases properly and so I think the idea of right now the idea of increasing police presence right now when we still I don't feel that we've really addressed that underlying community disconnect and mistrust in terms of how our community is being police so I think we really need to get at the heart of the issue which to me is that if we're going to be able to move forward and make progress around public safety. Councillor Hanson I see Director Dodson and go ahead Director Dodson I would like to bring this to before you begin one second we're going on two hours of this and we still have some people waiting to present on this I think this has been an important discussion but I just want to be aware of that that we've been going for about two going on two hours now with this and just wanting to bring us start to move us towards resolution so that we can get to the other folks who have been waiting patiently to present to us. Go ahead Director Dodson. Thank you Councillor President Tracy there's a couple of things I just wanted to share I think regarding Councillor Hanson's comments right there I think we've made a mistake at points of conflating how many officers with how officers police I would argue they're not one and the same necessarily how the officers interact in addressing the pain. Councillor Hanson is right about that but I'm not sure there's not a leak to the idea that decreasing the numbers will automatically deal with that issue so I think that's worth further investigation. Secondly I think that there is a broader concern in terms of alarmist behavior and putting this information out to the community I will say that the taxpayers of the community has an expectation of a certain public safety response. I was not aware that there was a process that said the community the taxpayers the stakeholders have to be prepared for a different public safety response and so without that conversation I think this conversation is critical if I found out at the time that there were no longer midnight at the time that they're no longer like if that's what I found as a community member I would be up in arms that there wasn't an earlier conversation letting me know that yes the resolution passed but when the resolution passed I didn't know that 105 to 74 meant that when there was a call at 4 a.m. for something to happen at my house nothing would happen and some conversation about the fact that there was a call at 4 a.m. for something to happen at my house and I think that was a form of believing towards that point I think is a responsibility that has to be taken care of to let the public know that may be happening because it seems that that may be happening and the lead time for replacing police officers is one of the biggest challenges here whatever gets done there is a lead time in terms of proactivity I agree with proactivity but It's clear, but I have contacted lots of people with expertise. I actually, in looking through the proposals, if I'm sure people read them or I don't know how much the council has it, but one of the vendors that proposed has a bullet point, ensure the reconstructed public service delivery network is grounded by operational realities. Killing analysis shows that ensuring a police officer will be available for response to a high priority call when needed requires that many more officers be deployed than the number that would be needed based on analysis of workload alone. And then further down, it says that this replacement can't be done on a one-to-one. When you do some kind of community service person, they can't one-to-one replace a police officer. Now I didn't say that, but this group that has expertise that's worked in New Orleans, Seattle, Phoenix, Memphis, Kansas City, St. Paul, DC, St. Louis, this they put in their proposal. So that information's out there that there's a challenge in doing that. That's not new information. So that could have informed this process. So I wasn't in a position to be proactive and collaborate on that. I would say that any proposal seemed to me that the chief or myself put forward would have been unilateral, which would be exactly the opposite of this process. No community process, no BFD, no assessment of BPD, but we could have gone out and let's say there was a hiring of CSOs and CSLs without that process that Councillor Jang talks about. And what if the process came back and said that you needed to hire all these officers? And we found out that the CSO, CSL, that we had put together unilaterally didn't meet what the consultant we paid a lot of money suggested would be the appropriate way to force police. And the community service, the community may say, we don't know what they're gonna say. I think that's why we're gonna ask them what if they didn't say that? But we had proactively done all this work to do a hiring that was, it seems contrary to the whole idea was to let the community and the expert drive what we did. So I'm not quite sure how that work could have happened before the thing we're paying lots of money. And I thought was the prerequisite for doing the work was in place. So this is where we are in reality, just dealing with that. Those are the things that, and I'm not sure I see how. So when you look at the CSO and CSL model, Kahootz and Eugene, everywhere you go takes you back there. They're 30 years in the making. So let's say 1980 something, and if a year after they went in, I'm sure we're looking good as it does now, but now it is truly collaborative. Everyone's on the same page and they have this track record that makes us good. Everyone else is scrambling to put something together. And I couldn't find another model that operates even close to there, which doesn't mean you don't move that way, but these aren't overnight things. They take some thought, they talk with the community. Are you all ready to have less police service while we're going through this transition? Do you understand that might be a side effect? I think that should be a community conversation. And it didn't seem when, you know, when I was just a community guy, before I directed police transformation, I was not aware that the policing that I paid for might change because of that. And it seems like that would be something that I would want to know. Thank you, Director Dodson, me, their counselors again, trying to bring councilor Freeman, go ahead. Thank you, President Tracy. Can everyone hear me? Yep, you're good. Great, I've had a super long day, so I'm just going to try to do my best. To summarize a couple of thoughts, something, a few things just stood out to me, one I think was the mayor's comment around issues of poverty and yours, Director Dodson, around, I can't, I should have written down the exact phrasing, but something about a cleaning, the number of hours with, or number of policing with, I'm sorry, I can't remember it exactly, but I'll try to get to my point, which is just that I think that, oh, what was it? It was how we police is somehow related to the number of officers that we have, or there's a false correlation. And to me, the issue is around that we are so focused on how we're policing that we're not actually focused on how we're mitigating violence and harm. And that's really what the underlying, like concept of public safety is. And there's just this aspect in which policing and systems of law enforcement and mass incarceration are so ingrained in our mentality and in our society that we cannot possibly imagine other ways to arrive at being safe communally without force, basically, and enforcement. And that we have basically all, but in some ways I think given up at actually supporting people before they reach that point of crisis that we are just in this conversation, I think really has been in a lot of ways, unfortunately around fear and around cultivating a fear that if we lose some level of policing or there's some magical number of staff that we can have as police staff that we can have, that's going to keep us safe. But what I heard from Chief Mirad was that violence has, there's been issues with increased numbers of shooting across country and none of that has to do with policing levels. Those have to do with underlying systemic issues that we have as a community. And the thing that I think upset me, Mayor Weinberger, when you made a mention about poverty and I understand that it's a complicated systemic issue, but I don't think that we should give up on needing to really look at those underlying issues. Otherwise, I feel like we are just resigned to say, okay, well let's just criminalize poverty and let's just allow generations of systemic racism and white supremacy to allow law enforcement to brutalize black and brown people. And so I agree, I think Councillor Hansen brought up the fact that there is real harm being perpetuated by the systemic racism and white supremacy issues at Burlington Police Department that we're continuing to see in our data and that if we, when we continue to sort of push the conversation around these sort of like, I think it's, we're not actually talking about the real issues. We're not talking about folks having, how do we support folks with mental health issues? How do we create economic security? How do we fight against sexism, which is a huge, huge factor in violence in our community? How do we look at issues of white supremacy and the unbelievable violence that is perpetuated by white supremacy? Those are really the underlying issues of harm. And to me, this Congress, there's no magical staffing number that is going to reduce that. And I really do, I want us to be committed to it and to not just say, I feel like we're so, want to just sort of throw our hands up and say, we're this municipality, we're a local community, what the heck can we do about those systemic issues? And I really think that we need to dig deep and look at them because people are really harmed and hurting on the ground because of it. So yeah, that was my best attempt to, to organize my thoughts. As I said, it's been a pretty long day for me, but I appreciate all the conversation that's going on. And I'll definitely be following this proposal as it continues to work its way through and continuing to have feedback. So thank you. Thank you. And just a reminder, please don't go after others by name per council rules. Is there anyone else in the queue? Okay, thank you for this. I'm going to go, well, Councilor Mason, did you have something? Yes, President Frazier, I just, mine is that I'm not sure who the question is directed to. I'm unclear in terms of the process going forward. I mean, I appreciate this as a proposal. I understand we might expect a resolution in a month or so, but I've also heard in between some of the talking back and forth a desire for collaboration. So I'm not sure which committees I also heard the joint committee potentially being consulted. I heard the police commission. I'm just looking for a little guidance for not only us as counselors, but the public to weigh in if there is an attempt rather than just dropping a resolution and having this same conversation a month from now. So I'm not sure to whom to direct that question, but is there a roadmap for how the public dialogue on this will occur if any before it shows up in a resolution before the council. Certainly speaking on behalf of the administration, I would think it would be important for the police commission to be given an opportunity to weigh in on this before it comes back to the council for a decision. If it's better to do that with some kind of referral from this body to the joint committee since that has both the public safety committee and the full commission on it. I know that's a busy body, but that's another route. But one way or another, I do think we've committed to the police commission that they will be given opportunity to weigh in on important policing issues. It's not something, it's something that we've repeatedly not fully engaged them on over the last more than a year. And I think it's important. Certainly the administration will be is committed to trying to engage them on this issue and getting their perspective. Does that answer your question, Councillor Mason? It does. I guess my follow-up to be respectful of the work that the joint committee is doing is whether it has the capacity to take this on or whether it is more appropriately sent just directly back to the police commission. I feel like I don't have a sense of the timeline that is being asked for. The joint committee has our next meeting tomorrow, which is particularly to the making the RFP selection of the BPD assessment RFP. I don't know when the next police commission meeting is, so I don't feel, I would assume it's the, is it like the second Tuesday of the month or something like that, so presumably in January. So I won't make a motion to refer because it sounds like there are a number of variables, but I've heard a firm commitment from all parties to try and at least have a public hearing or allow for public input. And I'll look to the administration and consultation with either councilor Hightower as the chair of the joint committee or the chair of the police commission to make sure that that happens. So thank you. Okay. Don't have anybody else ready to close this one down? Okay. Thank you for the conversation, counselors, as well as the presentation. Let's move into our next item, which actually we have to go back into the, where we left off on the agenda. So we already did the public forum. So I'm going to be, I'm going to go into item number five, which are climate emergency reports. Did any counselors have any climate emergency reports that they'd like to offer? Counselor Hanson. Thanks, President Tracy. Yeah, I got a note from a constituent today about air quality in Burlington and someone who closely tracks air quality and have seen that it's reached, it's been reaching regularly, or recently it's been reaching levels that are harmful for sensitive people. So I just want to, and in my research on transportation issues as well, I've seen that over time, air quality has in some regards worsened in Burlington. So I think just something to flag and raise and maybe the CIO, Brian Lowe, is willing to maybe look into some of this data and what's driving this change. And I just want to raise the conversation, because I think that's what these climate emergency reports are about, is raising issues and conversations. So I want to raise that one and put it on everyone's radar and maybe we can start to look into this and try to address this issue and understand where it's coming from. Thank you. Okay, any other counselors? Okay, seeing none, we'll go into our next item, which is the Consent Agenda. Councillor Stromberg may have a motion on the Consent Agenda. I move to adopt the Consent Agenda as amended and take the actions indicated. Okay, we have a motion on the Consent Agenda. Is there a second? Seconded by Councillor Pine. Any further discussion? Okay, seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of our Consent Agenda, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, hearing none, that passes unanimously, which brings us into our deliberative agenda and just for folks following along. We do have a couple other, we do have a tax abatement meeting, but before we get to that, I do want to address the item 7.01 on our agenda, which is a presentation regarding the Burlington City and Lake semester. We have a number of folks from that presentation here tonight to share what that program involves, and including a student actually, which is awesome. So I'm really excited to have them here. I want to get that presentation on the table before we switch over to tax abatement and continue our agenda. So we'll move into that before we do that. And I believe that Andy Barker has the presentation. Okay, I see you turn on your camera, Andy. Welcome, and I believe we have Sina Daly, Peter McConville, and then Isha Ibrahim will be also joining us as well. So welcome to the council, and I'm sorry if I missed any others, just want to welcome you to the council and appreciate you sharing what it is that goes on at City and Lake semester with us. Great, hi there to the council. Is my audio coming through okay? Yep, you're good. Great. Well, thank you so much, Council President Tracy and Councilor Karen Paul for the invitation for us to present today. My name is Andy Barker. I'm the project director for Burlington City and Lake semester. And I'm joined here by my colleagues Sina Daly, Peter McConville on the BCL faculty, Burlington City and Lake. And I'm also joined by a Burlington High School senior Isha Ibrahim. I think I'd see her camera just came on and she was in the BCL program this fall. So thanks so much Isha for joining us and hanging on for the council meeting. We're going to share our time. We'll try to be quick. I want to start off first of all, just with a big thank you. I mean, so many people on this call have been friends of ours and supporters have helped BCL get off the ground, become a success, collaborated, talked with students, helped us with logistics. So many people in city government, too many people to name, but I really want to extend a heartfelt thank you. I want to say just a little bit about what Burlington City and Lake semester is if you aren't familiar. And I wanted to just share a couple of slides. So I'm going to try to do that now. And if you'll let me know if those are coming through, that would be great. Can people see that image of the city we live in there? Yep, that looks good. Great. So Burlington City and Lake semester you should know as a partnership between Shelburne Farms and the Burlington School District. And it gives about 20 Burlington High School juniors and seniors a chance to use the city of Burlington as their classroom and their curriculum for one semester of their high school journey. And the group meets for full days. It's an immersive program from eight to three sometimes every other day. This fall it was every day. And we study real world issues. What's going on in the city? We've talked about policing and a lot of the issues that have been debated tonight. We've talked about social justice in Burlington how we achieve that public safety. We work with lots of community partners. We get students in connection with adults in our city. We collaborate where we can on authentic projects. We were based in the old North End Center which is a fantastic sort of community hearth but we're really spending most of our time out and about around the city on the lake wherever our projects end up taking us. We have three big goals and they really go beyond the mission of the public schools. One is to empower young people from all backgrounds. Another one is to transform education and really stretch the boundaries of what school is and what it means and make sure that it's really meeting the needs of students and thinking about the challenges of the 21st century. And it's also about strengthening our community. And in our view that work really begins with connecting young people, connecting them to each other, espalationships and starting dialogues. It begins also with connecting young people to this unique, beautiful, spectacular place, the national environment, the problems we face, the possibilities that we have. It requires us to really wrestle with equity and sustainability and how we build authentic community. These are the important questions of our time and they should be at the heart of what students are studying and learning in school. And it also requires us to take young people seriously and not just think about them as young people to get ready for the future, but about people who live here and have valuable lived experiences that we can listen to and learn from. And over and over again, what we find is that Burlington is a great city for this kind of a program. We're a real city, we've got real challenges, but we also have a deep generosity of spirit from so many people, people eager to help to lean in, to partner with us and with students. We're in our third year. Here's a look at the five cohorts of BCL students so far. We hope we'll have many, many more of these in the years ahead. And I have one little tidbit that I just love, timing is everything, but literally just this morning, we got the word from United Nations University that BCL was named an outstanding flagship project. You may know already that Greater Burlington has been designated a regional center of expertise in education for sustainable development within the United Nations University. That's how we were nominated. And so this is really something we're proud of as a program, but really the whole city should be. And so I wanna call out thanks to the city that's invested in this regional center of expertise work, UVM Rubenstein School and Shelburne Farms who are kind of the lead partners in that designation. But that's really exciting for us that United Nations University is seeing what we're doing here and giving us the thumbs up. Before I hand it over to Isha, I wanna just give you a couple of details about a project we did this fall that I think integrates many of the ideals I'm talking about. So just this past fall, students did an applied ecology project. We had lots of help and support from Burlington Parks Rec and Waterfront and the Burlington Wildways Organization. We started off with a few days in the intervals studying geology and natural history. Students posted blazes on a new section of the Wildways walking trails. Students planted trees on the city's property at 311 North Avenue, which is part of a native species restoration and climate resilience effort. Dan Cahill and his crew at Parks and Rec were great partners in that. And then we ended all this with a huge consultancy with Wildways partners, including the city and Rock Point, Winooski Valley Parkstick District and others, Intervail Center. Here we are outside and distanced at the old North End Center. Adults, youth, grappling with the question of how do we ensure that these natural areas are accessible and inclusive for all Burlington residents? And it was an incredibly powerful and hopeful experience for students and for all the adults that were there as well. And I think that really says something about the possibility of a program like ours and how we connect the city and our schools through this work. So I'm gonna stop talking there. I really wanna invite Isha in to share her thoughts as a student who went through BCL and share her perspective. So Isha, I'm gonna stop sharing my screen and if you would please take it away. I'm gonna be sharing an animation and a video chat. I'm gonna be seeing five of these. We've done many projects in BCL. Can you guys show me? Isha, it's a little, you're breaking up a little bit. Is there something wrong with my audio? No, your audio is fine and now you're coming through fine. You're good. And I'm sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to make sure everyone can hear you. Okay, sorry. Okay, my name is Isha Ibrahim and I'm a student in BCL. And we've done many projects in BCL. The projects are just small magazines and we had the choice to make a zine about anything we wanted. My partner and I chose to make a zine about symbolism and social justice throughout Burlington. We used what we learned from the professional photographer, Homer Harowitz that we worked with and we took different pictures about different opinions and beliefs regarding social justice in the streets of Burlington. The theme for a zine was black and white with a pop of color. In some pictures, we were free to be as creative as we wanted. During class, everyone has a chance to speak and this is helpful for people like me who might not speak as much in a traditional style classroom. I also got to know people outside of my friend group and I felt like I could just walk up to anyone and start a conversation because of how well everyone knew each other from the times we spent together during fun block, circle and class. I felt heard at BCL. Lots of people in the community came to speak us and actually listened to what we had to say. BCL faculty members also made sure that we felt heard. We had the choice to choose topics we wanted to learn about and I felt like my opinion mattered which helped me to gain more confidence in school. That's something that I can take with me and I'm glad that I attended BCL and I think everyone should have this opportunity. Now I'm going to hand it off to Peter McConnor. Thanks, Isha. I was gonna say a few words about why I like teaching in the program but really it's because I get to spend all day with students like Isha and help join them on their own learning journey. But I've been teaching English at Burlington High School for 15 years. During that time, I've been active in helping to move the school forward and trying to look at ways for education to evolve in our community. And while I love teaching English and I love opening up the world to people through literature, one of the things that I really love about BCL is that we're able to open up the world through our community itself. Through a variety of partnerships, we've worked with government agencies, we've worked with higher ed, we've worked with other profits, we've worked with for-profit private businesses. We're able to connect students to the world and to the people in our community in a way that really just makes them come alive. I think just really quickly about the work that we'll do when we begin this semester studying city systems and as we talk about housing, we'll meet with VHFA, we'll meet with COPS, we'll meet with Redstone and we'll hear about the challenges around providing affordable housing within the community and the challenges surrounding home ownership. When we talk about transportation, we bring in the UVM Transportation Research Center and we talk about issues of transportation and social justice. And the kids lean into this work in a way that they don't always lean into, say Jane Eyre, which might break my English teacher heart a little bit, but it's all well and good. And I'll just end, I don't want to take too much time but say that the thing that I think I'm most proud of when we look at our outcomes at the end of each semester is the things that students really report on. They report on having a greater sense of agency when they leave our program than when they came in. They report on feeling better connected to their community and they report on an increased sense of purpose around school and their learning. And those are the things, I love that they get these systems, the conversation that was going on earlier today is exactly, or this evening is exactly the kind of conversation we try to engender in our program and just looking at all of these complicated knots and trying to untie them and we don't all come to agreement with each other but the exploration is really where that learning happens. So with that, I want to thank the council again for inviting us in and I'm going to pass it off to Sina. Hey, Sina Daly here. So coming to you from my basement, thanks again for inviting us to share a little bit about BCL, very interesting to hear your conversation and thanks for all your hard work for us. So you saw in the pictures, we have probably about a hundred students who have come through our program. Some have graduated that have benefited from this, what Peter described and experiences like Isha's. And currently we are in a mini BCL as we call ourselves program, Burlington Experience. Thanks to Superintendent Flanagan and BHS administrators. We all pivoted in the 11th hour for this quarter of win right now to provide this experience for 12 students. We're calling it Burlington Experience and we meet for half a day at the Old North End Community Center as BCL always does. And it has allowed 12 students to meet in person when their classmates are actually remote. So it's been a great opportunity and we really have the backing of our new superintendent and our administrators to create new programming to meet the needs of our students. Today we had presentations, students talked about education, stuff that had been exploring around that businesses in Burlington. And one group was talking about belonging in Burlington and thanks to Mayor Murrow for the other day for taking a quick FaceTime call to let us interview you about what Burlington means for newcomers and how welcoming of a place we are. These are things that these students really care deeply about. Early in the semester Isha and others were down in the rain. We messed up interviewing Murrow about racial justice and they came up with an excellent video on that. So these are real issues that young people care about. As we move forward to the next semester and hopefully in a post COVID world, the high school, as you know, is moving downtown and BCL faculty and the students, we really see ourselves as a resource for our community, for our school, for Shelburne Farms education for sustainability to think about city as classroom. And we are in deep conversations with our district leaders to try to find ways to do that on small scale, large scale and move beyond the programming that we have. We wanna continue to change our system to meet the needs of all of our students for flexible pathways for graduations which we keep talking about. And I'll just end with a quote from a student today in the presentation who said, the education system is set up to work the way it was supposed to. And they know, these young people know that that system does not work for everybody. So they're looking for a change and we're here along with Isha and other students to help provide that and continue to engage them in these issues that are near and dear to all of us who call Burlington our home. So thanks again for listening to our presentation and I'll hand it back to Andy. Well, thanks Isha, thanks Sina, thanks Peter. All I wanna do by way of closing is to invite you all to keep us in mind. There's really nothing more empowering than when adults in the community and leaders in our community reach out to students and ask for their input and help. And we've had tremendous experiences with many of you. So the door is open and thanks so much for the chance to tell you a little bit about what we do. Councillor Powell to be followed by Councillor Stromberg. Thanks President Tracy. So gosh, there's just so much that can be said. Not only I do have a comment and then and I'll try not to have it be too long and then I have a question for you. So just wanted to just note that the first time that I spoke with Andy about this program, it was an idea to a large degree on a piece of paper. And I think that it is by no, it is no understatement the amount of work, the heavy lift that went into bringing this program to life. And it looks, I guess the success of some programs is you look at it now and it looks sort of easy. But I know that it was a very heavy lift to get this off the ground, convince administrators, people at the high school, community partners to believe in the project, to make it so that Burlington High School teachers could work and do this kind of work without being in the school. And you persevered. And I think that you deserve a tremendous amount of community appreciation for what you have managed to get off the ground. And what has been on the other side are young people like Isha who have benefited and you have benefited from them, all of you working together. What you've done is really build a level of community, a level of respect that young people feel tremendously valued for what they can bring to the conversation. And I guess the only other thing I just wanted to mention is that you had invited city counselors a couple of years ago to come to one of your classes. And I just wanted to mention two things. The first was that it was really so much fun that I really felt badly that we had to leave because it was a lot more fun than going back to work. For those of us who were just thrilled to be able to talk with a lot of very young and incredibly engaged young people. And the second thing was that one of the students, I don't know if you did it, you did it this, how it worked out, but one of the students wrote me after the, after the time that we were there. And the questions that they asked were incredibly deep and extremely well-informed and there were about 20 of them. And it was just a pleasure to talk with students that are so amazingly connected to the community and really, truly care. So my question is, and I think Andy at the time I asked you about this was, if this model succeeds in giving people an alternative education, even for just a semester, is this something that you think some of your colleagues would try to do? Perhaps maybe not in the same way, city and lake semester, but maybe in some other area of culture or something else. And so I'm wondering if that is a possibility if you know of others that are trying to get something like this off the ground so that there can be other city and lake semesters. I mean, you can only take so many students this semester, it would be wonderful if there were more of you. You know, just very briefly, first of all, thanks Karen, you're absolutely right that the reward for the hard work is that our team gets to work with bright young people every day. And honestly, I think my job is better than almost everybody else these days. Sina and I and Peter and Doug this fall, we're in person with young people doing our thing. And it's been truly a team effort. So, so many people have chimed in. I will say just really briefly, we are continuing to talk and partner with BSD folks and Noel Green at the high school on what other kinds of community-based learning we can do. I think that the move to Macy's building downtown is a huge opportunity, so we're in that conversation. And yeah, you know, there is a network of people in Vermont who are trying to figure out how we can do more of this kind of school, because it is what kids, young people need to be adding on top of the traditional academic subjects, this engagement around sustainability and equity and really pressing questions of social justice and community. So it's a pleasure and thank you for the kind words. Thanks very much. And thanks to all of you for coming and really I'm like one of your biggest fans. Thanks so much for all you're doing. Appreciate it. Thanks, Councilor Powell. I have Councilor Stromberg to be followed by Councilor Jane. Thanks, President Tracy. Yeah, thank you all for coming and presenting. That was really thoughtful. And man, I wish my high school had this program. I think that's fantastic. And I also know that when a lot of people that I graduated college with like studied abroad or even had some specific program that they partook in in one capacity or another that brought them somewhere else and just kind of out of the classroom. That's the thing that they remember the most and they learn the most. And this might be like a kind of silly comparison, but like I took polysine in school, but I feel like I've learned way more like experiencing Council and everything in real life and understanding the issues and really digesting it in real time and participating. And I think that's super, super valuable. So I hope that you all can see me as a resource and I'm really happy to connect and be involved offline as well. That's a really great idea and I'm very supportive of that and hope it continues to grow and flourish. So thank you so much. Thank you. For that, I have Councillor Chang. Thank you very much for being here. And the Peter Singh, thank you. Thank you very much. And I think, you know, you said it all education in the 21st century has to change. Now this, I don't know where you are. If are you still in an evaluation phase or now you're thinking about extending, you know, where are you in that? Because this is no longer an idea, but this is something you implemented and it's working. That's one question. And the other question is specific to credit. Students, do they receive any type of credit to apply to their academic learning going through this? And also are there all the universities that accept maybe this type of graduation of our community base or play space learning where you can graduate and extend your learning? And three questions, sorry. Yeah, let me actually kick the credit question over to Peter. Yeah, really simply as a certified English teacher and Doug Sucker being assertive, who's not here with us this evening, being a certified social studies teacher. As is Sina, we students who participate in the program for what is essentially four classes will go with kind of the current iteration. They will receive a credit for English, a credit for social studies and then two credits that we call applied research, which are elective credits that go towards their final count but they're not necessarily subject specific. And Andy, I don't know if you wanted to tackle the college question. Yeah, well, in terms of what phase we're in, I think I'll just answer that question. We had, Councilor Jiang, we had a pilot phase, which was two years long and we're in right now what's technically a bridge phase. And what that means is we're looking to find the financial model that allows us to continue to do this work and hopefully to expand it. So we do have a shared budget. Burlington School District pays for the licensed teachers in the program and they're assigned to that course. And Shauburn Farms raises money for about half the budget, which currently funds SENA and MyRole and project costs. Some of that's grant funded, some of that's individual donors, some of that's title money that comes through the federal government, state government. So we have a patchwork funding model, but really what we're looking for is what's the model that will allow us to be a permanent program and continue on in a way that doesn't require constant fundraising. So we've proven the model, all it works, it's clearly good for students and the right financial model. And I think I'm frozen. And Alia, I'm happy to just pick up for a moment on your question about colleges. One of the things that we find is that schools are really looking for ways that students can differentiate themselves from their peers. And so what several students are doing is, they're applying exactly what it is they've learned from this program towards the application itself. They're actually seeking out programs sometimes. They realize that this entire industry exists and we have someone who decided last year after a bunch of work that she had done that she wanted to go into public health and she kind of hit the ground running this year remotely, but that's what she went after. And we find that we're able to sort of forge relationships for students with community members who are able to kind of help them along in that process as well. So we really do sort of pride ourselves in a way in helping kids ignite the passion that actually makes them a more attractive student to begin with as they look towards secondary ed. If that's where they're headed. Or quite frankly, into careers. I look at all the exposure that our students have to so many of our community members and these jobs that I probably didn't even realize existed five years ago and they're sitting there talking with experts in some of these fields. And so it just really broadens their horizons in terms of what's possible and get the end of the day. And I don't know, Isha is, I don't wanna put you on the spot, but is there anything you wanna say about if it's changed your thinking about what you're gonna do after high school? I think that it did help me, it still did help me. Like the fact that we were talking with community partners, I did feel more connected to the community. So I guess in a way, instead of like wondering what to do and how things work, like it did help me in that way. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, Councilor Mason, you're on mute, Councilor. My apologies. Thank you, President Tracy. So I have the distinct pleasure, I believe, of being a parent of the only, of any Councilor and my daughter attended with Isha the BCL program last semester or quarter, I should say, it was not a full semester. And I would say that was really the only disappointment of the program was the fact that she was not able to attend for a full semester. It was because of COVID and what was going on, it was condensed. I cannot speak highly enough about, as a parent of a kid who was coming home in a very challenging time for high school kids, given the school was shut down, we're in a pandemic, the level of engagement that the people on the screen were able to get out of my child was nothing short of remarkable and reignited, I would say, in a sort of a passion for learning and for the process that unfortunately had been relatively sapped out of her as she just sat through class after class, really in a lecture format. And I don't know where this will go, but I have no doubt that at least for my daughter and others who experienced this, it opened a possibility of learning and a different path than one which they may have thought of. So I've said this in emails, but publicly, thanking everyone for offering this experience to all high school kids and can't encourage any parent of a high school child to very strongly consider getting their kid as soon as they can. My question, and I think Andy may have touched on this sort of now that you're in this out of the pilot and into the bridge phase, what are the challenges you're facing and how can we as community leaders feeling the positivity of this program assist you getting to that, wherever you decide you wanna go? Well, I know I'm a little glitchy tonight. So, Sina, if I glitch out, please jump in here. I will say that we have a new level of engagement with the new superintendent and our partners in the school district. And so we've got meetings in early January to do some kind of vision work around where we wanna go next. And I'm a firm believer in emergent curriculum that's in our program, but also in terms of finding what is the next opportunity for the program. So I think we're in a good place right now. And I think the conversation with district partners is where it should be at the moment. Sina, do you wanna, and so Chip, I don't have a specific ask for city council tonight. And that may change in the future. We may come back to you and say, here's a path where you could help us. Sina, do you, anything you wanna add on that? I mean, I'll add, you know, there's always the, Andy did talk about the budget and how we are financed. And so that's always on the table, of course. But, you know, to the quote that I shared that the students said today, you know, we are living in an older system of education that needs transformation. And this is pushing some of the boundaries of old systems. You mentioned Chip, you know, the semester systems and the quarter systems. And, you know, so some of the scheduling issues that are outside of our hands and that are in our systems would need some changing. And we do feel along with many others in the district and at the district school level, at the administration level that there's an opportunity here because of what we're experiencing during COVID and because of the move downtown to make some of those more drastic changes to perhaps scheduling and how we, you know, fit kids into these blocks. Our biggest goal, and I think we've been fairly successful at it and it's something we're not willing to give up is to have a diverse group of learners together in the same cohort. And that's something that the school is really not set up just by design to allow for. We don't really track in high school, but students all know where they end up, you know, by their junior, senior year and we are doing everything we can. And again, fairly successful, I would say, to disrupt that. So the learning that takes place is really with a group of, you know, different kids with different backgrounds from different neighborhoods and that's intentional. And so, you know, that's a model that we hope that maybe can be shared and taken into serious consideration because consideration, no matter what, downtown schooling looks like. So that's what I'll add at that point. Thank you. Okay, anyone else? Wonderful. Well, thank you so much to our presenters for joining us and sharing just this information about this wonderful program. I really just appreciate you being here and being patient with us as we had our other presentation. I know that we're hoping to get you on a little earlier. So I apologize for that, but thanks for hanging in there and just sharing all this great information with us. Well, again, thank you for the invitation and a huge shout out to Isha for spending her evening on the call. Thank you, Isha. She's just trying to start her holiday break right now. All right, good night. All right, good night. Thank you. Thank you. So that brings us to our next item, which is a communication regarding the consolidated annual performance and evaluation report or otherwise known as the CAPER. We have Katie Kinstead and Luke McGowan doing that. And the way that I foresee this in the public hearing going is that we will have a brief presentation on this. Again, it's a very in-depth report with lots of different sections to it. So I don't expect them to cover the full breadth of it, but really just give us an idea of where it is. I'll open up the floor then to counselor questions and comments before going into the public hearing. And then once we've done the public hearing, then I'll ask for a motion on the item itself, just because I would like to get the public hearing in advance of the motion to adopt this. So with that, I will turn it over to Director McGowan. Thanks, President Tracy. And I will attempt to keep things as brief as possible, but we are always able to take questions and feedback in this public hearing, but also at all times on all matters relating to HUD and our reports that we prepare. So we're here to really present to the council and hold a public hearing on and then ask for a recommendation to submit to HUD the CAPER, which is the Consolidated Annual Performance and Evaluation Report, which is a HUD requirement to get access to federal funds to deliver certain programs. Namely, these programs help us with our affordable housing goals, economic opportunity goals, and our suitable living environment goals. So much of the work that you see going on in the city to attack some of the underlying issues that have been identified during this meeting, that happens through the use of federal dollars, namely through three programs, CDBG funds, home funds, and our lead program. So that's mainly what's detailed in the CAPER that you can find, which is available on the CETO website. And it is a lengthy report, but I do think of it as a really good indicator of both what we're doing with these dollars, but also a temperature check on the community on a number of different metrics. So that's kind of the overview. I'm gonna turn it over to my colleague in a minute. I do wanna say this report was completed, has everything this year in the time of COVID. So there is some of that is reflected in the report. The timeline for this report is July 2019 up through June of 2020. Usually we would submit this report somewhat sooner, but we got an extension from HUD to allow us to bring it to you now. The team at CETO that has been working diligently on this report really deserves all of the credit, namely Katie Kinstead, who I'm joined by here, our Assistant Director for Administration and Finance has spearheaded this effort and really all of the city's access to federal funding over the course of this past year. So new programs, old programs, all of that in some ways is running through Katie. So I just wanna recognize her work there. She also has a very able team in Todd Rawlings, Christine Curtis and Marcella Gange and a number of other CETO staff are actually implementing some of the programs summarized in this report. Finally, I'll just close in saying it really does take a village. So these are, we're capturing the accomplishments of the community on getting what is essentially $2 million out or $1.8 million out into the community over the last year to advance those goals. And it just wouldn't be possible without our sort of amazing network of community partners and nonprofits and really engaged community members who participate in lots of different ways through this process. So with that, I will close and turn it over to Katie who is going to run through a few of the highlights in the report and then we can open it up to questions or comments. Thanks, Luke. So I'll share our highlights primarily in three buckets, affordable housing, sustainable living environment and economic opportunity. And these are the priorities where we've used primarily federal funds for CETO and community activities as opposed to focusing on reporting the accomplishments through our partners, although those are very notable and important. So starting off with affordable housing, we have our Burlington lead program that's in its third year of a three-year grant and they completed testing on 27 houses and completed lead hazard control activities on 37 housing units. And this was really impressive, especially since towards the end of their program, obviously due to COVID the last quarter of the year they had to really wind down their activities due to the governor's order. So we're really proud of those activities. The next one is that construction finished on Laurentide. We also were able to serve 55 individuals experiencing homelessness by partnering with Pathways Vermont. We were able to rehabilitate six owner occupied units through our housing improvement program, HIPP. Moving on to our next objective, some of the highlights from sustainable living environment include that we were able to provide shelter and services to over 374 individuals experiencing homelessness. We were able to do development work around the Moran Frame project as you're all very well aware. We were able to make progress on their renovations to the Old North End Community Center and all site work was completed including the expansion of the parking lot and addition of a playground. Our third and final priority that we'll report on this evening is Economic Opportunity. With our CEDO CDBG funds we were able to provide technical assistance to 15 current and potential entrepreneurs including three new micro enterprises that were created. We also through COVID were able to disperse a number of grants in addition to the normal grants that we provided to low income and underserved micro enterprises in our community. So with that, we are happy to answer any questions you may have. Great, thank you for the presentation and clarifying just what all is contained in the caper. Are there questions from counselors or comments? Counselor Jang to be followed by Counselor Pine. Thank you, thank you. Great, great, great, wonderful work. So it seems all of those, most of those are federal funds, right? Right, yeah. And it seems CDBG is specific to community development, but hub is mostly housing. So Counselor Jang, CDBG is a HUD program. So the HUD department which is the housing and urban development, federal department administers, community development block grants. So all of the above under HUD. Yeah, so which one is specifically about housing? All of it? All of it touches on housing in some forms. So CDBG funds are used in part to support housing nonprofits. The home fund in particular is sort of direct support for the construction costs, part of the construction costs of programs like Laurentide at Cambrian Rise, but then the lead program is also individual houses going in and abating lead hazards and other health hazards in those homes. I mean, thank you. Thank you. All set, Counselor Jang? Yes. Okay, Counselor Pine. I just have to say something because Counselor Busher would have asked a question and she's no longer here, but she always asked a question about the capers. So I have to give you one, okay? So if you could share with us what you see as the biggest challenge now because this report ended in the end of June. So we're halfway through the next reporting period already, I think. And tell us what to look ahead and what are some of the bigger challenges you're gonna face either completing the goals, achieving the goals, what are the barriers that you anticipate having to overcome? Thanks, Counselor Pine. And since this was Katie's first time, I did tell her that maybe we wouldn't get question as many questions because Counselor Busher wasn't here, but thanks for sharing your torch there. There's kind of a number of different challenges and we highlight actually in the report kind of where you can see, here's where we think we did well, here's where we didn't perform based on our goals and I can let Katie speak to some of those specifics. I'm always struck and I really encourage folks to take a look at the kind of education outcomes which are included in these reports. And so you really can get a sense for where Burlingtonians are doing well and where we are really struggling, and you can really see a lot of what we're talking about in terms of especially kind of BIPOC proficiency levels in our high school. So in Burlington High School, just are not where they need to be. And I see this as a challenge that, this is all of our challenge as a community and it's also almost where our biggest lever is to really make a difference. So that's what I read from this year's report and also from last year's report. But Katie, maybe you can speak to some of the other challenges. Sure. One challenge is of course the ongoing pandemic. A lot of our partners where we granted community development block grants, CDBG funds this year. Their programs are still needed. They were designed prior to COVID, but they were still needed despite of COVID but we're seeing slower invoicing on a number of activities. So as you may be aware, HUD really wants to see what they call timeliness so that we're able to show that we're using the funds and more so than just meeting HUD's requirements is making sure the funds are getting into the community. So it's continuing to work with partners and make sure that the programs are going to spend as they envision despite kind of changes due to COVID and then imagining creative ways for when we do the next funding cycle to see if there are funds remaining how we can really deploy those in the community to make an impact in a timely manner. Okay, Councilor Jinger did see you. Was there anyone else on first round? Okay, Councilor Carpenter, go ahead. Just to comment and Luke knows we just got news that one of the good news is that Congress and their bill put a lot more money into CDBG and a number of the housing programs. So we have a little glimmer of light going into 21. And just hot off the press at the top of the room. Okay. Yeah, we've been reading that with great attention. Yes. Coming off the press. All right. Anyone else on first round? Okay, go ahead, Councilor Jinger. Yeah. So I just wanted to ask this quick question about the partners, right? So it seems CEDO or the city we don't have direct programs to the community using these grants, but do it seems we're using a lot of partners to channel this expenses to the community? Is it, and what percentage is directly controlled and are programs or projects by the city? Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Jang, for that question. So we do run, the programming is split. So of that $1.8 million that represent, I think over the year and Katie can correct me on the specifics, but essentially 16, 18 different programs, 11 of which managed by, so our community partners, CEDO essentially grants those funds out and then we ran about five or six programs internally within CEDO, direct risk, Katie, if I have wrong, please, please let me know. Yeah, I would just agree that it's a mix. Like the majority is through partners, especially through our home program. It's almost exclusively through partners with our CDBG program. We have a number of programs that run through the city, but we try and really prioritize in the advisory board that advises us and will advise us again in the spring for the next round of funding. Also awards a lot of the funds to the community initiatives through a competitive process. And then the final kind of category of how funding is through the web program and that is administered entirely through the city, but we obviously work with subcontractors that are doing the work, both testing and the rehabilitation work. Thank you. Okay, anyone else before we go to the public hearing? Okay, so we'll go to the public hearing aspect now, which is part of the process. So if there are folks who are on the call as attendees, you can use the raise hand function. This is only to speak to the report that we're discussing. So it's this consolidated report that we're just talking about. We're not opening a general public forum. This is really a requirement that we're meeting in order to allow the public to comment on this particular report that was provided. So does anyone wish to speak to the report? And again, just use that raise hand function. And I will recognize you just a second one. Okay, I will go ahead and close the public forum. And I'll look to Councillor Pine for a motion on the report itself, Councillor Pine. Thank you, President Tracy. I would move to accept this communication and authorize the director of the Community and Economic Development Office or their designee to submit the 2019 consolidated annual performance evaluation report to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Okay, thank you. We have a motion. Is there a second? Seconded by Councillor Zhang. Any further discussion on this item? Okay, seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion to accept the report, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Hearing none, that passes unanimously. Thank you to both Assistant Director Kinstead as well as Director McGowan for your work in preparing this report and presenting this evening. We will now move on to our final item of the evening, which is item 7.04, an authorization to apply for the Downtown Sales Tax Reallocation Program. Councillor Stromberg. Thanks, President Tracy. I move to waive the reading and adopt the resolution. Okay, we have a motion. Is there a second? Seconded by Councillor Pine. Do you want the floor back, Councillor Stromberg? Sure, briefly. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, so just for the public knowledge, this item is a resolution that authorizes the Community and Economic Development Office, CEDO, to apply to the Downtown Program for reallocation of sales tax receipts for building materials used in the Redstone Development Project, which is going to be located at 54 South Wynusky Avenue. And the aim of this is to obviously make improvements to the public infrastructure in our city on the Downtown District to be exact. And the proposal is for a 38,400 square foot building. And so that's gonna be a 69-unit housing project located actually at the corner of Beale Street in South Wynusky Avenue. And so this is just an approval from the council if passed for the application process to begin. So that's just for CEDO to submit an application to the sales tax reallocation program for the project. So it's basically a little synopsis of that. Thanks. Thank you, Councillor Stromberg. Any further discussion of this item? Councillor Carpenter, you're on mute. For the public, this is a reallocation of sales tax on construction materials. And there was some confusion that this was, that the business would be exempt from sales tax and it's really just an exemption for the materials they buy during construction. There was a program set up a number of years ago to incent developers to build in downtown. So it's not a blanket exemption from sales tax, it's just for the materials. Thank you for that clarification, Councillor Carpenter. Is there a further discussion of this item? Councillor Henson. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I've had the opportunity to talk to a representative from Redstone, the developer on the project and learn a little bit more about it as well as Grace from CEDO. And thanks for being here, Grace. I think the biggest sort of outstanding question and I think the question that most of my constituents would want me to ask and understand is just around the price of the housing that's being built. This is a pretty large housing project being built kind of right in the heart of downtown and kind of right in the heart of the student heavy rental district within more date. And so just understanding what sort of pressure this project might be putting on the rental market. And I don't know if Grace or anyone from Redstone has any further sort of clarity or estimate around that to offer. Thanks, Councillor Hanson. We have Eric from Redstone here and I'm trying to see whether he's been admitted. I think it would be really nice to let him speak. And I know that he has been waiting to speak. I think he does it very well, so. Ray, I'm sorry, I didn't really catch the conversation in Board of Finance. I wasn't able to make that. So I'm sorry if this is repetitive. No, not at all, that's fine. So I have Eric Hoekstra as a panelist now and I see Eric's turn on camera. So Eric, if you'd like to speak to that I should take the Councillor Hanson's question. Go right ahead. Sure. So I think one of the things that I highlighted in Board of Finance is what we're talking about here is a project that has total construction cost of somewhere around $7.2 million. Of that cost, about $2.9 million will be construction materials. The downtown program with the sales tax reallocation process requires that the first million get knocked off that 2.9. So we're down to a $1.9 million of eligible construction materials for potential reallocation. Vermont state sales tax is 6%. So that gets you a figure of about $115,000. So that's what we're talking about in terms of the size of the application for sales tax reallocation here, $115,000 in the scheme of a $7.2 million construction project and a development project that's well in excess of $7.2 million because keep in mind that's just construction costs. It doesn't include all of our soft costs, our architecture, engineering, permit fees, other things like that. So in the scheme of our project, the funds from this, they help. And as many people, Councillor Carpenter, Councillor Pine and others know very well from their work over the years, the last dollars are the hardest to get on development projects. So, you know, $115,000 is meaningful. But on the other hand, it's like 1% of our project costs. So I just wanted to kind of frame that to help people understand what we're talking about here. In terms of affordability, we will fully comply with the requirements of the inclusionary zoning portion of the development ordinance. Great. And I think just, you know, in terms of Jack, you're concerned about pressure on the market. Yes, I've never known new production to create pressure on the market. You know, I think creating new housing should relieve pressure on the market regardless of the price point. So that certainly always our intent in creating new housing supply in the city of Burlington. Right. Well, that's a very big debate in our community and others is around, you know, that point that you just made, I think. I think in general, yes, I would agree with that. Although I don't think, you know, luxury housing, for example, not that I'm saying that this is luxury housing, but I think luxury housing doesn't necessarily bring down overall housing costs in a community. But I think your previous point was important just from the standpoint of what this is that we're voting on and what it means. I think the reason that I'm asking these questions is because, you know, this is a moment where the city is either helping push this project forward or not. And so I think it's our duty as counselors to understand like how we think this project would impact our constituents and impact our community. I think your point was kind of, the project's gonna happen either way because this is a relatively small amount, which I think is a fair point actually. But I'm just wondering if you could speak any more to your expectations around the price point for the units. If there's any more sort of clarity around where you think that's gonna land, I just think that would be really helpful. At this stage, we're still in the planning stage of the project. This is a fairly early move for this project. We don't have any permits in place yet. Our hope is that we'll be in a position to start construction on this sometime in 2021, but we won't deliver until, you know, at the soonest it'll be toward the middle to later part of 2022. We're still working through a lot of the logistics around exactly what the rental rates will be and all that kind of stuff. So, but I can assure you that I won't get a permit without fully complying with the comprehensive development ordinance and the inclusionary provisions of that ordinance. Great, thanks. And I'm wondering too if you could, this is a question I already have the answer to, but I think for the public's benefit, the sustainability and environmental aspects of the project I think are pretty impressive. I'm wondering if you could just highlight those for folks understanding. Absolutely. And thank you for asking, counselor. Yeah. So this project, this project's been in the works for more than two years now. We've been working with the First United Methodist Church on this concept for this project. It's a very small infill site in the downtown. It's less than a third of an acre. And this is exactly the kind of project that has been facilitated by the changes to the parking minimums in the downtown and other areas of town. So our intent is to build a project with zero onsite parking to create a tremendous amount of onsite bike storage, both internal inside the building and external bike racks to have a comprehensive transportation demand management strategy where we provide transit passes to our residents where we really encourage people to live a car-free lifestyle as much as possible. And if they need to have a vehicle, we'll connect them with resources to find offsite parking in city garages and private garages and parking lots around town. The project site is a half a block from the college street shuttle. It's a block and a half from the transit center downtown. There's a grocery store almost literally next door and there's a pharmacy across the street. I mean, you can really get everything you need within a short walk of this site. And it's a great opportunity to give a shot to what the elimination of parking requirements has created for opportunity in and around downtown. In addition, we always try to incorporate as much as we can in the realm of energy efficiency. Every project we do, we work with Burlington Electric Department and sometimes bring in efficiency Vermont and VEC. We will be seeking energy star certification for the building and for every unit within the building. Right now what we're looking at is an all-electric scenario. So utilizing high efficiency electric heat pumps for heating and cooling with no connection to natural gas or any other sources of energy. We're gonna look at renewable opportunities. I think with all of the, so for heat pumps, every unit is gonna have its own heat pump system on its own electric meter. So every heat pump system requires a small compressor that has to go on the roof. So we don't have a lot of roof area for PVs unfortunately. So I don't know that we're gonna have a lot of renewable onsite renewable potential here. But certainly the systems within the building will be fed by BED's renewable system. So those are the things we're looking at. Great, I think yeah, that's really exciting. And your point about transportation demand management. I think this will be an opportunity to really prove that it's not, dealing with transportation isn't just about building more parking, but in fact, it's actually about putting some sort of pressure which you all will be in terms of not building parking and then providing realistic alternatives for folks to get around. Part of that has to do with the location right downtown, as you said. And I think that's part of the logic of this program that we're applying for is that we do wanna encourage development in locations where people can walk where they need to go. So I think there's a lot of really exciting aspects. I still am a little bit nervous or concerned about the price point aspect, but I'm also extremely excited about these other aspects that you've raised. So thank you for that. Councilor Pye. My question is really simple. It's currently church property, which means it's tax exempt. I think we're gonna see it become a taxable property for the city. Grant, did I believe it's in the downtown TIF? Is it not? Or is it just outside the TIF? It's right across the town. It's outside the TIF. Okay, so that's a good thing for the city. Getting a property that's tax exempt for 150 years to the tax rolls is pretty unusual. Yep, it's significant. Thank you. Anything else, Councillors? Okay, seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Hearing none, that passes unanimously. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Happy holidays. Yep, same to you. Thank you. Everyone. Appreciate that. And our next item, I'm gonna go ahead, before we go to committee reports, I'm gonna, now I will recess this meeting and we'll go to the full board of the Batement of Taxes. So I'll give folks a chance to switch over to that and turn it over to Mayor Weinberger so that we can deal with those items. Great, thank you, President Tracey. We are joined by the tax assessor, John Vickery, who sits on this board as well. And here we go. I would welcome a motion regarding the agenda. So I call this meeting to order at 1017. Need a motion on the agenda. Councillor Pall. I'll make a motion to approve and adopt the agenda. Great, thank you. Is there a second? Seconded by Councillor Pine. Thank you. Any discussion of the agenda? All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? I did not hear any opposition. So I believe that passes unanimously. And that brings us to item 2.01, which is the consent agenda. I would welcome a motion to take the actions indicated on the consent agenda. Councillor Strongberg. I move to adopt the consent agenda and take the actions indicated. Great, thank you. Is there a second? Seconded by Councillor Pine. Any discussion of the consent agenda? All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? Okay, the motion carries unanimously. And that brings us to our one deliberative item, which is a request for an abatement of taxes from the Vermont Organization for Jewish Education at 42 Summit Street. And maybe Mr. Vickery, could you kick this item off for us? Or would it be better? Sometimes we have Councilor Mason do that. Okay, go ahead. I'm happy to do that. Great, thank you. This is a property that is currently owned by the Vermont Organization for Jewish Education. It was earlier owned by an individual, Willem, who is a rabbi for the organization. And they have asked for a tax abatement of the full amount of taxes in 2019, plus penalties and interest to date, which haven't been paid. The recommendation coming from the committee is to abate the penalties and interest, but not the taxes. And that is what is before the board here today. It is currently, the property is currently exempt because it is under, owned by a religious organization. Sorry, thank you, Mr. Vickery. Councilor Polino, the chair of the committee, would you like to add anything? I'm happy to try to answer questions. I'm not sure why this one was pulled. So maybe is there disagreement? We had a unanimous decision, right, John? Looks like there was a dissenting vote. It was not unanimous at the committee level. So that's why we're here. Was it Councilor Carpenter? I saw, no, it was Councilor Freeman. Point of information. But so it was 2.09. Was that intentional that 2.09 from consent was not, so neither 2.09 nor 301 were unanimous. I believe I was the only dissenting vote. And I think it was over just small amounts. We had a disagreement. And so I, that's why I didn't, but I didn't understand why 2.09 was on consent, but 3.01 is undelivered. Well, Councilor Freeman, if I'm mistaken. It doesn't bother me, but. Okay. The record, the minutes from the 1127 meeting seemed to indicate that the council vote, that the committee vote was unanimous on 2.09. So I'm sure that perhaps I was in an error, but that's, that's why would you like. No, no, it's okay. No problem. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. I think that Councilor Freeman's point wasn't about them. The decision ultimately is we were, we spent a lot of time talking about amounts and. There were years in play, I think three total. So. Sounds like we already voted on consent. So that item is already long gone. So as to this request. Really comes down to, we did grant the request for penalties, but it was not. At the end of the day and interest. So it was substantial. But ultimately we felt that the actual payment of the property tax was fair. In large part due to the fact this is now tax exempt. Essentially. As long as the organization owns it, which is. There's no reason to believe that I wouldn't own it. But because it was a mid year request. So we were able to go back in time. And sort of do the mid year requests, even though they became later tax exempt. So we sort of split the baby. That's really what it came down to. We felt that the interest in penalties were the proper remedy, but the city still gets the taxes. I'm happy to answer specific questions. This is essentially a rabbi's home. That is used for services just so that counselors know. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Councilor Polino. I see councilor Shannon. Once he recognized. I'll let her go ahead in a second. Raise your hand if you want me to add you to the queue. Go ahead. Councilor Shannon. Please unmute yourself. Sorry about that. Thank you, mayor. Was the city in some way at fault. For this late payment. Was the city doing something or. Why is the city. Taking accountability for this. Well, so as to interest in penalties, I think there was a, the city. Did not. I would say do anything wrong. We felt that. They really, they went through some complicated. Procedures I would say in order, you know, there was evidence presented by the rabbi who represented both himself, I guess, as well as the organization at the hearing. And he explained that he did. Go to the city and request guidance. And we felt that. Basically there was good faith reliance on what to do. And then there was. And so. Basically he had to start. The process all over again due to ownership. Problems between the entity and himself who originally owned the property. The property was originally in the applicant's name. So that would be the rabbi. And so. That was about the time during which we waived the interest in penalties. So that's what exactly why we felt it was fair because he was in good faith trying to get the tax exam status. And so that's what we felt was fair. And so that's what we felt was fair. Sounds like he could have gotten it if he had, I guess. Let's say all things went well on a private attorney or somebody who had done this before. Sounds like it could have been done right the first time, but there was some good faith effort. I think that was the way I would characterize our decision. Councilor Freeman and Councilor Carpenter, feel free to correct me if you feel. I miss something. I don't know. Unless there's some evidence that the city did something wrong. It would seem we're giving favoritism to this. Applicant. Most of our taxpayers are operating in good faith. Who come to us. And. You know, unless there's an extraordinary inability to pay or circumstance. Or the city is at fault in some way. We don't grant these. We don't grant these type of tax abatements. So unless I hear that the city was at fault in some way here, I will. I think I agree with councilor Freeman and I will not be supporting this tax abatement. I think it's consistent with how we have always treated tax abatements because it's not actually about a taxpayer. Operating in good faith, which most of them are. It's that they have to pay the taxes unless. Yeah, they have to pay the taxes until they don't. Thank you. And just to clarify, I think councilor Carpenter was to speak, but I just want to clarify when I said operating good faith, I don't mean to the payment of the taxes. I mean. I don't mean to the payment of the taxes. I mean, I don't mean to the business structure that would allow that would have allowed both him and the entity to have become tax exempt. So that that's where the confusion. I think he would have qualified earlier. Had had he done it the first time and then there was, you know, What would not be clear to a lot of people. At the beginning of the process that he needed to do at the beginning, which he later ended up fixing. The taxes. Thank you. Thank you, councilor Polino. I've got. Very quickly. Taxpayers who, who make errors in, in the processing. Happen all the time. And I understand that that's acting in good faith, but that is not. But they still owe the taxes. Thank you. And the penalties if they don't pay on time. Right. Okay. I've got councilor Carpenter and then councilor Mason. Go ahead. Councilor Carpenter. I let assessor Vickery. Enter and but it was quite complicated. He came in, I believe, March to the city to ask about. Transferring the ownership to. The city attorney. He had a lease arrangement that he thought in good faith. Would be adequate to shift that turned out the city attorney did not believe that to be the case. Then he. Pursuit some other legal advice. He didn't get that opinion until June. So there was quite a bit of conversation going on about how to make this property. Legitimately. On the behalf of his organization be tax exempt. So I appreciate. The good faith, but it was. It was a complicated. Transfer. He asked for the abatement of the taxes. For the time and then proceeded into the full tax year. We did not feel the taxes should be abated. But there was enough conversation going on. About the transfer of the property and how to legitimately. Do that with his organization that. We felt. Reasonable to abate. The interest of that. But we're not abating the taxes. They've lost a year of their tax exemption. Because the process took them so long. Mr. Vickery did you want to weigh in here? Yes, I can. We've had folks that have asked for tax exemption. Legally tax exempt entities that have asked for exemption. Mid year after acquiring a property. And the past practice has been that they would receive tax exemption at the beginning of the next fiscal year. However, they do have a right to petition to the board of tax abatement as. Manifestly unjust. And this group. This gentleman came and. Talked about their wishes to be tax exempt. And the advisement was, well, you need to transfer the property because you're not. Legally, you're not able to get tax exemption. But the organization would be the religious organization could. So then they began that process. Early on, actually before the fiscal year. But they didn't go about it right. And the advisement from the city attorney's office was. That's the lease is not. It's not transfer of ownership. At least this lease is not. So. They had to transfer the property and these things don't happen overnight. So by the time it was transferred, it was November 22nd, I believe 2019. And they may have made a request. Thinking that, that they are deserving of tax exemption. So it's, it's a little complicated. The city has not done anything wrong here, but is there. Is this a legal issue from the point of ownership. Of the Vermont organization for Jewish education. And or is this a case of manifestly unjust. Because they began the process and it just didn't work out. I'm. That's how I see it. There's no clear answer in this one. Okay. Thank you. Councilor Mason. Thank you, mayor. Before weighing in on the abatement request has the city attorney. Is this truly exempt? I mean, I. I don't know. Okay. So the city attorney has it weighed in on this and it's their view that. I mean, as I'm reading the facts and I appreciate it wasn't, it sounds like he had a house. The only change is it's now owned by someone else. So, but at least the primary use is an exempt purpose. And the city attorney has said, this is fine. Okay. I'm seeing heads not. Sounds a little odd, but I'll. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Councilor Mason that one further factor that persuaded me was that other than at the time that he started applying for the exemption, the taxes have been paid and he had owned it essentially in his name. The rabbi for some time and the taxes were being paid, which he during that time, he technically qualified for the tax exemption. He explained that the reason the property was originally in his name, even though he works for it's essentially through the tax exemption. So, I think the reason why he started this organization owned it is because he took out the mortgage and it was in his name. And he was trying to retain the mortgage in his name. In order to not prevent a refi. And lock in favorable financing requirements. So I felt that that was persuasive. Ultimately, that did not work. I would like to have the tax exemption status, but transfer it to the entity. Okay. Thank you. I am first I'm glad I'm not in this committee anymore. I know these are. Not easy cases and I appreciate it's easy to come in and look at a one page piece of paper after you've sat there for hours hearing the testimony, but I am struggling a little bit with squaring because I remember those cases I was chairing, where other organization had come, CHT came once, where they acquired a property mid-year and we had a pretty firm rule, like no, taxes are set on April one. And if you're not of record owner on that date as an exempt organization, unless some error by the city, we were, you know, not necessarily sympathetic to those claims. I appreciate he was making efforts. I'm, the story I'm hearing is unfortunately, sounds like he was not advised well during that process. It doesn't take that long. If you wanna move property, you know, from one to another, as an attorney who does this, it's, this is not a month long process, you know, it can be done fairly quickly. So unfortunately, I'm not hearing a set of facts and I respect you guys listened to six hours or many more hours of this, but I'm not hearing a coherent reason for why we should vary from what seems to be our other, you know, established precedent where nonprofits have not achieved, you know, as favorable as a result as this committee's recommending. Thank you. Councilor Carpenter, go ahead. Well, just to be clear, they had requested the abatement of the taxes as well. And we said, no, we cannot do that mid-year. You need to pay the full taxes for the year. So it is the abatement, he was, he had the advice that was gonna be tax exempt. He felt like he should get the mid-year thing. And we said, no, we're not gonna abate your taxes. But during the June or July to November period of time, he didn't pay the taxes until it was made clear. No, you've gotta pay him. So that's why we just looked at the interest in penalties. He is paying the taxes for the year. I understood and not to get in a back and forth, but I think the better advice would have been, pay your taxes and then ask for the abatement rather than just don't pay them on the assumption you're gonna get the abatement. So. Okay, thank you, Councilor Mason. Councilor Powell, did you have your hand up? Yes, I just wanted to make sure I understood. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So is there any precedent? I understand that you didn't abate taxes for talking about the interest in penalties. Is there, I guess to assessor Vickery, is there any precedent for us doing that mid-year for someone coming to us wanting to abate the full tax? We don't do that, but offer to meet them halfway by abating, partially abating interest in penalties. Has this happened before? And I'm going back into my history of being on this committee and honestly, I an exempt organization, legally exempt, coming back and asking for exemption of a pro-rated from the time of ownership for the remainder of the fiscal year. I don't remember how that turned out, but it might have been a case a long time ago, 10 years ago. So I'm not much help, I apologize, but I think it's been contemplated and brought before the board before, or the committee before. I can't remember what they did, but following the law, the practice has been, for someone who has not gone before the Board of Tax Abatement has been, yes, you'll be exempt beginning of the next fiscal year. That's been the precedent. All right, yeah, I mean, I don't, you know, if you're, it would seem as though, if you are, you know, familiar with non-profit or exempt for religious organizations, which it would seem that this would be the case, that you would have some, you know, some notion of how some of this works, even if you don't, even before you would go to a lawyer and have this work done. So all right, well, thank you. I appreciate, thanks very much. That's my only question. Okay, thank you, Councillor Paul. I'm remembering that we often do provide the opportunity for people seeking the abatement to address the board briefly if they are in attendance. I'm not sure if the applicant is in attendance and I don't know if, President Tracey, you can help me out there if you can see if there's any one. I don't see the applicant in attendance, but if I'm missing you, if you could just use the raise hand function, I can enable your microphone. Okay, seeing no one taking us up on that, go back to the Councillor. Are we ready for a motion on this item? I just recommended action, but I don't think they're, I'm not sure Councillor Pauli know if you made a motion when you open this. I can make it. Thank you, Mayor. I'll make the motion. It would be to grant a partial abatement of $2,590.88 due to manifestly unjust as the organization was attempting to get a religious exemption, which they ultimately got, but that exemption took some time to get and to arrange the proper paperwork and adopt the findings and reasons for this recommendation. Okay, great. Is there a second for that motion? Seconded by Councillor Carpenter. Okay, so the motion is on the floor now, further discussion or amendments. Okay, seeing none, I think we are ready for a vote. All those in favor of the motion by Councillor Pauli no, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? You got to do roll call. Got to roll call it. Yeah, I just was confirming it wasn't unanimous. So, can I, I will go through the roll just, well, go ahead. Mayor Weiber, I can call the roll. I don't have the roll sheet, so I'll just go by the councillors as they appear on my list. And I'm actually on, Lori's on to take the roll. Okay, great, perfect. Are you ready? We're ready. Just to be clear, so Mayor Weinberger and City Assessor Vickery are able to vote on this. Is that correct? Yes, I understand that, yes. Great, thanks. Councillor Carpenter? Yes. Councillor Jang? No. Councillor Freeman? No. Councillor Hanson? No. Councillor Hightower? Yes. Councillor Mason? No. Councillor Powell? No. Councillor Palino? Yes. Councillor Pine? No. Councillor Shannon? No. Councillor Strongberg? No. City Council President Tracy? The Council President Tracy? I'm sorry, I was muted. No. Mayor Weinberger? No. City Assessor Vickery? No. Three ayes, 11 nays. Okay, so the motion fails. Thank you, Lori. And with that, I believe the full board of abatement of taxes has concluded its business and we are adjourned at 10.43 p.m. I'll hand it back to you, President Tracy. Okay, so recognizing that it is 10.43 and we have not made a motion to suspend our rules, such a motion is in order at this point. Councillor Hanson? Yeah, I'll move that we suspend the rules to complete our agenda. Okay, so we have a motion to just suspend our rules and complete the remaining items, which are committee reports and general city affairs, president update, mayors update? Second. Seconded by Councillor Strongberg. Any discussion? Hearing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? No. Councillor Shannon says no. Okay, so we got to call the roll. If we could, if you could please call the roll on that. Councillor Carpenter? I'm sorry that I'm fuzzing out too, but the motion was to suspend the rules, right? Yep, to just complete the remaining items. Yes. Councillor Jang? Yes. Councillor Freeman? Yes. Councillor Hanson? Yes. Councillor Hightower? Yes. Councillor Mason? Councillor Mason, you're on mute. Sorry, I thought I held the space bar. Yes. Councillor Paul? Yes. Councillor Palino? Yes. Councillor Pine? Yes. Councillor Shannon? No. Councillor Strongberg? Yes. City Council President Tracy? Yes. 11 ayes, one nay. Okay, so that passes, we've suspended our rules and we will continue on with the rest of our agenda. So that brings us to item number eight, which is committee reports. Does any committee chair have a report that they'd like to offer? Okay, Councillor Pal, go ahead. I was gonna, thank you President Tracy, I was gonna actually let committee chairs speak first, but just as a point of reference, President Tracy and I are on Comstat and did have a resolution that we would bring an update to you quarterly. As part of that, consider this the quarterly report. There is no Comstat meeting for the month of December, but the Comstat meetings have continued virtually and even with the departure, unfortunately, of Jackie Corbally, we have continued on with meaningful presentations. The resolution that we passed a few months ago on overdose prevention sites, we did get the legal update from Attorney Blackwood about a month and a half ago. We still have one outstanding item, which is the report on conceptualizing with a budget and just a conceptual idea of what an overdose prevention site would look like in the city of Burlington. That was to be done in consultation with safe recovery, but it really was to be done by the city, by the opioid manager or the mayor's designee. My understanding is that the administration is fairly close to hopefully making a hire to do our best to replace Jackie and hope that that will happen early in the first quarter so that we can get the remaining part of the resolution done. So just wanted to offer that as a report. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Paul. Any other committee chairs wishing to offer a report? Okay, seeing none, we'll move on to the next item, which is city council general city affairs. Anyone have any commentary on that? Okay, seeing none on that, we'll move down to city council president, council updates. I got two updates for us this evening, the first of which is that with the holidays falling as they do, we will need any materials for the January 4th council meeting to be submitted by Monday, the 28th, the end of the day, Monday, end of the business day on Monday. So please by all means get those materials in by that time. If you'd like to have them on there, that applies to department hence as well. If we do not receive materials at that point, it really puts a strain during that period on the clerk treasurer's office. So please have your materials in by that point. I'm gonna be pretty harsh on this just because it becomes very difficult and I don't think it's fair to staff to ask them to do this. We're gonna have to be having, for instance, the clerks are, Lori's gonna have to be working on this on New Year's Eve. So we're gonna be trying to get the agenda out earlier, but just please think of staff in this moment as we deal with this and get your materials in early so that we can really have a smooth process and head into the fourth. And then the next item is has to do with the North Winooski Project. You may remember that we dealt with this the section south of Pearl Street as a part of a resolution in March that we've since seen action on and there's been some pretty transformative work done. What we left undone or what we still have process remaining on is the section north of Pearl Street into the Old North End, the North Winooski sections. So for that, what we had done is identified a parking study as being part of that process. And we're gonna create a committee with that. That committee will be composed of the three members of the two as well as four members of the public. And in that resolution, the council tasked Mayor Weinberger and myself with appointing the members of that, those four community members in consultation with Mayor Weinberger. We selected those four members trying to represent different stakeholder groups. So we in that process have appointed Kelly Dugan from Old Spokes Home, Kirsten Miraman Shapiro representing CHT, which is the owner of the building in which the feeding chitin is housed, Charlie Sizemore who is a business owner of Taco Gordo and then Max Horowitz who is a resident on the corridor. So that gives a little bit of an idea of the cross-section of people that were brought on there and then DPW will be working to get that committee up and running as part of the ongoing work to change North Manuski. So keep it out for that, for additional process steps on that, but just wanted to update you on that appointment, those appointments having been made. And that's also, I'll turn it over to you, Mayor. Thank you, President Tracy. I have just a few thoughts. I did want to touch on our staff as well as we finished this last meeting of 2020. This has been just a remarkable year. This has been noted by so many. It has been challenges unlike anything that certainly I've seen in my time in local government and I think it's unprecedented challenges in local government for generations. I know that we have grappled in this forum with many issues and I want to say thank you to all of you and I know it has not always been easy and we've had our differences, but I also know that we have all worked hard to do the best we can through these unprecedented challenges. I do want to say a big thanks to the city employee team as well. So many city employees have been asked to do things that had not ever previously been considered part of their job before. We've never had, they've never been running support of quarantine programs before. We've never been trying to support senior centers in the way that we have attempted to do through this pandemic. We've never had a constituent service at the resource and recovery center that needed staffing and that 2,000 people would expect responses to. And again, again, city employees have responded to those calls. Many of them have done so by putting themselves at, sorry, Otter is here in the same office doing homework, apologize for the noise. I didn't want to get distracted because I mean, just so sincerely, my appreciation for city employees who have been on the front lines in a very real way of this fight. We've been reminded of that just in, even on tonight's agenda that you approved hazard pay for firefighters EMTs tonight. These are some of the same people that over the last week have been among the first reminders to receive vaccines by we're staggering it by the end of two or three weeks from now, all of our firefighter EMTs should have received vaccinations. I also want to thank the leadership but the department heads, we are a great group of department heads and they've really shown their skill and their commitment and their innovation and their willingness to go to the extra mile throughout this emergency. Again, with them, the challenges for our leaders have equaled that on the front lines and throughout the department. And I just, that is the part of the city team that I most frequently interact directly with and I want to personally thank each and every department head for their service this year. We close this moment in this unusual place in the pandemic where we are facing the toughest weeks, the highest virus infection levels that we faced from the beginning. And at the same time, these vaccinations are starting and I saw a statistic today I just wanted to share here that I think showed the challenge and the promise of this moment and the challenge of it with the pace that we are on by the end of March, one study projects that will have saved about 25,000 lives through the vaccinations between now and then. By in that same time period, if Americans did a better job consistently wearing masks, we would, and wearing them properly and all the situations they should, we would save as a country 56,000 lives more than twice as many people as the vaccinations will save in this period. I think that really shows the importance of remaining vigilance through these months as we're turning the corner here as we start to see the finish line, let's keep our guard up, Berlin, Berlin-Tonians and Vermonters have done such an outstanding job of that from the beginning of this pandemic of all the metro areas in the country we've done just about as well as any of them, not better than any of them. And it's because of the vigilance and the sacrifice and the hard work of the city team and moreover of Berlin-Tonians and people being responding to these calls and doing their part, let's not let this down here as we head into the home stretch. And we're at a key moment of it now as people finalize their plans this week for the holidays. I encourage everyone to listen to the guidance from the governor and the commissioner of health that it's the same guidance as for Thanksgiving. It is just not safe to gather during these holidays with people outside of your household. We, with the news that yesterday, Congress has approved or even, I guess, sorry, I think some of the vote, the deal was yesterday, but some of the votes are happening even tonight. There will be, thankfully, a fresh round of relief resources flowing into Vermont. I wanna remind everyone that I wanna just remind counselors that if you have constituents who are confused or having trouble accessing the benefits that are due to them through unemployment insurance or the Revive PPP program, this is what the Recovery Resource Recovery Center is for us to give people that kind of one-on-one direct assistance if they are having trouble with other areas of government. Please, we continue to have the Resource Recovery Center staff and they are trained up and ready for this new round of questions. And I encourage everyone to think of them as a resource for your constituents in the weeks and months ahead. Finally, just wanna close by encouraging everyone that there is a great way to stay safe during the holidays and during the New Year's holiday in particular. And that is by participating in the city-sponsored highlight that is taking place for a third time this year. It's gonna be a highlight unlike any other year. It is all virtual, all online. It is not just another Zoom call. However, we are gonna have something like 140 different Vermont performers who have responded to calls for entries put out by BCA in recent months. And it is a really neat interface. I got to use it on Friday at this press conference trying to bring attention to this. And I do encourage counselors and any member of the public watching this to consider joining us. The programming starts as it always does right around noon on New Year's Eve and continues through into past the new year. There will be fireworks taking place down on the waterfront, which you don't have to go to the waterfront to see. They will be videoed and shown on this virtual platform, both at live early in the evening and then again at midnight. So with that, hope to see everyone out on the platform of highlight at New Year's and we'll see everyone again soon when we reconvene in 2021. Thank you. Thanks, Mayor. That concludes our agenda. So a motion to adjourn is in order. Moved by Councillor Jiang, seconded by Councillor Pine. Any further discussion? Hearing none, we'll go to vote. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Passes unanimously and we are adjourned at 1058. Have a happy New Year, Councillors. See you on the other side.