 The first thing is to review and approve the agenda. I don't think there are any changes to be made. Any objection to that? Nope. Nope. Okay. So without objection, we will consider the agenda approved. The next thing is general business and appearances. This is an opportunity for any member of the public to work on the agenda. And if you have any questions, you can ask the council, I suppose, to address the council on any matter. Otherwise not on our agenda. And if you would keep your comments about two minutes. And. Say your name and where you're from. Yeah. So anyone has anything they want to say now is the time. Cameron, do you see anybody? No. Okay. Sorry. Welcome. Okay. I think we are, let's say one wants to jump in. I'm going to move on. Okay. So the next piece is the consent agenda. Is there a motion regarding the consent agenda? I'll make a motion that we accept the consent agenda. I'll second it. Okay. Okay. Any further discussion? I just, I don't need to. Pull an item to the light, you know, to not vote on it, but I am wondering. Bill or Cameron, if either you can tell us about the park mobile. Yeah, because that seems like kind of a big deal. Yeah. We talked about that a little bit. I think when we had our parking discussion, it was a little bit of a big deal. I think it was a little bit of a big deal. I think it was a little bit of a big deal. Perhaps within a month or so. Once we've signed this contract. So people will be able to pay. For parking via a mobile app through their phone. So they won't need cash or a credit card on their person. There is a service to charge attached to that. That's all part mobile makes its money. It doesn't cost the city. So we're hoping, you know, there's anyone that's used it before their stickers that they've used it before. So we're hoping to have that done as soon as possible. The other key factor with this is that, you know, we've talked about the limited lifespan of our current meters and the need to upgrade them, given that they're 2g meters and they're being phased out. But in our financial situation right now, we really don't have the capacity to buy new meters. So our plan is if the, if the 2g, system runs out, basically the credit card option would go away, but people could still pay with coins and could use this app instead. As a convenience. So there still would be two means of doing that. You know, obviously we need to replace our meters at some point and as soon as we can financially. Now it's not the time. Thanks for that. And so there's a motion and a second, any further discussion on this? Okay. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. And opposed. Okay. So the consent agenda passes. And we are good to move on. To the social and economic justice appointments. So for that. Committee there, I think there are actually. Seven positions either vacant or up for appointment. And I think we had five applicants. So. I don't see any of them on here. I did get a message from Michael Sherman, which I forwarded to you all saying that he was interested in continuing to serve, but would not likely make the meeting. Is. I suppose if we just, I know we have a couple of appointments to make, but perhaps we can just take them one at a time. Is there a. Any discussion or motion regarding. Yes. Jack, go ahead. I move that we go into an executive session to consider. The appointment of a public official. I'll second it. And just double checking here. Oh, because we have somebody on the line. And so anyway. Are any of the members from or for appointments. For the social and economic justice. Committee want to speak. No one from the committee is here. Okay. So we have a motion and a second. Oh, Lauren, go ahead. I wonder if we should ask if anyone from the design. Committee is here too. So we go into executive session. If you could do it all at once. Yeah, I think that makes sense. Jay, did you have something you want to say? Okay. All right. So. Let's look at the design review committee as well then. Okay. So I'm actually going to get back there. Okay. So for the design review committee. I, we had four positions open. I think we had two applicants if I'm not mistaken. And I don't see either of them on the line either. So. Okay. So. Okay. Okay. Okay. Before you go, Madam mayor, before you go into executive session, how are phoning participants supposed to know when you come out? We'll still be here. And so. With this date again. This zoom isn't going anywhere. So this zoom will still. No, but I'm not. I'm not going anywhere. I'm just on a phone. Right. But you're still talking to the zoom platform. So we'll still be here. Okay. Just hold, hold in the queue. And you'll go into a different meeting. Okay. That is correct. Yep. So we will be back shortly. Back in this same, same call, same zoom. All right. So all in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. No. Aye. Aye. Aye. All right. All right. And opposed. And none opposed. So. We're going to. I'll head to the other call to the, to the executive session call and we will be back soon. Okay. Executive session some moved. Second. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed. I moved to the social and economic justice committee. We appoint Lalitha Mahwaganam, Michael Sherman, Shayna Casper, Julia Chapitz, and Janelle Perry. And to the design review committee, we appoint Eric Gilbertson and Steven Everett. Second. Okay, so motion a second. Any further discussion? Okay, all in favor, please say aye. Aye. And opposed. Okay, well, thanks. Yes, Donna. I just want to make the comment that I would really appreciate the way Cameron lined up all the applicants within the link agenda. It was very helpful. Thank you. Is she here Cameron, did you get me? Yes, she is. Yes, and thank you to all the applicants. Thank you for your service. Time and your dedication. All right, so we are going to move on to the update from MIAC and I think I saw, oh, there's Kate. Hello. I'm just going to turn it right over to you to give us an update. Okay, great. So for those of you who don't know me, my name's Kate Stevenson and I am a member of the Montpelier Energy Advisory Committee. I recently stepped down as chair and handed it over to Amy Gamble. But wanted to do this update because basically what I'd like to present to you today is kind of an update on the municipal energy tracking work that we've been doing and talk a little bit about some of our recent projects with the Energy Advisory Committee and kind of where we're going. So for those of you who are new to the council, you know, the Energy Advisory Committee is exactly that. It's our job is to just advise city council on energy related issues for the city. But we also kind of have tended to do projects above and beyond that as well related to community outreach and education. But for today's overview that I want to give, we are just going to specifically talk about municipal energy use, which is defined basically as like the city owned buildings, fleet and operations. So for these purposes are including the school district and the school buildings as well. So we got a few slides for you to just kind of show you a little bit what we've been working on. So let me just open this up. Everybody see the graph? Okay. Yeah. So great. Just to start out, we've now been tracking municipal energy use for nine years and just finished, we're kind of always about a year behind in getting all the numbers updated. So we just finished updating everything with fiscal year 19, which closed July, 2019. And then we're starting to work on fiscal year 20. And Kelly Murphy, the new finance director has been, I've met with her a couple of times to talk through this process. And you know, it's a lot of work just to gather all the data from all the different city departments and the green bound power and all the different places. But it's worth keeping on top of it, I guess. So now that we have nine years of data, some of these graphs might look familiar. They just have an extra year added on. A couple of big, big picture things that I want you to be aware of is, like I said, we're kind of looking at three big buckets thermal heating, electricity use, and then our feet. So in this one, you can kind of see how those are changing. And with the exception of, you'll see a little blip in 2014. That's mainly when district heat came online. There was like a big increase in oil that year, but then it kind of went back down again. So that's why there's a little peak in 2014, but that's zero by 2030. And, but we still have a ways to go and fuel use because that's what we're really, our goal is about being 100% off of fossil fuels. So when we look at where we're using fossil fuels now and break it down into these building particularly, we have some really good news, which I'm excited about when we look at this graph. So basically, you look at two of the big chunks the district heat utility, which is when we burn heating oil to run the district heat in the summertime and the water resource recovery facility. Those are two huge users of heating oil. And we have projects, basically completed or underway to eliminate a large percentage of the heating oil use in those two facilities. So when we look at this graph a couple of years from now, we're gonna see those two disappear. And the same with union elementary is actually on district heat. And they did buy a bunch of oil for their backup and burn some oil in FY19, but they're not planning on running on oil going forward. So that was also kind of a hopefully one time thing where they went back to buying oil. But it really, the other thing, if you take those three chunks of the pie out, it really helps us focus down on where we need to look over the next 10 years to continue to reduce our fossil fuel use. So the places to really focus are gonna be the high school, the middle school, the water plant. And then to a lesser extent, the DPW facilities at Doug River and then the rec center kind of a big unknown. I think at this point, what happens with the rec center, but it is burning a bunch of oil right now. So anyway, I think, you know, I'm really excited about the fact that we've really made some great progress in producing the fossil fuel use and we're headed in the right direction here. So I wanna tell you a little bit about the net zero revolving lump fund. This was established in 2016 by city council. The city put in $20,000 from a reserve fund into this special fund. And it's to be used for energy efficiency projects on municipal buildings. So some of the recent projects, it took, you know, we started this in 2016. It took us a while to complete some audits and like get some projects lined up. So it was really 2019 and 2020 when we've started to actually get projects checked off of our to do list. So that included insulating the district heat pipes to the fire station, replacing part of the controls on the snow melt system, which basically, you know, melts all the snow in front of the fire trucks outside on the sidewalk. We did a small project to replace storm windows in the DPW building. We did some lighting upgrades in city hall, a big project to weather strip over 150 windows in city hall, which is still getting wrapped up. So that one hasn't gotten fully checked off yet. But, and then we went through and we went through and did weather stripping on all of the overhead doors which were spread around in all the different municipal buildings. So those were some of the projects that we've been working on. And I wanna give a big shout out to Steve Twombly who is our, I think authorized to spend one day a week helping us kind of project manage these projects. So he was really the one coordinating with all those subcontractors and moving these things forward. So if we kind of look at, well, what's the impact been of the revolving loan fund over the last few years? There's two different graphs that come out of the tracking software that we used to measure all of our projects. But with the fully completed projects we've spent over $16,000. And we're seeing out of those projects annual cost savings of over $12,000. So we've already achieved total cost savings of over $21,000 over the couple of years that this has been going and significant energy savings, emission savings. It's really, I think we finally have enough projects completed to really start to see the impact of this. And the way that the fund is set up is that the savings all go back into the fund. But then for two years after that we get 50% of the savings into the fund. And so we're slowly gonna be able to build it up over time. But right now we don't have a lot of projects going because we're kind of waiting for savings to improve back in and trying to identify what the best next projects are gonna be. So there is a revolving loan fund committee that is made up of members of MIAC as well as city staff that reviews any potential projects. And we haven't met in a while. So probably do to get back together and think about what projects you might wanna queue up for 2021. So a couple of just snapshots of good news because we can all use some more good news these days. So the big news with the district heat is that they were able to shut down the summer loop this year and not run the city hall boilers for domestic hot water in the summer. This is something we've been trying to work towards for years and we're super excited that this happened. So there's still, I don't know what the full plan is of whether this is kind of a permanent change, whether it still needs to be turned on in the spring and fall for some shoulder season heating. But if it was shut down entirely it would save about 15,000 gallons of boil every year. But in terms of kind of going forward our committee would really encourage the city to do an analysis of the district heat system. It's been five years in operation now. So we have some data or there is this data out there about the costs and the energy use. But we, yeah, someone needs to collect it all and kind of do some analysis. So we would be happy to help out as a committee but we don't have access to any of that data right now but just think that that is an important next step to be able to think about what this looks like going forward. Quick note on the municipal solar. We are offsetting about 44% of our electricity for the city and the school district combined with our solar array. We have two different arrays. One is down in Sharon and then part of it is here in Montpelier off of Lavraub. And in a lot of ways we can sit back and just let it do its thing. But one of the interesting things about this year is that it's actually been very sunny year. So our solar production is way up and our electric uses way down because of COVID a lot of the buildings that were shut down in the spring and or just changing changes in use have meant that the demand for electricity has gone down over the last few months. So we've actually been, Kelly Murphy and I have been working with the Novus which is the solar developer to start to allocate our solar credits to more different meters. So basically we started out where we took all the solar credits and we were just putting them, throwing them at the wastewater treatment plant at the highest using buildings. But now that we have more credits we need to kind of spread them out more. So that's in process. And then the thing I just wanna flag is that at some point in the next couple of years the city council will need to make a decision about we have an option to buy out the solar array at year seven in our contract. And I don't know exactly what year, where I think we're in year four. So we've got a couple of years to figure this out but hopefully NEAC can help and do some analysis of the cost benefit, whether that makes sense. Whether we would wanna continue with our power purchase agreement or the other option would potentially be to kind of to bond, to buy it out. And there could be potential savings with that but we haven't done all the back. Another good news story is about the police station. And this is specifically about electric use. So at the end of early 2019 the whole air conditioning system was replaced. So they took off the big chillers on the roof that were about 20 years old and put in air source heat pumps throughout the building. And they don't actually use them for heating because they're on district heat but they use them for cooling in the summer. So you can see this is just a snapshot of the electric use. It went way up in the summer. You can see these kind of bumps up in the summer and then we installed the heat pumps last summer. There was, you know, flat line. So 26% reduction in electric use from one year to the next which I think we can attribute directly to the heat pumps. So that was a big project. The act didn't really have much to do with it but we're glad that it happened. And, you know, the biggest project that is ongoing is the wastewater treatment plant. I was able to get a few updates from Kurt and the folks at ESG last week just to kind of make sure that I was up to speed as to where things are. But they are projecting to complete phase one in December for the end of the year and then phase two, which involves the combined heat and power generator that will burn the biogas and produce electricity and heat. That's projected to come online May 2022 so that it's still a few years out. It'll give them time to kind of ramp up the biogas production. But the amount of electricity that they are projecting to produce is really substantial and I just want to make sure everyone understands that. It's twice as much as our solar array, right? So 1.5 million kilowatt hours a year from our solar project. This is 3 million kilowatt hours a year. So it is a whole lot of electricity and we are going to be selling it to green on power for like the highest rate possible. So it's 20.7 cents per kilowatt hour. It's a great rate. It's because they want renewably produced electricity and we get the highest tier in the standard offered program. So the electricity produced is not going to count towards our net zero goal because we are selling it on the open market. So that's just, that's one thing to be aware of but they are expecting that the revenue from the electricity sales is going to be an additional $80,000 a year above and beyond any end because they were able to get a bunch of grants about $5 million of grants. We don't have to go and ask for more money for phase two. Like they already have the funding for phase two. So that's also really exciting. And yeah, I think it does really change the profile of all of our energy tracking. So this is what I've been doing a lot of head scratching over the last couple of weeks, 10 years look like how do we reach our net zero goal? So this is my presentation. It's our energy use to date. The dotted red line shows what we've tracked so far and more of this reduction in oil use like from the district heat summer loop. We're talking about reduced oil use at the wastewater treatment plant. But I think we, but then you see the big spike because to bring in all the organic waste into the wastewater treatment plant it requires a lot of energy to keep that warm to heat it. So it will all be renewable energy. It will be biogas that's used to do it but actually like our total energy load will go up. So it's kind of this, it's a little hard to wrap my head around I know because we're kind of taking what are currently externalities there are things that are happening outside of the city of Montpelier and we are bringing them and we are treating that waste. We are harnessing that waste to produce energy. But by doing that we are also increasing our energy use and increasing our emissions here within the city limits of Montpelier. So I think this is something I certainly want to work on more and trying to figure out how to dial in our projections and we only have, we have less than 10 years now to reach our goal. And we don't have a, aside from all of the good news stories that I told you we don't have a plan yet for how we're gonna reduce the rest of our, eliminate the rest of our fossil fuel use. A big chunk of that has to do with our vehicle fleet and it has to do with fuel switching at those buildings that I mentioned are still, that are still on fossil fuel. So when this topic of the net zero 2030 plan originally went on the agenda, I think we were hoping that at that point a year ago we had applied for a grant to hire a consultant to help us work through this plan. We didn't get the grant. And so we haven't made any progress on our 2030 plan. And so I think kind of as I wrap up, I think that's the question that's a little bit on the table. It may not be open for like a lot of discussion tonight, but it's to figure out how can the city continue to move this forward? There's only limited capacity within the volunteers on the act to take on what is a substantial project. So we need to kind of reevaluate how we can keep this moving forward, but I'm happy to take questions and I'll stop the share and we can see if anybody has any questions. Yeah, go ahead Bill. I actually just wanted to throw on three comments to Kate's before we open up questions. Number one, just to say to Kate and to everyone else that we've already reached out to Evergreen Energy who is our original consultant on the district heat project to do an analysis or giving them some information so they can provide us a proposal. We'd love to have me included in that because we're looking for all sorts of suggestions from them. So yes, we agree. It's time and secondly, just when we're talking about the waste of the water resource recovery facility, I really do want to shout out to MEAC for their leadership on that and also to Kurt Modica in particular for really going above and beyond as a city employee to get the grants and the loans and to help work on the getting the pricing from pre-mount power, all a great job but certainly MEAC. And then finally on net zero, I appreciate it, Kate, bringing that up. I just would remind the council and MEAC that because we didn't get the grant last year we do have $35,000 in the present budget. I mean, we don't have any money period but assuming we have some money, we have $35,000. So we could initiate that project for whatever that will buy and maybe it's a two year project. So we look forward to whatever you think Kate that the group can do with that but because the council did fund it. So those are my three areas of comment. Other questions or comments for Kate? Yeah, go ahead Donna. I just, as always Kate, you present wonderful statistics, data, graphs all readable, understandable. Really, really helps me. Thank you. I really appreciate it. And all your committee members too all your work that you do steadily is very much appreciated. Thank you. Jay? Yes, I'll agree with that. Thank you very much Kate. And sorry for if this is something of an uninformed question but I'm trying to help me understand the relationship that the city has with the school district because obviously the high school and the middle school are too big pieces of the pie. So are we working together with them? I understand that in terms of ownership and et cetera, but management, I just wanna have a better understanding of how that's all happening. Thanks. Yeah, that's a great question Jay because I would say historically there hasn't been a lot of communication between MEAC and the school district. We have one member Ken Jones who is a longtime school board member. So he has kind of been our liaison of sorts between the school board and our committee. And so last year, I think it was last year, maybe it was longer than a year ago when they brought on a new facilities director, we went and met with him. And then we, Ken and I actually went and made a presentation to the school board, I guess last summer, sorry to remember, but to try and reach out. And I think one of the initial things that we were asking for is basically to ask the school district to adopt the same net zero 2030 goal that the city has adopted. As far as I know, no action has been taken on that, but that would be one small step, I think, to start to collaborate with the school district. And I do think that there is opportunity for we can really lean on efficiency Vermont and their services for retro commissioning, all the schools, which is basically kind of like an engineer's deep dive into the heating and ventilation systems to make sure that they're operating properly. So that is kind of what was our recommendation to the school's facilities director. And I don't have it heard whether any action has been taken on that. That's kind of the next step. Go ahead, Lauren. First of all, just thank you so much, like totally agree, great information. And I think it's very exciting and impressive how much work MIAC has gotten done. So kudos to all the team. I know a lot of people put a lot of effort into those projects. And so thank you for all of that. Definitely wanna like follow up on the net zero planning. And maybe this is something I know MIAC is doing some kind of like planning meetings over the next month or so. So thinking about, if we have less resources than we thought, does it make sense to do a deep dive into one of the sectors or some other approach. So definitely wanna close the loop on that and figure out how we move forward and have that plan in place. Knowing as you said that the clock is ticking to really get to the 2030 goals and things that I'm sure will take time to put in place. So looking forward to that and hope we can keep this on our agenda in the coming weeks. And the only other thing I wanted to mention was the, well, one thing you brought up the school and the ventilation. I know that the school kind of tied in with the COVID stuff, the facilities director, at least at Union Elementary has been working with efficiency of Vermont on a big ventilation project. So I don't know if that, they might have had different goals than what you described. But I know that there has been work and they've been getting grants and some other things. So there might be some progress there to check in on. And other thing I wanted to note today that Vermont House passed the Global Warming Solutions Act poundingly 102 to 45. So there's still the governor's process and what happens after that. So some hoops to jump through but if that does go into a place that is setting targets for the state that we will have to hit by 2025, a 26% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and ratchets up from there. And that sets up a climate council and planning process. So just thinking about how the city could plug into that council and planning and being a place for innovation and collaboration. And we've been doing this a lot and with the micro transit project and other things, where could we pilot good ideas and or there could be more? Obviously there's gonna be tough budget times but with this commitment that the legislature is making possibly resources for programs and other things to actually hit those goals. So just noting that for people. So obviously we can kind of keep that in mind and be participating in that as a city, I hope to make the most of it and figure out where we could be kind of a place we could model things and put into practice to help meet our own net zero goals. Thanks. Any other comments or questions? I have a comment, Matt, mayor. Go ahead there, Stephen. I just in the sense that the revolving loan fund might have available funds. I know that later in the discussion of moving back into city council chambers, I think some heat recovery ventilation or that council room will exhaust the potentially contaminated air and recover the heat as it brings in fresh air. It may be a timely project for use. It is an energy efficiency model. So I just suggest that. And if you could find a way to capture revenue off the sewer gas coming out of its state in Maine, that would be valuable too. Great, thank you. Interesting projects to consider. Any other comments from or council or the public? Kate, I am so grateful for you and your work with the committee. I am just curious as to, I mean, I know you've put in a lot of time and Kelly has put in a lot of time into putting these numbers together. And so I guess I'm curious as to like, how doable is putting these numbers together? I'm so grateful for you, but if you were to decide, okay, I'm gonna do something else. I'm not gonna do this again next year. Is Kelly gonna be able to do it or how easy would it be for someone to step in and run these numbers for us? I will say we haven't fully successfully made a transition to having it done by city staff, partly because Todd left and Kelly was coming in and also what I didn't present to you, what was all the greenhouse gas emissions part of this, because I haven't had the time to work on those numbers and the conversions and all of that. So there is a lot more work to be done. Yeah, I think we should have an energy coordinator position and this would be a big piece of what I would expect they could work on. But right now, yeah, it is a lot of time and it's a lot of chasing things down and I don't know that there's a, we now have like a good place to store all of our data, but you still have to collect it from dozen different places. So yeah, there's room for improvement there and if I get hit by a bus, I don't know who's going to pick it up and rub it then. Yeah, fair enough. Donna, do you have a... On that point, Mayor, maybe we should send her some chocolate or flowers just to keep her really motivated. So grateful, so grateful. Yeah, and I do feel like if we're going to continue to make progress and not necessarily even just for municipal operations as we're starting to solve big chunks of our fossil fuel usage within the city, which is really encouraging if I recall, from your first slide or a second, we're at about 40% renewable right now, which that's remarkable. That is amazing. And I think we have a 2050 goal for the whole community and that's going to, we need to start working on that if that's going to be realistic. So yeah, I agree. So thank you again for all your work and we're going to continue to chip away at this. So any other comments from the council or the public? Okay, all right. Thanks again, Kate. Thanks for agreeing with me. Thanks, Kate. Okay. All right. So next up is the personnel plan. This has been on the council's radar anyway for a couple of years now, I think, or maybe just the year, Fall Park, but anyway, I'm going to turn this over to Bill to talk about. Thank you. And I believe Tanya Chambers, our HR manager is on the call as well. So this is really just an update of an overhaul of the personnel policy, personal plan as we call it. The last one, the last was overhauled and adopted was in 2007. And over the years as things have come up, we've realized needs to update it, change it, modernize it and make it reflect. And through a variety of fits and starts, we didn't really get good momentum and other things got in the way. But I think a year or so ago, we engaged a really active group of city employees from all departments of non-union. This is primarily for non-union employees. And they really, we just went through it from top to bottom, got almost done, a couple of personnel changes, a couple of things came up. Then COVID hit. But we finally managed to get really, from the beginning to the end with all the changes and then circulated them all around to the interested parties a number of times, got feedback changes. I really tried to be as thorough as we can, have as much employee involvement as we can and also to reflect our current standards and values. And this is really it. The reason the document is not in strike out is we've made so many changes that it was really it became easier for us to work off of a clean document and strike out so I think we're going to hard to read, but Cameron did a really nice job putting together a summary of the changes I think those really hit. They're on a huge amount of really substantive, substantive changes, just clarifying policies, making sure things represent the way we actually do things, making sure it uses more modern language and making sure it reflects things. So we're, I think as a whole, we're very happy with this. We're very happy to have reached this point where we present it to you for approval and we certainly hope that you'll approve it. I'm happy to answer any questions. Any questions about the policy, Jack. Thanks, Bill. I was thinking about section 15, the workers comp section or work related injury leave. Can you explain how that works the way it's now proposed? Fortunately, I can see that Tanya has already unmuted herself. I'm hoping. I would share my video, but my bandwidth here would make it impossible for you to hear or see me. So I apologize for that. What I did with updating the workers comp section was to provide very specific procedure for employees. So I'm going to talk about how quickly they need to report an injury, who they need to report it to, and then what to do with that information once it's reported. Thanks. The question I was really wondering about is. The city will continue to pay the injured worker by way of the injured workers leave time and then the company, the city would be reimbursed. Is that. A way of. We would pay the difference of the workers comp benefit and their average weekly wage. But we do that really. For clarity by using their sick leave and we continue to pay them. On a bi-weekly basis of 80 hours using their sick leave. And when their workers comp check comes in, they sign it over to us and reimburse their sick leave back at 60%. So it's, it's, we, it's doing the same thing by giving them 100% of their regular pay, but it was clarity on how we do it, which is the way we've always done it. Just didn't exactly reflect the way. We do it based on the way it read. Okay. Thanks. Thank you. Other questions. Connor and then Dan and then Don. I just want to say, no, I've been a thorn on this one, but just want to thank Bill and Tonya and everybody worked on it. I think like, yeah, if you don't have a union contract, this is an extremely compassionate. Personnel plan here just explicitly spelling out just cause protection, things like that. You know, or things other public workers don't have in other places. I wonder if we could talk a little bit more of the one, one piece. I feel a little uncomfortable about that was added. Was. The credit check piece for certain employees. I know that is a way that you can look to see if there's a history of embezzlement or something, but. You know, there have been a lot of, credit checks for new hires, you know, that credit can be a sign of like previous unemployment. It can be, you know, medical debt. Usually have children at disproportionately impacts people of color. So yeah, I think I'd like to just hear a little bit more about that. I can maybe see like very specific positions like, you know, finance director or something. That would be broader than that or interpreted as broader than that. So I'd like the language really tight on it. So. Tony, did you. That's very fair. I think it is only, we only do that for finance positions. So I think it's fair to tighten that up and identify that. Thank you. Yeah. No, it's definitely not something that's broad, broadly done, except for people that are going to be directly working with money. And managing, you know, that there's a potential fraud risk. And I think we just put it in because, because we do it, we didn't want to exclude it. Then have someone say, you know, you never said you can do it. I think I certainly, I mean, you know, issue if you wanted to approve this with the condition that we amend it to include finance, financial positions only. That's all that's all we do. That would be okay. Okay. That's good. So I was thinking like, okay, do we need to like hammer out language? But if it's just with a condition that I think, you know, supplies to financial positions that that makes sense to me. Dan, go ahead. Sure. But when you say finance positions, that would be okay. I mean, I think we need to have a better understanding of the, better understanding of the financial positions. So Dan, go ahead. Sure. But when you say finance positions, you don't just simply mean the finance department. It would be any department that handled. Money. Okay. Any position, right? Yeah, I mean more specifically would be the finance director, the staff accountant, the senior staff accountant, somebody who's probably the. The clerk. The manager of the finance department. I think it would be an important factor for a new employer to hire a new treasurer. So it would be for the positions that specifically handle money. Okay. I had a question about the social media review. Just because I didn't see any, any detail as to how that social media and then it's in the same section about it. About hiring. One, right now and two is you know what kind of standard are you looking for in using that type of review and hiring process? I'm wondering if Cameron if you could answer that better than I could. Yeah I can jump in though I think again it depends on the position right so for some there'd be almost none or virtually none for positions that are going to represent you know say a department head position or you know city manager's office or something like that. We will look at whatever public social media you know Google and some of it quite frankly my thought on that is the rest of the public has access to that the press and everybody else I want to be able to see what's there before anybody else does to understand if there's anything I need you know should I ask about or be concerned about or if this is just a person to represent themselves in a way that you know would work well with the city so it's part of you know unfortunately it's just part of the public profile is you know it's kind of a way of checking references but we don't do that we'd say you know I don't believe I shouldn't say this absolutely but I don't believe we do this with DPW employees or you know those kind of things it's really positions that are going to be in the public eye. Okay but if this we'll go ahead camera. Sorry I was just going to add another layer of discussion about that is that we do have you know an internal social media policy that this sort of aligns with just saying in there that you know you can't be saying things online that are like spamming or like something that could be constituted threats or hate speech those are things that we'd be looking for just in general things that don't align with our city values that we've established internally as staff. And is this something where you know you're just looking for what's publicly available in social media that you're not asking applicants to give you to either friend you or to reveal private accounts. Yeah that's where I was I wanted to make sure for you. Yeah okay all right yeah and obviously that all comes with the difference camera in between like you know somebody who's doing something that might be considered against our social media policies or hate speech versus just simply expressing political opinions that might not be popular you know with others. And so you're really looking for that kind of that that more extreme where somebody really has an issue that would create an issue for the city once they became a representative of the city. That's fair enough okay thanks. And again it's something we've been doing and we felt it was important to write it down so it was there people right there for all to see. Donna and then Connor. Okay thank you I was interested also in the social media presence and you answered that question but back to the policy I didn't see a policy statement here did I miss it is it in the personnel or is it a separate policy that Cameron remember? The social media policy is a separate document I apologize that you didn't get and we'll make sure that we get a copy out. I do want to mention too that we did have an attorney review the social media policy for legality so we were very careful with our language. It would be helpful to know and I appreciate you having it I think it's important that we do it but you want to you know do it right. Other questions? Yeah absolutely yeah just small things like you talk about professional development do employees come back do they do a report do they share with other people what they learn so there's sort of a ripple effect of their training. So all of the above depends on the training rates of some we send people so they can come back and then specifically train other people others they provide a report of what they've done others it's so that they could go back and be better specifically what they're doing it might be something more specific so you know we when when someone goes to training we try to identify what the outcome what the goal is. So it's case by case. Right it's can you know really depends on what the skill is right so say I'm gonna simplify this but we've done this in the past say we've had people that just weren't good writers and it was important to be able to write so we'd send them to a writing class well we don't really expect them necessarily to make everyone else a good writer the idea was to improve their writing for their job. Yeah yeah well and then I guess you'd incorporate it to encourage them that indeed you see results right I mean you have to use it as well as they have to use it great. A question about the accumulated somewhat is the term for both your sick time and your vacation time. Vacation time is capped at 35 I think 35 days per year per year so so that means I can't earn any more than that or I can't accrue any more of that by not using it. You can't earn any more than that in a year but you can accrue and there's a cap on the accrual. It's based on the years of service the cap on the accrual is based on years of service but for somebody who is a city employee for 14 years or more are capped at 320 vacation hours. Right now but when they let's say I mean one of the things that happen is some of our employees didn't use their vacation time and they accrued a lot so I was also looking at just what was the max of the accrual and I didn't see it in here but maybe it's separate I can get that from Bill that's true. I believe it is in there. Okay so you have to use it or you lose it kind of situation. Up to a certain non-max. Right up to the max you can accrue and roll every year up to the maximum based on your years of service. Oh okay so I could end the year with all 35 days saved. Oh and then yes and then the next year I couldn't have more than 35 days left. Is that right? So with the maximum of 35 days is the maximum amount of hours per month that you accrue based on years of service so somebody who just starts earns eight hours a month and then after seven years sorry. No no I really you explained that earlier I really did understand your point about the difference on what they accrue dealing with how many years they're there but no matter what they accrue on a monthly basis at some point usually there's a cap where you can't carry over into the next year and I just didn't see it mentioned in here that's all so that so you can have a total cap of the amount so finally mentioned 320 hours that's 40 days of vacation cap so that's what you can have so if you use over that you lose it so you can either carry if you can carry it forward to next year but you can't get more than that so if you keep adding more but that's the amount that the city's on the hook for if you leave and we have to pay out right right and likewise there's 960 hours for six time six time so that's also capped that's correct that's capped but we also don't pay that out and that's right they can't take it with them right okay and one other question I was glad to see giving some money to the parks and recreation but I was wondering how you calculated $225 because that's what the union contract provides for those types of benefits and they have similar kind of labor work and so it was just in inequity that we're we're providing those kind of I was thinking one pair of shoes one pair of pants and one shirt that's it well that's essentially what it is but it's it was just you know they're doing comparable work they're getting dirty they're you know they're told shoes or whatever and no I thought it was very small I was glad to see they were getting something so thank thank you for getting it done thank you Connor and then Jack and then Lauren yeah just one thing it was a little unclear when I was reading it it's uh we're not considering all city employees covered under the Hatch Act right only ones whose positions are fully or partially funded by federal dollars right well so the city hear your question it's about the Hatch Act all city employees because the city generally receives federal money that isn't necessarily applied to specific um employees so we've we've applied it we've basically said all employees should be exempt from sort of political activity can we do this if like federal money isn't going to their salary I mean it's this is all been reviewed we weren't told you couldn't I you know well I mean I think I think with the Hatch Act if it's if there's any federal money that comes to the city you know they can't necessarily say you non federally employed person can't do this but they can sort of set and saying we'll withdraw our money if any city employee violates the Hatch Act kind of thing we're going to blanket for the entire city receiving the funds is that is that your understanding will that's how we've managed it yeah I just know like state government you know if positions were completely funded by the general fund you would have some state employees who were not covered under the Hatch Act so I don't know how the state manages their budget you know for us we have revenues in the we have general fund revenues that are federal revenues so there's no you know they're offsets to our budget they're not necessarily for certain specific positions so um that's how we've handled this I'm flipping through here trying to find that specific provision but that's generally how we've how we've you know we I mean we've never really had a problem Jack and then Lauren thank you I was just going to answer Donna's question the uh maximums uh because I I didn't find this at first either the the salary or a vacation time accrual is on page 12 under subhead a there and it lays out the maximum which goes up with the with increasing tenure up to a max of 40 days so so it is there you're welcome yeah I saw the that accrual okay thank you thank you okay uh Lauren yeah thanks um and overall I I think it looks great and it's great to have it I know it's been on the plate for a long time so great to see um one thing I just wanted to note was um with the creative discourse the social and economic justice um you know process that's going on one thing that did come up was that often looking at hiring practices personnel policies and things are something that I would imagine I I wouldn't be surprised if they wanted to look at that and you know see if there's any you know the way Connor uh flagged the the credit scores can be an equity issue or or other thing so um nothing you know that's jumping out to me and some of it might be the way things are implemented less than the personnel policy itself um but just just noting that you know if if that group comes up with anything you know obviously we can come back to the council with any suggestions or recommendations um in the future um but I know that that's you know often a place that those processes will will want to look at how we're hiring and treating employees and in equitable ways um so just noting that um was curious um with this new kind of remote world we're in I saw that there's still a mention of remote work for weather but no other has this is a city thinking at all about like allowing any employees to do remote work for positions where that would be feasible for some portion of their time or is that not really yes we are and um you know that probably could be addressed just even in the time since we've started started this um you know we certainly have done it this year successfully in some cases and most successfully in others um so I think the assignment of you know if a person can work remotely they're still subject to these rules and regulations I think we were just offering in that particular case it was sort of if there's a snow day and you can't come in you have this option but it doesn't in my mind preclude that option any other time and I would suspect now that we're all more savvy at using this technology that on snow days and other days um people that would have otherwise just said hey I can't come in may find themselves you know working half a day or whatever taking you know same thing with like sick kids or something you know before it was just I'm out now oh you know if they're sleeping I can do a couple hours of work so you know we tend to be as flexible as we can with that I think the other thing to just your earlier point one of the things we looked at when we went through was certainly looking for anything that might be biased but you know we would welcome any additional view on that we also tried to change all our language to a more restorative language as opposed to real disciplinary language but you know these are long-standing practices that have history so you know we're trying to evolve that so we would certainly welcome any feedback whether you know some of them may be actual amendments to the policy which we can do anytime I mean council can anytime because we can recommend them anytime and the others may just be under you know talks about like hiring for example just as the manager could set a hiring practice and I could see you know with a couple of our hires this year we cast our net wider than we had before we reached out to you know some minority publications and you know different types of platforms to try to see if we can get different types of applicants so you know yes we love that feedback thanks only other thing just noting and I don't think no change in proposing tonight but just like family leave you know I wish the state had passed a much more generous program than we have I would love the city to be doing more not you know bringing that up tonight I know that would be a big policy discussion but just you know for all of us in our in our state and country I wish we had much more generous family leave and so ongoing conversation that we agree although interestingly enough it was actually quite a robust conversation amongst our staff and surprised at how many people women um were not supportive of that they were like no this is good this is what you know we're fine I was a little bit surprised by it so what we have is what the group came up with okay any other comments or questions okay is there a motion regarding this revision to be personnel policy and I think there was perhaps some conditions there so Jack go ahead I move that we adopt the personnel policy subject to the uh this question and recommendation made earlier about uh credit checks oh second okay there's a motion in the second any further discussion this one Tanya she worked really hard in this not only in the committee but sifting through all the things and she's not someone who gets a lot of air time here at the council meeting but she's really one of our internal unsung heroes I'm glad you can see the you know the advantage of the product of her work Cameron jumped in a lot Sue Allen did a lot of this before she left but really you know this all fell at the end on Tanya and so thank her for her work yeah this is great yes thank you Tanya and and all the the folks who worked on it um all right any further comments uh Donna well I also want to thank Tanya and apologize that underneath the the table of content there is a list of all those policies but on my computer I just screened right by it but you list all of them so thank you that's very helpful to know and I wanted to apologize at all I wouldn't send Tanya a chat but it's disallowed so is there reason Cameron why we can't have a chat key um I keep chat features off because if uh if we had a huge room it'd be hard to monitor but also all of those are public record and I'm not saying that it's not fine to have a public record it's just an additional public record okay that's it that's all right I just had to interrupt a thank or that's okay thank you thank you okay any further discussion all in favor please say aye hi hi hi and opposed okay well thanks again for all your work on this and it's been uh you know a long process to get here I'm so grateful um thank you for supporting us yeah all right so um it's I think we're up to the winter parking option discussion by the way I'm sort of aiming to take a break at uh 8 30 or so but we are making good time so far just great um so for this am I turning it over to it looks like perhaps Zach and Donna are on the same line there or is it or am I turning it over to to Bill either way you can turn it over to me but it's going to go straight to Zach and I don't know if I don't yet Donna's there too and it looks like probably Tom's in on this too so awesome so DPW I will say just to introduce that you may recall last winter we had some discussions about amending the um about amending the uh policy and of course we had a lot of pushback so DBW spent a fair amount of time looking at options and there so they're proposing something that we have not done before so like you know hear them out and give them their feedback because we you know if we're gonna make a change we need to publicize it and you saw that they have a communication change so anyway with that I'm going to turn it over to them thanks um so Zach and I hope everybody can hear me um Zach and I will go through this with you tonight um we're here to discuss obviously how we handle winter operations um in any given year we'd be sitting here talking to you about winter operations this year it's a little bit different and we are feeling that given a variety of set of circumstances that we need to propose a really different approach to how we're going to handle the winter operations and why is it different it's different because of COVID it's different because the department's staffing is down by six positions it's different because of the city's budgetary concerns moving forward and the amount of overtime that has typically been accrued by our staff which we feel is necessary under the previous procedures for clearing snow but which puts us in a position especially with a smaller roster of individuals to do that work this year in a situation that could be um well it could be a situation in which people are working way too many hours and it's our responsibility to avoid that kind of situation um so winter months it's an all hands on deck situation um there's never a snow event in which um we can mobilize our team and have people who are at home resting and so I think that becomes um a directive to us to not only maintain safe roads but to maintain safety for the people who are clearing those areas um so as a result we've come to the conclusion that we really need to modify the status quo that's existed and we looked at a variety of different ways to go about that and we're going to present a different option as Bill had said for snow removal it's identified in your packet as option b alternating side parking van um some of you um having taken a look at this may recognize this or may feel as if you um seen this or had um exposure to it because it's successfully it's a process that's successfully used in burlington and while around the northeast there aren't a sizable number of communities who use of it um there are community other communities who use it we think it's a pretty easy system for people to understand um and to comply with once they get accustomed to it and that is different from what's happened in the past so in its simplest form residents simply park um the side of the street with even numbers on one day and odd numbers on another day and there becomes a schedule of maybe monday wednesday friday it's even numbers tuesday thursday saturday and sunday it's odd numbers whatever it is we set that up and that stays in effect for the entire winter so while there may be initially some confusion about which day is which we'll have um deployed adequate signage and we'll be reinforcing that pattern of behavior for the entire season i think it's easy to remember cars will be required to move or park during a standardized time um this will allow us not only to clear snow from the space that cars are driving in but allows us to get close to to the accumulated snow banks which often cause us to be required to close streets for a particular night so that we can call in additional equipment and we can clear those snow banks we will be regularly in a position where we can keep that additional work to a minimum no matter what level of snowfall we experience i think that will be appreciated not only by our department but it's much better safety standard for residents because when the snow starts to fall into the street and snow banks get high there are pedestrian issues as well as parking issues for all of our residents and visitors um i think that the practice of shifting streets i think i know that we've decided that the practice of shifting um parking from one side of the street to the other um will just create um a very easy to understand system that is effective not only for us it diminishes potentially overtime accumulation um and results in clearer streets in general um i think that the downsides of this that we have to address and we've brainstormed and will seek additional input on are how do we message this kind of change um what level of communication do we need um do we have a period of time where we're adjusting to that and we're going to um accommodate some unusual situations um there are some concerns um by police that the timing that we'll need to have for this is slightly off what they would prefer but we did meet with them we talked it through they're willing to cooperate with us um if the council is willing to move forward with this kind of recommendation so Zach has been our guru on this um and he's investigated he's worked um it through we've worked collectively with um deputy director curt modica um on this as well and so i'm going to turn this over to him to um give much more specific details and then we'll open it up for questions all right um so first of all as donna mentioned um this year uh we're in very different times than we've been in in previous years um staffing is a very big concern so we really had to think rethink about how we are going to approach this winter um it has been a problem uh dealing with the winter ban and actually being able to clear the streets um so we have tried to uh really wrap our head around uh a proposal that we feel that would work for our operational needs um so to begin um i'm just going to go over some highlight points of what we are proposing um and then i have a map prepared that we can take a look at and if there are specific areas we can have a little bit of a conversation and look at some of the individual or site specific concerns that we may have um so first of all by incorporating an ultimate side winter parking ban um we take all of the cars and we put them on one side of the street and what that does is that it allows us to be able to get to clean the other half of the street well um in past practice when there's a car that is blocking the street on either side of the road it takes about 60 to 70 feet the taper outside of around the car get past the car and to get back to the curb line so for every car that we come across in winter event you have six 60 to 70 feet of roadway that you cannot get to and what that does is it requires us to alter our um our routes we have to go back to areas um and see if the cars have moved um and a lot of the times they have not yet so we're going back to the same streets multiple times just to check to see if we can now address that area um and it really turns into it really snowballs and residents call and say why haven't you gotten here yet and there we have we're responding to we're reacting to citizen complaints and not being proactive in our approach about how we deal with winter operations um so a few points um we would ask cars to switch sides between the hours of 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. on any given day the downtown area where there is currently parking meters and parking on both sides would people would be allowed to park during the daytime on both sides of the street so it's kind of an exemption to what we're talking about but we recognize that you know the downtown business is everywhere where there's a parking meter we need to be able to allow people to park um so that would still be allowed at 10 p.m. if you were park if between 5 and 10 p.m. if you were on State Street you would be asked to move to the other side of the road the right now for the purposes of this conversation we've outlined the parking area as the downtown it's really the exemption area which is only where there's parking meters there are a couple instances where we may want to expand the zone a little bit and we'll get into that when we talk about when we actually take a look at the map I just want to point out that there are many streets as it happened last year where we had to go out and put no parking signs and people weren't able to park on either side of the street which was is when no one can park on the street it's even worse of a scenario we can't we one can't maintain the street two people can't park there and three they have to be it has to be posted for no parking just so that emergency vehicles can pass through there was a time last year when we had the majority of Berry Street Liberty Street Hubbard and Loomis all had no parking signs out and it was to the point last year that we had to go make 200 signs just so that we could keep putting signs out because all of our all of our current no parking signs were already deployed so it's those type of issues that we have that takes a lot of time for us to adjust and in order to deal with the winter operations so with that being said I want to I want to share my screen and show you guys the map and then we can start looking at specific areas and looking at some of the data I do want to know that we have we went out and did parking counts over the last couple of days to gauge how many people are utilizing on street parking on any given time and on any given day prior to the winter season coming Cameron can you allow me to share my screen I'm working on it sorry okay you should be able to now you should be good just use the green square there you go this is taking a second can everyone see my screen yeah so we I do want to acknowledge that there are a lot of area areas in streets that have ordinances that are that need to be revised that there are a lot of kind of conflicting language within our ordinance we have started to go through each individual line street by street and trying to develop consistency within the ordinance I find that the ordinance as it reads right now would be is very hard for the general public to follow if you lived on any street it's their streets listed two three four times in the ordinance so what we did is we the blue indicates it is odd side parking so on an odd calendar day you park on the odd side of the street and the green indicates even calendar day even side of the street so today is the ninth if this was in December we would be parking on the odd side of the street which is indicated in blue what we went and did is we looked at the parking need so when we evaluated over a period of three separate counts we logged 42 cars along Berry Street now when we take a look at available parking whether it's one side or the other if you take if you add up all of the blue section you have more than 42 spaces if you add up all the green section you have more than 42 as well so we've gone through and looked at the majority of streets and tried to find where this wouldn't work and we're really not finding a lot of areas that this type of approach would not work for us I do want to say that there are other streets that wouldn't by allowing alternate parking we'd probably free up additional spaces that wouldn't typically be used at points in time there are streets on our no overnight list that people cannot use or shouldn't be using per ordinance and we feel that by alternating we can have where you can actually provide more available spaces on any given day so with that being said I will show you these this brown or light brown color here that you see is the outline of the parking meter zone so everywhere where the city has parking meters that zone which I guess the easiest thing to call it is a parking meter zone is outlined in the brown so those would allow if there were on State Street if you had a two-sided parking people would be allowed to park any throughout the day up until 10 p.m. on either side of the road if I can interrupt there so at 10 p.m. then they would be required to move to the correct corresponding calendar day side of the street is that correct yes and then so the the the question that we've always had to deal with is when parking overnight how do you how do you craft that and the way that we have wrapped our head around it right now is that you park on the same side as the same calendar day unless you plan to be parking overnight and then you need to park on the opposite side of the street and there's not really a great way to message that but it's it's something that we feel is with you know with enough messaging that it really shouldn't be too big an issue it's similar to our parking lots except for I find that it's probably a little bit cleaner at least for me to understand are there other types of questions are there things that we that people would like to discuss one area that I had anticipated we would need to talk about is school in Loomis especially with the high use of people that utilize school street and then the portion of Loomis for drop-off to UES we would be we would be open to extending this brown metered zone down school street and on Loomis to up to Liberty which would not impact the newly approved plans that allowed for additional parking on Loomis for a few residents with the school changes that we have if I can can you can you just tell us a little bit more about that why might we be considering extending the brown zone down Loomis etc so this is one of the few areas that with teachers and the amount of people that are coming to UES on a daily basis we figured that there there may be an additional need so we would be open to extending that area on school street and down to Loomis it has a really high volume of daytime parkers so by if you would only allow one side of the street there we may be pushing a lot of people into the outlying streets Harrison Avenue St. Paul and other areas oh I see what you're saying so yeah um so because for the rest of the like the non-brown area the parking is banned for one side of the street all day is that that's correct right yes so like Liberty Street any given day you would be parking on either the even side or the odd side right yeah that's that would probably be a change for people to process because they're used to parking anywhere they want during the day and that a ban applies at night because that's when so gets cleaned up but that wouldn't necessarily need the case um with this plan yeah we're trying to allow for more clearing of streets during our operational window that we're here right because right now the way that it is we have between the hours of 1 a.m. and 7 a.m. if we call a ban or we've just kind of deal with it as is and go around cars and kind of make the best of a scenario that's not really that that great um if anyone has traveled down Liberty Street on any given day regardless of snow you can't really pass two-way traffic I mean if there's cars on both sides of the street you're stopping you're pulling over and you're allowing a car to go um so there's already a need there regardless of winter um but this is something that you know I think for emergency access for a lot of the complaints that we deal with this could be this could greatly help us um it makes sense to me that it would be uh that we would extend it around um Loomis or so for the sake of the elementary school there um that makes sense to me I'll but I'll I see other people have things I want to say so Dan and then Lauren did you have a hand race and then Jay okay yeah go ahead so a couple of questions um if I'm understanding correctly so on on sections of street where like for example St. Paul that you have up where there's only parking on the um the blue side would would the would the parking be allowed on the opposite side on those on those days or would it just simply be no one could park on St. Paul street on on green days so that's what we're doing right now going through the ordinance is we're most a lot of streets we feel that we could swap the parking on one side most streets right now are set up that the parking is on the sidewalk side so um in in most areas it's right adjacent the parking is right next to the sidewalk um there are a lot of streets like St. Paul that I don't we don't see any site obstructions any real issue for swapping the side of the street for to allow parking so in this instance we would probably allow um there would be right now it's not written per the ordinance that you can that parking is allowed on the other side of the street um but as part of this revision we would look at um adding in green spaces um along that street okay so so where it was where it was possible and I guess I would come up contrasting Paul street would say cedar street where one side of cedar street is non sidewalk sort of just hill hillside you wouldn't want to allow people to park on you wouldn't create a blue parking where there's no sidewalk on the other side of the street I mean we looked at we specifically looked at cedar street and looked at whether it was feasible or not to put cars on the other side and it's just it's not really um on that street I mean it's it's very narrow we put all of our snow on the hillside anyway um so you'd be asking people to open a car door with a passenger into a snow bank um we didn't feel that that was a really a good an area that that system would work in uh but everywhere that we can we're we're looking at um you know providing additional opportunities for the alternate side okay and um I guess that would you know and I don't want this early street by street but so that that's a general plan is to any street where it's possible to add even if it doesn't have parking now under this plan you would you would adopt parking or we would adopt parking uh on opposite sides so the cars would just simply switch back and forth given the day yes that that is correct okay so how much signage do you think this is going to require to sort of notify because it strikes me to be on the question of um of educating and sort of getting this out through public notice you know there's going to be a lot of necessary signage to denote that you can't park on this side of the street on these these type of days or you know to denote that they're the parking switches yeah so I mean the one the one good thing is that um in a lot of areas by adding or clarifying with one sign or two signs um you'd be able to to make the switch um but yes it would require us to evaluate how many signs um we do have the capability to to do that all in house and we would utilize um all the existing posts that we could so we wouldn't have to do new installs um but that is when we're going through each street one by one we're looking at um how does the ordinance read and what would have to happen to signage um okay um and then um would this be would this follow the same sort of seasonal pattern as the old or the existing uh pattern from like November 15th through or November 1st through the through the end of April or or sorry March 15th or so or would this would you be looking at a different timeline for this um so right now we're only discussing in the same timeline so November 50th April 1st um it could be considered for street sweeping but I don't really want to really go too far down that rabbit hole at this time um I mean the need is around winter operations so that's what we'd be geared geared towards um if it was a success and we wanted to revisit it at other points of the year we could uh but for this winter that's all we would be looking at and proposing is November 15th April 1st right and and I guess my last question I appreciate the opportunity to ask several of them uh is is this a situation where in other cities that have adopted this type of cross street parking um you know what kind of enforcement have they had to use and what kind of enforcement do we expect to get people sort of educated with that kind of program and because it seems to me to be somewhat more complicated and involved yeah so it it seems complicated um a lot of other communities have done like little flyers uh that you know that we could reuse um that are you know pretty straightforward and simplistic um I think uh in terms of getting the communications out um we would you know I we had talked about uh say November that we'd have a a time period where we began implementation but we would just be giving like windshield notices you know on say starting on December 1st uh the alternate side parking goes in fully into effect and tickets will be issued um other areas uh have done they will ticket you if you are uh not parked in the right location and if there is a need like a department need uh then it's either a a higher value ticket number or it's towed um so that would be something that we would have to to work out um but generally I would say that we would be asking PD to go around and to ticket anyone not on the correct side of the road um and I you know I think that if people are lined up correctly then we should in most circumstances I don't even know if we would have to tow on unless it was there was a really big need for it um okay thanks um Lauren and then Jay thanks just a couple quick things um one just wanted to um agree with the idea of extending um for for school street I mean they're asking parents you know as much as possible to drive their kids this year and not take the bus to minimize bussing as you know so having been there the last couple of days dropping my kids off it is a cluster so I would I think it's gonna be a bit of a you know very busy you know so trying to make that as um accessible as street as possible makes sense to me um for parking um I mean I think overall it's like you know it sounds like with the it's good creative thinking and it seems worth trying I think we've all gotten you know we're all trying a lot of new things this year we've never done before so if we're gonna ask people to try something new any year you know hopefully everyone's got the can do spirit and I can um you know add this in and I know this came up last year and that was kind of an education uh and issue was raised but um you know I think that piece of it seems like the critical um component is how we're getting the word out and the signage and the pliers that explain it in a way that people get and lots of lead time and all that which it sounds like you're doing a lot of good thinking around sounds like that issue of the like overnight parking really figuring out how to how to message that will be a tricky one but um I'm sure you guys can do it so that's my first impression thanks uh Jen thanks so thanks Zach and and Donna just a couple of thoughts on this one is I think when I when it comes to this type of thing um having gone through the park avenue closure a few years ago I realized that the two most important things with traffic patterns are consistency and predictability and so I do really like the idea of um moving to this type of system because there's if there's one thing that's not predictable it's the weather in Vermont um in the winter time so um and I don't love the you know the flashing signs as everybody's coming into town and all of that like trying to do it based on weather forecasts is really challenging so I do um really like this approach um just a couple small things um I do think from a communication standpoint um probably you know and I looked at the communications plan that Donna had put together that said that um uh that you'd start putting uh flyers on car starting November 15th and then it would go into effect on December 15th and I think that that's a good idea I would also recommend that the signs go up on November 15th letting people know that hey this is how it's going to be um through this winter and so like seeing those signs and people like sort of trying to understand what's coming um I think it's going to be really important I think between the signage and the notifications on cars then we can we can help that education period you know it's got to be more than just a week or two um because you know who knows when the first snow is going to happen um and so I do think that that that part is really important I think it's going to be tricky um on roads where you know St. Paul is an example where there's like only parking on one side but on Liberty Street there's parts where there's parking on one side but not another and so like it just I think there's just we want to make sure that we're communicating to to folks that they understand um what to expect and what's going to happen um you know what the changes are going to be and I I guess two small things um is is one I'm hoping that you did the parking counts in the last 48 hours um it did be perfect great um because obviously things changed a lot around in the downtown area with all the schooling and then you know obviously the you know you've got a number of parking spaces noted on Park Avenue that you can't account for um for for this school year so um I think that's it I do I do really appreciate this approach I think it's it's gonna there's gonna have to be a there's going to be a learning process but I think the as far as we can get ahead of it as as much as possible the more successful it will be so thanks a lot for your work on this thank you um I will say that Don and I talked briefly um today about uh trying to speed up the process as much as we can so that they're I mean if say November 1st if we already had the signs out um and they had all the month of November and in the chance that it snows we're not you know stuck um so as much as we can and going through the public hearings and the other stuff um if we can kind of speed it up I think that that would be beneficial for the community so that we have a little bit of a um we're not you know really coming up to the last day of um you know it taking effect so in the event that we have a big snowstorm on November 1st you know what do we do uh type scenario um so that's something that we were kind of just floating back you know back and forth between um you know prior to the meeting um is you know how aggressive can this timeline and approach be so that because the longer the better honestly like in terms of getting you know the word out um so if we end up going to this direct in this direction then um the more exposure that the public can have to it I I think the better um we also have I've been looking at uh ways to implement um text notifications other communities have um like a sign up bulletin where they anyone that registers gets pinged a text phone call email or whatever method that they want um with the notification saying hey today is an even calendar day park on the even side of the street um there is a few different vendors and we are just looking into um the feasibility of what that that might look like um some of them come at costs um typically nothing's free anymore um so um we may be coming back with a proposal of some sorts for the communications as well I think I saw Jack and Donna then Connor thanks a couple questions one as someone who grew up listening to the uh radio every morning uh announcing what days in New York City the alternate side of the street parking rules would be in effect or would be suspended it just makes me wonder are you anticipating any dates like holidays or anything where uh the rules would be suspended because if they weren't days when uh our workers would normally be working or do you think you'll go with the simplicity of just having it be every day so um I think the easy answer is simplicity of every day um consistency um I I think last year was the first time that our street supervisor got to spend Christmas Day with his family in like six years uh so um I think the reality is that most days uh our crews are asked to do something it may not be intuitive to the general public about what they're asked to do but the majority of every day between November 15th and April 1st they're either salting, sanding, plowing, pushing back, snow banks or removing snow thanks another question that occurred to me is as you went around the city have you identified any uh streets or sections of streets where you think it's not really feasible to uh to do the alternating last year we spent a lot of time talking about parking on on Sibley Avenue for example and just for many years of driving up and down that street it seems like it might be tricky to have the have the parking on the other side um and there may be other streets like that where it might not be workable yeah so um Jack we did look at that and um as you'll see we did not feel that the lower section of Sibley um directly across from where they have available parking now would be feasible between college and berry street um we did take a look at the upper section of Sibley and we felt that there was ample room in space and uh sight lines that it could be on the other side as well um but not on that lower section between college and berry street um so that is some of what we've been doing over the past couple days is evaluating um you know exactly what is available the other thing that I will say is we have a lot of streets that are in these pink streets here where we don't have any regulation currently so there's no ordinance that would prohibit it um however if people started to park on both sides of the street uh we may find that we are in another instance where it's not that they have to go to the alternating um so there's a lot of other streets that are not specifically mentioned in the ordinance one way or another um that we also feel that would should be on the same format um such as you know these ones in pink that we're looking at currently thanks um who was next was it Connor or Donna I think it was Donna it doesn't matter we'll talk sometime but to follow up on the pink streets I would prefer that you treat all the streets as much as possible the same and every day the same and no exception short of a flood you know but like Jack mentioned in New York I mean I visited friends and they just knew you alternated days all the time summertime wintertime you just did it street sweeping was as important as snow plowing so I like that I like the idea of doing it and it's clear and it's group mentality people will see other people moving and so I think they'll get the idea even quicker than than lots of signs is that once we get it installed people will really help one another and remind one another so I really like it and I really appreciate the timeline I would move it up if you could so that you get more time before snow hits I think you know we can have November storms but I think it's a great idea and I fully support it and appreciate all the information you and Donna shared thank you good Connor all right well thanks very much everybody for doing that I think it'll be uh definitely some growing pains but it's uh I think it's the best option on the table uh just as far as uh communications I would consider doing a robo call which everybody hates but it's a really cheap way to get the message out uh I was just looking at pricing on the phone there I think you could do it for about like 300 bucks and get everybody in town a robo call uh with the option of them opting out afterwards the degree we have telephone numbers so again I would do that rarely but I think this is a case where you could probably do it can I ask Connor a question sure go ahead Connor I mean they have vermont alert and you get text like right now you get text on the street of having the streets ban and could they not just text everybody they could text it to I mean like like that's uh that's opt in I would give them the option of opting out it's uh but you think phone numbers are easier to obtain I got you one of the issues with vermont alert if I can just jump in um we're not sure that this will qualify vermont alert requires there to be some sort of emergency or some sort of event that's so a winter parking ban in a snowstorm or for snow removal is considered okay use for vermont alert okay we haven't got we're not sure whether we could use vermont alert you know maybe we could they give us permission to use it once for the sort of this is the way we're going to change things but they're certainly not going to allow us to do it daily and say you know park on the outside park yeah that's good to know thank you oh dad go ahead sure um so I guess the one of the questions has has this map been circulated to the public at all or any opportunity for public feedback on it not yet um we were really looking for kind of an authorization to proceed uh that we wanted council to kind of give us their blessing to to go down this road uh then we will finalize the map and then we need to start having some public meetings and allow people to come ask questions to voice their concerns to go um really through the public hearing process okay and at that point it would be an opportunity for people to sort of look to say you can't have a car park here because it's everybody knows nobody can park here for some particular reason um because I think I mean that strikes me as one important part and I Ideco Donna's uh comment that we have to be as uniform as possible in how these streets are you know these patterns because if there are certain streets that are every other street but other streets that are not every other street or you know any kind of uh variation makes it more complicated for people to learn and that and I I've also experienced the city tradition of parking on either side of the street as well but you know that's a new concept uh for a lot of people that they're going to have to learn and this more simple that we can you know if we're going down this road the more simple we can do it the better and and this is one of those problems that you know it's hard it's hard to remove snow and plow city streets you know there's no simple solution as long as there are cars on the streets um so the more consistent uniform easy non-thinking we can make it that people can simply memorize a pattern I think is going to be better and I do like that this option over the the current option in that it is it is just predictability it's a it's a pattern that repeats itself as opposed to checking alerts or lights or signals or weather forecasts or crystal walls or tea leaves so I support this as well but obviously consistency and public feedback are going to be two of the keys beyond the communication portions that you guys have have started to outline so I want to jump in here as well and think about the process from this point so I'm before I say that I'm also very interested in this I think this is going to be a great improvement for particularly for staff over the current situation and and for honestly people as well as as long as there is not a significant reduction in available parking in the in the winter and and just the predictability I mean so all that is to say that if we move forward with approving this approving you all to move forward with pursuing this path tonight then that means that you all would be coming back to us with a formal finalized proposal is that correct or would you or would you perceive that you would need to come back to us I think you probably would but I'm yeah what do you think about that so my thought is that because it's a significant change to ordinance you would have to have a first and second reading which is why the timeline is so it's so important for this conversation so my feeling is that once we had the first reading had feedback had the second reading we would then be able to come back to city council for final approval in adoption of the plan so I just want to also flag that this might be an area where we could potentially reach reach out to particular neighborhoods through the capital area neighborhoods group if there are particular streets that seem problematic that they are a mechanism to target some messaging I'm saying particularly to get feedback beyond that any further comments or questions on this either from council or the public okay is I think we could probably use a motion as to whether or not to move forward Donna go ahead but yes I would make a motion to accept the presentation from PDW to go ahead and change the winter parking ban to move forward with the change of the winter parking ban to their alternative winter side alternating streets and come back to us for our first hearing at our next council meeting is that timeline do oh there's a second is that timeline doable Zach and Donna I think the timeline is doable the question is whether or not we want to consume a council meeting the time of the council meeting to have a public hearing my thought was that we would have them at a separate date so you know I would it's pretty much up to you I mean we'll we'll go on whatever direction you guys tell us but I'll let you talk so much the next time here from the public and I think it's easier to do it at council meetings than to ask the public to come out to a separate one it's just harder to I think hear the notices and see the notices I think that would be my recommendation to come to the next council meeting an interesting question um Zach you were thinking of having this as a separate meeting because of the volume of comments you thought we might receive or yeah I didn't want to completely bog down a whole council meeting if there are I mean some of the sibling and prospect conversations last year kind of consumed the majority of some of the meetings so I don't know what level of turnout we're going to have so that was why I initially had was thinking you know that we would kind of do it at a separate meeting but I am you know I'm more than willing to obviously do it at a council meeting as well that's kind of up to you all and if we did it at a separate meeting we could potentially accelerate the timeline no he actually makes it slower in his timeline by having his he doesn't have on the list they have their second public meeting mid-october versus having it september 23rd so yeah may I jump in here too yeah go ahead Bill just you know I one of the reasons we wanted to have this conversation was before we spent a lot of time like rewriting water denses and spending a lot of effort we didn't want to do that if you guys were like this is a crazy idea you know forgetting so you know we get the sense it's indoors I don't know where we are and you know drafting ordinances how much of an ordinance draft change is going to take so you know if we even for the 23rd we're talking about we need to have this done by next thursday or friday for it to be you know we have a week basically to get all the ordinance changes done so I'd be a little careful about saying we'll have ordinances ready for the 23rd you know it may well be that if we're going to do a public presentation have questions in the answer is explain the thing maybe do that as a public forum in itself and still have the actual ordinance changes in public on council meetings well have some other presentation I just do Zach and Donna do you feel like you could have this ready by the 23rd that would best fit your timeline proposal to have the first reading on the 23rd and the second on the 14th so we can start getting messaging before it starts to snow I mean we've already started going through the ordinance as is I don't want to over commit by any means but I think that we would be we would have a we I think that it's probably doable I do want to make sure that we have plenty of time in case something pops up and that we have an issue that there's you know a backup date of some sort so we can I think I think we could probably do that we're also looking at consistency so we're looking at the ordinances I would like to eliminate you know areas where the same portion of the street is mentioned four times under different categories I think that cleaning this up and making it you know alphabetical by street and specifically telling people what there are and are not allowed to do would be very helpful because it's been a little bit tedious trying to read exactly every section and make sure that there's not anything contradicting different sections uh go ahead Don with the timing being more comfortable if you didn't expect perfection for the first public hearing and that you do a rough cut and then if indeed there's more editing for the second hearing I think that's allowable that would be great that would that yes that would feel much better on the staff side of it just because this is new that I feel that we are going to continuously have some alterations as we're working this through and there are three weeks between the 23rd and the 14th oh right that's a that's a while so that's the time to get so you are best shot on the first hearing and then you really come and polish it for the second first community feedback but uh Dan go ahead yeah I mean I I guess I'd even take a step further it strikes me that the really key issue here is getting uh some of the public feedback particularly on the streets because then that's going to inform how you write the ordinances such that I would feel comfortable um you know if this did start the first notice being you know in the in beginning of October and you know the final the final hearing either being at the end of October the beginning of November yeah so long as there was a public engagement process and you know what we're passing tonight is basically a direction to you to go forward down this road um and that if the ordinance was the ordinance is kind of the the final piece and and really what what needs to happen is to make sure that this this plan is worked out to some degree um and that that strikes me is where the effort really should lie and if it's if it's a matter of putting the ordinance into effect a little bit later not exactly on November 1st ready to go but you've done that sort of public outreach then I think you've you know that that will go a longer way than rushing the ordinance and then doing the public outreach so how rather than that's a great point Dan thank you it may be rather than us wrestling with this right now if if we get the sense that um you're willing to do that you know that you've got to go ahead and then we can work out with our staff you know offline what the best schedule is for us to get this done and also have a public engagement process and then if it means that the next meeting is the first reading it would be on the agenda it doesn't we'll let you know um comment on the briefly um yes go ahead see you and then jack and then uh donna yeah go ahead uh this but to some degree is going to hinge on whether or not you go back to real meetings that are broadcast in real time over orca because this meeting where you're listening and you can't participate with a phone there's not enough bandwidth you can show maps around town and discuss them uh adequately in this uh virtual meeting environment so to some degree I also suggest you think about uh fixed presentations posters informative posters that are set up and left up for a few weeks around town and allow people to email comments to the city because this is affecting everybody who commutes to town and parks people who live here this is going to be massive uh disruption so think about uh how to don't think about his virtual meeting context as being adequate as public engagement thanks yeah thank you that's a good point and I think um it's worth thinking about particularly like if we we have posters where might we want to put them um to yeah program yeah one I want to point out that donna brought up a really good point earlier today that um utilizing the schools if they're willing to send their kids home with flyers may be a really really good idea to get a lot of residents of montpellier um up to speed with what we're asking for um so uh I think that that is something that we could also utilize if they were willing yeah fair um no if you're looking at any and all options I think those are good points that steven made and thinking about how we get stuff up articles in the paper you know facebook social media everything we can think of I know there are a couple other comments um jack did you have a comment yes I did thank you I'm just trying to think back to what the language of the motion is and I think it and I think it said to come back to have this on our agenda for our next meeting and I wonder if it might be a good idea to take that part of it out and leave the staff the uh the flexibility of doing it as bill said when they're prepared to um I was going to ask john odin what he wrote down I would really like it to be on the agenda whether it's the first hearing or not uh but I would certainly take it off the motion it seems like we could and um I forget who's seconded it was it connor okay and so connor's okay with that um so uh regard maybe regardless of uh it being a part of the motion if we can just have a quick update on it next meeting I that that sounds reasonable to me does that sound okay to the staff yeah okay okay great so without the the uh the reporting back thing it should be to accept the presentation from dpw to move forward with the change of the winter parking ban with their alternative proposal that uh I believe that cuts off the the rest side winter parking proposal the alternate side alternating side yeah you're right whoops alternating side winter parking and and connery that's what you understood it to be yes okay um okay great um any uh further discussion on this okay uh all right all in favor please say aye aye aye and opposed okay uh well thank you thank you for your work on this and I'm really hopeful about it I think this is going to be a really good thing from up here so very grateful um I just want to recognize 846 um um hopeful that we can take a quick break here probably on the scale of um uh five minutes let's aim for that and um uh Stephen I know you're on the the line here um I just want to let anybody know that this call is not going to go away we will be back in about five and we'll we'll pick up with the next item all right we'll see you we'll see you soon are we are we here there we go they all give you time excellent okay so we are all here that is great all right so the next item is a discussion uh about public restrooms um so for this I mean this was an item that um Dan Richardson had brought up and uh so for this I feel like I should I'm going to turn it over to you Dan to uh to introduce okay um so I think the purpose of this discussion is to have um a sort of uh opportunity for us to talk about what um what a bathroom what a public bathroom would look like conceptually or what we're thinking of and some of the needs um and I would hope that a discussion that we would have would lead to direction for the staff to come back to maybe flesh out some of the options that we would talk about or to determine whether we even want the staff to do those type of things so you know we've I think we've we've talked before about the need for a public bathroom and what it would serve which would be a mixture of you know people that don't have facilities because of lack of a home or visitors to the city or other individuals that find themselves in Montpelier in need of public facilities in part because what we've experienced in the past year is a lot of closure of what we had normally relied upon in the web of public and private restrooms for visitors to the city or residents of the city or anyone in the city that found themselves in need of those those facilities um so I did a little bit of research in coming into this and I guess one of the things that I feel strongly about is that um you know this is some an opportunity in a lot of ways to create um a piece of public architecture um that has a high functionality obviously but you know we shouldn't simply think this and the terms of like something a little bit more elaborate than the port of Johns that are currently outside of city hall we should be really thinking about this as a potential public structure that could be a benefit or a landmark to the city um and one that is going to have a high usage and so um what's interesting is Tokyo is going through a similar type of of reevaluation and some of their parks that have created public facilities that are all glass facilities and the npr did a great piece on this and uh what it is is they're all glass so you can drive by or walk by and see into the bathrooms completely but as soon as you go in and you lock the door it frosts up and becomes private um and so you know I think that's a really that kind of architectural uniqueness or quality and and and they're lit they're like little lanterns the the buildings themselves they have sort of embedded lighting but so that they're constantly lit and they you know they look like little lanterns um you know restroom-sized lanterns but this I think the idea of something something architecturally interesting creative that would be easy to maintain but would provide these essential facilities and I think you know really it's a it's a challenge of whether you know and this seems to be something at least as far as I can see seems to be something we have a need for in this city um you know we talked about this last time but I know I know I've talked with other people around town and received emails uh from constituents and others saying yeah there is a need for this and in the downtown right now um and so you know I I was thinking about different places to to locate this and where we would go and what one spot that actually uh I'll start off this conversation I don't mean to take this conversation too far down the road into specifics but it strikes me that one particular location um that might be a possibility is the city owns a small lot across from the mobile station at the corner of um main street where it turns into North Field Street and Memorial Drive where it turns into Berlin Street used to be a gas station a long time ago it's at the it's at the bottom of the um the walking path up to national life but it's a it's a small little lot but it's close enough to downtown that somebody who is in downtown could easily go to it but it also doesn't you know forfeit any of the uh real estate that you know is at a premium in in the downtown of Montpelier um as well I think it you know it it does sort of push this out a little bit so that it's um you know it's it's at a I think at a highly visible location which you know might help with keeping it clean or you know the the use of it um which all seem to be ideas that I think we we should be considering um but I think this is an idea that you know it's time has come um and it's worth worth considering so that's sort of my introduction to why I think this is worthy of consideration and I guess I would finally add that you know I don't see this happening obviously we don't have the money in the current budget we are just beginning to think about the next year's budget um and so I would you know it's not as if we have a pile of money laying around but I would see this as a priority that ultimately we would set money aside in the future budget to do this construction that this is uh a civic project that merits that type of um budget allocation um in the upcoming budgets I'll leave it there yeah um I just wanted uh echo the sentiment that I think this is certainly it's clearly needed and um it it's worth thinking about at what point um you know basically like you know do we think about this for for this coming budget or you know how can we be creative about thinking about you know either creating such a structure or the um maintenance of of such a structure so um I have more comments to make but I am going to hold off on them for now um curious for um other people's thoughts and um also comments from the public I'm ready anytime you are go for it Stephen uh I I think that I want to remind you that it's been over a year and a half that I've been bringing this issue to your attention and for it to appear on the agenda as if it's just you know Dan's bringing it forward Dan's bringing forth a long-term expensive option for you know a city architectural project well I don't dispute the value of that there are urgent needs if you go back and look at the charge that you gave the homelessness task force they haven't fulfilled any of that and one of the first priority things that I argued before I resigned is an inventory of bathroom options for the folks but now I'm talking to people even today who take their kids to the state house lawn and the porta-potties are locked you know nobody's going to walk from the state house lawn over to the mobile station to pee you know this is a this is an emergency this is a health emergency you've got piles of human waste that is many places around the city and y'all keep ignoring that so I think you need to do an immediate inventory charge the staff with it because the task force isn't going to do it inventory of all possible publicly accessible bathrooms and find use find the money to pay for their maintenance or disposal for the paper consumables and a cleaning service but you know the two outhouses just don't cut it and city hall chief fecos agreed that my suggestion that city hall rear doors had to be equipped with electric locks and a video camera which could be done dirt cheap and be made available 24 seven even if you have to get buzzed in from the police dispatcher that that's a viable reachable thing that could be done in a week but apparently y'all took your five minute break and I suspect most of you relieve yourselves ignorant of all the folks that are out there that don't have any place to do so and I think it's a it's a travesty of irresponsibility that we're facing here a real disconnect between you know public service both for tourists and for people without housing I have more ideas but I'm going to give other people a chance to weigh in on that if you need to prioritize this and it takes some immediate action thank you Stephen your your point is well taken that you know this is it's a problem now and we you know we've sort of started that well first of all that you've been ringing it up thank you yes and also you know that that we you know have been we've sort of started here with thinking about a long-term solution but also considering some short-term solutions I think also warrants discussion as well so yeah let's let's keep both of those in mind other other thoughts or comments um Donna than Jack I do like the idea of thinking immediately but I also like Dan bringing in some broader ideas and I think it behooves us to do that because out of respect for all the people using it and it also is an invitation into our community I mean there's lots of ways to even maybe get grants we think of it as a little bit broader than just a substitute for a pottypot but uh Stephen's right we do need to do something I would like to see the staff bring us back some ideas both on funding locations and types so thank you for bringing it up Dan yeah uh Jack and then Connor I agree this this is a real need there's an immediate need there's a long-term need I think you know I go on vacations places well summers when I am able to go on vacation I go to places where like on Martha's Vineyard where they have public bathrooms in each of the of the towns where tourists congregate and I think that's of value for the city of Montpelier also a value for people who are residents whether they're housed or not who who need the facilities while they're downtown so I think we should figure out how to find the money for probably for additional portable toilets as well as figure out the feasibility and budget for the access to indoor facilities in City Hall and proceed with trying to figure out what the best way to meet the need long term is which probably involves building something somewhere and that's all I've got uh Connor go ahead yeah I wonder if it might be worth bringing parks into the conversation because um it strikes me they kind of do it right you know if you go up the Hubbard Park you got the you actually have the facilities up there with the sawdust but it's very clean it's like yeah almost extravagant a couple of them so you know it's not it's it would be out of the flood plain to be close to downtown but sort of the entrance of uh you know the path up to the you know up the up to the castle there um I wonder if that's maybe just something worth looking at there and they can alex brain because I don't I don't know if those things break the bank I think they could be constructed maybe even in house or something um and I'm not saying it's a solution but you know a good number of uh homeless folks um would be spending time around there too so that might be a benefit for for them as well so something to think about so um couple pieces and I just want to bring up about this so one is uh you know there's a consideration of the infrastructure itself which would be expensive but then um there's there would be the ongoing maintenance costs of this and I imagine that if the city was going to take on the running of a public bathroom uh either it's a contracted service or it's an FTE or part of an FTE um and so with with that possibility um I feel like it's it's worth looking at existing infrastructure um you know whether that's city hall or whether that's you know reworking um you know the arrangement with the transit center um you know they're supposed to be running that facility but if it was us who were paying for it to for the bathrooms to be open and clean then you know that's a separate separate situation I I don't know how re reworkable that is it might not be I don't know but just you know looking at existing structures knowing that um if we go down that this road there will be an ongoing maintenance cost anyway um and so and just the way that I picture this going um is that uh that this may be one of the things that I mean if people are are interested in it uh that this is something that goes on to the um list of options for our upcoming budget conversation um I mean maybe it's it might be too soon for this and we do have I think some uh tricky is probably not quite the right word but we you know it it may be a difficult uh budget year uh anyway just because things are so unpredictable uh right now but keeping that in mind you know if this is something that's on on the table anyway um I think that would make sense to me um curious for others opinions about that uh I uh seeing a thumbs up from Jack uh and Connor and Donna um and Lauren uh Dan did you have a comment no I'll just add the thumbs up oh okay um you know there is one other thing that I wanted to bring up um I realize this is not exact this is not totally related but um I have been getting lots of complaints about garbage uh around um the pocket park that is on the bike path behind the DMV I it's so I've I've actually been having uh conversations I bike there past there um especially now that school is starting uh just about every day so I've been having conversations with people hanging out there uh and with uh various other organizations that um are involved with that spot um just thinking about like you know this this spot is really hard to maintain um just trash wise and uh so it seems like there may need to be a new plan for that location and thinking about rehoming that structure um and so just I don't know that that needs to be um I don't think there's anything to decide on uh as a council with that necessarily unless I mean if you have feedback about that idea or you have objections to that idea certainly like let me know or staff know but um otherwise um you know I think we'll be exploring um to moving that structure um so anyway I just want to put that out there but anyway from the conversations that I had with folks you know it sounded like you know if it if it went away or not went away but like if it was moved that would be okay um but uh but you know but also you know even unprompted uh the the conversation went towards you know what we really do need is public restrooms um and so that that was it was very helpful it was very enlightening um Donna go ahead so are you thinking of removing it because there's a problem with it versus trying to work on the problem it's such a neat little feature for their shared path I hate to see it gone that we can't try to work together to have it more presentable all the time yeah it's we've tried taking away city benches because people sit on them they don't want to sit on them there may be a way to revision how that space uh could be used potentially so um is is that revisiting just going to happen or are we going to talk about it as a group well that's a good question would you would you like to talk about it as a group I mean I'm not I don't have to be involved maybe the council doesn't but I would yeah other thoughts on that uh Dan go ahead oh Dan and then see that well I guess you know I'm supportive of the idea of repurposing it I think that the as it exists right now it's it's not quite the right fit and and I agree that this is something where um you know it's being you know sort of Sisyphean struggle to keep the um the the park clean and it's also at a very sort of awkward junction of the bike path in that there are gates on either side it's a bit of a narrow um turn through and if there are people occupying the park as a and crossing the path it can feel a little bit tight um and so I think it would be you know I think it's it's a great structure it would be better served in a different location even possibly along the bike path but that particular corner um and I just don't see you know I and this is just anecdotal is I don't see the summer people there hanging out and enjoying it I mean I think there's a lot of people that have used the site for um you know either I've seen people sleeping there I've seen people um you know I've seen a lot of trash there um you know it doesn't feel like it's become the sort of way station for community gatherings or or that sort I think it would be better served somewhere else and especially you know given that you know what's really what's really happening and we're seeing you know where people use it for trash or um uh an impromptu bathroom you know it would be better served by building a bathroom and providing those facilities that people need um and putting this in a different location yeah um Stephen did you want to comment on this yeah yeah I do because I reported that the accumulating trash last week and and it it was it needed to be the trash needed to be picked up Friday all around town and instead uh it didn't get picked up until Tuesday and it was and and it the remains of the blown around trash is around I did notice that after you and your husband drove by somebody came in and and removed the three barrels worth of trash uh including the one outside of a barrel so that that parking park did get picked up the problem this is integrally related to the homelessness and the bat public bathrooms but we need to engage with the merchants because the merchants have as much interest in visitors feeling like this is the town where they can come and feel comfortable walking around and still instead of feeling in pain walking around and that that's a problem we we we're going to need to immediately negotiate bathrooms from existing facilities down near the state house which used to be served by the tourist visitor center the state visitor center uh near Bethany church that information booth there's plumbing available there that information booth could be a fine place for uh a public restroom uh townhouses do not cut it they don't they don't maintain well they overflow there's no hand washing facilities we are in a pandemic uh city center was at one point willing to consider keeping those open if the city paid for the consumables but they have now rejected that entirely uh I think upper elm street on the south end of elm street one of those properties one of those small little businesses could be converted into a very accessible and conveniently centrally located public restroom I this is an area that needs somebody like war choice to come back to you in two weeks with a uh plan for what can be done within the next month and what's going to take six months and and tens of thousands of dollars I think you need to get real serious about this this is a human rights issue this is a you know a racism issue this is a quality of life issue and you're treating it like it's uh you know an optional icing on the cake project you know that's enough thank you yeah no your point is well taken um I did try to I'm sorry I forgot I did try to recruit uh the manager George of Shaw's he was willing to call in but I didn't get the agenda to him before he left today with the call in number he he has some relevant experience with trying to manage a public restroom there where the toilets get clogged by people flushing needles down which then catch you know waste paper and you know one simple solution you know the city values have a needle receptacle you know his does not so there's an area for collaboration which we should explore urgently because everyone benefits and somebody needs to look at the liability shared liability issues etc but I think that there there are solutions available uh that should not be postponed for month yeah and and that you know would cost some money but wouldn't be potentially lots of money um so um other thoughts on um on this topic here team do we need to um well actually I'd love to hear from from bill uh how are you hearing us do you need a directive from us uh yeah how are you how are you feeling about all this uh well I mean we have the same you know I think Stevens articulated really well the biggest obstacle for most of the solutions is COVID you know I don't think anybody wants or is allowed to have public people come in and using their bathrooms I think that's that's really an exact you know the main reason why the city hall was closed off I think that's why you know we had the police up in 24-7 um so we get it and um so you know I've written down what everyone said we have you know when we get back to speak tomorrow we will put our heads together and and about all these topics and figure out uh some suggestions and you know we'll try to do so much to private people but I you know it's a that's a great idea I think Stevens right on the money there but I also know if I'm a private business in my you know you're already having to be restricted about who you're letting in and the rules that you have in the communists and all that so how do you balance that I don't know no mayor the the fact that we're allowing the game the city gave keys to the construction guys on Taylor street that they can use the brand new restrooms while all the homeless folks sit out there and just resent the hell out of it is is an example of how uh uh blind we are to this issue hmm so just thinking about um just of how we follow up on this um I is the is the next council meeting um to super for initial thoughts feedback or um we'll see I mean well this is important so yeah okay and and I do like you know even in thinking of the the long term um um if Dan and I had actually talked about the the prospect of uh some kind of a design competition you know whether it's an architectural if we decide to go forward with um constructing something new you know are there creative ways to um to leverage you know something that would be an asset to the city um you know beyond beyond its function um but uh you know be creative as well um but that that's probably further down the line than than where we're at right now Jay go ahead just a quick question I just want to understand sort of the responsibility accountability around the Gerton pocket park like who's who manages that if we were to consider relocating it what what's that process look like and and is that something that we need to have a conversation with at the council level well the city owns park um so since it's a pocket park it's presumably under the auspices of the parks commission um but technically the parks manages it um we'll be having like I said we'll we'll do make this issue tomorrow morning we'll see what Alec has to say I know he's been tipped off that this is a concern and they may have some ideas about what they'd like to do with it um obviously I think as a courtesy we should you know talk to page curtain and um but um I think it's also has been a constant source of issues with with garbage and um just conflicts there so if there's a better use for that space and for that structure then I think the time might be now and as far as I am aware um just where we're at with that was uh checking in with uh city staff about if if there was a different location where that might work where might that be um so I think we were still just just thinking through it uh no solid plan uh about that yet but we can if folks are interested we could we can bring that back um for discussion or I can you know bring it up as as part of the reports or whatever whatever makes sense to folks um mayor can I give one minute to one minute on the pocket park the pocket park is not the problem there it took me six months to get public works to put trash receptacles there and I had to recruit people to climb down the bank and clean up the garbage that it accumulated so the the park the problem perceived problems or the projected problems with the park are problems of neglecting warming spaces and cooling spaces for the homeless that's the only place where they congregate and get their meals and to ignore that fact and say oh we're just gonna take your meals site away it's just it's just absurd you know if we're really it's disconnected so I have a lot more to say but on another time okay thank you go ahead Bill even can you tell me more about the meals so meals are delivered uh they're coordinated by by dawn and by the food providers that uh skinny pancake and and capstone and that's the place where a dozen meals get delivered at least once a day and the folks are picking them up there they're putting a cooler and the coolers have sometimes been damaged and replaced uh the cooler there now hasn't been cleaned in weeks and yet there was fresh well packets of fresh beef stroganoff in it you know yesterday when I went out there to check Casey was the only one there at the time but my point is that if you want to make enforcement I mean the pocket park especially during the winter months could potentially be moved up into the confluence little postage stamp park it still needs to be there as a place but there the police could monitor it more for uh alcohol abuse I don't I'm not trying to run anybody off and I think that until we in another way is not going to handle it just like the shelter doesn't handle everybody we've got to write a plan you should have insisted upon a plan being written to handle both the people that fit into that system and the people that don't including meals I'm the only one publicizing where the meals are and it's absurd so you've got a planning process that's integrated with tourists bathrooms and homeless that needs to be well integrated and you've neglected it for a solid year now okay thank you Stephen um so at this point I don't know that we uh if if bill you're going to get back to us with some recommendations um then I don't know that we need that there's any other action to take on this item right now um any further comments about this team okay all right well thank you um so to be continued and uh the next item is uh the covid update uh so for this is that Cameron sure is all right so um this one's a little bit more brief there hasn't been a whole lot of movement in the state um there has been some changes this uh month to some of his work smart or work safe stay safe order um uh that included some guidance for rec departments um that didn't necessitate us making any changes to our proposed programs we were already well within the guidelines that they proposed so our programming which includes soccer right now is moving forward as planned uh the Vermont Department of Tourism and Marketing is looking for businesses to help quantify the impact of COVID-19 so they have a survey included that link they requested um information by this Friday from businesses um the governor also announced that Kenny Drugs has partnered with the state and 11 of their locations will be made into COVID-19 testing sites and details of that and making um signing up to make an appointment can be found on the health department's website and then the state also launched the hashtag by local Vermont program um you can sign up through um I believe it's thinkvermont.com for a $30 voucher to participating local businesses I think they probably are out by now but they did say that they were looking at further options but that was announced this week um general city updates um you know we're still open on Tuesdays and Thursdays we are having a red cross event tomorrow that they are running by appointment only just so you know if you do decide to come into city hall tomorrow at any point there will be a larger than normal amount of folks in the building but they are um they do have a COVID-19 plan and they're only accepting blood donations on appointments um we also made a change in parking as reviewed in the parking plan that you had looked at and approved before we will be turning on our meters in the parking lots and accept an enforcing permit parking starting on the 15th this month um we're also still talking to the can neighborhoods and Montclair Mutual Aid another way has also begun to give us community meal information and we've been including that in our weekly reports um another way on Berry Street does have a Friday night dinner and a Wednesday breakfast that they're now giving us information about regarding our communications we've had an uptick in interactions we're averaging almost 2,000 interactions with all of our posts around COVID-19 the most impactful one from this past few weeks was about the park avenue closing and the street change the traffic changes there which reached over 4,000 folks in our network so that was my brief COVID-19 update for the last two weeks do you guys have any questions great thank you thank you so much uh jay go ahead sorry camera just real quick one thing is the um uh the $30 gift cards like ran out within about half an hour i don't know if they'll use you anymore but maybe they will um the other thing is and i i didn't fall i saw the link but i didn't follow the link to the department of tourism that is looking for data from local businesses but i just wanted to let you know and maybe you could connect the dots here that Montpelier live has been doing monthly surveys to all the downtown businesses in terms of where their revenues are a year over year this year compared to past years are they breaking even how many people are they employing now relative to last year's they've done it for may june july and the august one is just about to go out so that there's a lot of data available so you might be able to connect with dan to share that information it's it's already there thank you great anybody else okay all right thank you um all right so on to in-person meetings uh yeah is this me and rent yeah okay good um sort of wearing the covid um information half right now um i gave a couple different proposals um to you about what a meeting in person might look like i do want to go over the survey results i also included really briefly i know that we did not have a huge amount of responses to that so it's not a statistically significant by any means but um it is the people who cared enough to reach out and say something so we had a lot of really responses pro and con for returning in person um out of the i mean only 19 folks responded to any of our um outreach which was done on front porch forum our facebook page and um uh i think that was where we we put out the information but we also created an online survey that people could use anonymously if they weren't interested in putting their name on that but the majority overwhelmingly said they were not interested um and had a lot of reasons as to why a lot of health and safety reasons people also mentioned that they found zoom convenient to them that they were able to participate more as they were able to watch it from home in a more convenient way for them i think a lot of folks are now discovering that you guys are streaming on youtube and maybe not have known that before um and that they're able to just log in to zoom if they have something they want to say when they see it on tv versus having to get in a car and drive down the city hall so there's a lot of um interest there i think around the sort of zoom platform um my recommendation and staff's recommendation is not to um continue in person meetings and to continue on zoom until um there is a even until there's a vaccine until people are comfortable being in close proximity to each other if only because of the financial um impacts of that space um in order to safely keep all of y'all uh six feet apart we'll need to install plexiglass um between you there would still need to be a mask mandate inside the building um and the windows would need to be probably opened and we don't have a large capacity in that room um if people are standing uh 32 people can be in that room including y'all but that's standing room and that's it's not um an accessible way to have folks attend a meeting so um there's a lot to consider when you're making this decision we will make it work whatever way you want to make it work um the reason i'm mentioning financial costs is that all of the grants that we were eligible for to be reimbursed their deadlines have already passed and this is not something that we included um as we did not have any extra capital to really put into that at this moment so um those times are past so we need to out of pocket cost putting up plexiglass um so um i've put a couple different proposals in front of you um there's a combination of socially distance meeting in person and with a zoom component i did test that out a few times um it's not ideal because you can't get the full room in the picture so folks would be cut out of that zoom space um we would need staff to monitor that and that's fine i would do that no problem um i don't doubt that we could make it work but i do doubt that it would be the most successful option um we talked about plexiglass dividers and moving folks around the room just to make sure that people um were appropriately spaced um masks would need to be worn the entire time even if you were appropriately spaced the cdc guidelines say if you're around somebody for more than 15 minutes that's really unacceptable amounts of risk in their eyes and it is an increased risk of um transmission so that's the information that i gathered and i did have a few proposals um it's honestly we're here to do uh whatever you feel is best so lots i i actually don't have strong feelings about this toner and then i'll back off i thought i was one of the ones i bloody i hate the zoom meetings maybe it's that my head is too big i can barely fit in the frame but um i do think it detracts from some of the work we do being on zone you know i know when dan liked taps the table three times it means vote a certain way and stuff but um i'm just kidding i i missed the person the person contact but you know i think even though the survey had a pretty small sample size we're probably entering kind of uncertain times of school being back in session and uvm coming so maybe revisit in a bit but i'm okay sticking with zoom for now go ahead lord uh yeah i was gonna say similar i mean i much much much prefer to be in person um but just the the challenges with making it work and and the risk and you know if i felt like it really was a much more accessible um scenario for the public it might be worth it but i think this is actually um you know being able to access it from people's homes who have that be a phone is probably more accessible in many ways than having to get to city hall so i think holding off you know they were just out today or in the last couple days with projections for for the next month or two in vermont and they're anticipating a little spike at school and everything so it seems like the wrong time to be undertaking this unfortunately i mean we can keep an eye on it and keep the conversation um you know seeing what options and what creative um things other cities might be doing and stuff but i think for now it doesn't seem worth it i will put out there that i i thought of a different configuration which is to say that um it would like what if we were in person but we instead of trying to put us all on zoom in terms of like one zoom um seeing the whole room because we all bring our laptops our devices anyway so what if we all brought our laptops to council chambers and then did this you know each individually so we would all be in the same room but with our own our own pictures um and i don't know i don't i don't uh i'm i'm not i'm not so i'm not gonna do it but what's that donna is that a live zoom meeting yeah like a live zoom meeting so that like the public would still participate in this in this same way but we would be in the in the room together um sort of a it's a different way to think of a hybrid but i there's i don't know there's other disadvantages to that so um in case anyone have any strong feelings about or actually any any other thoughts really are you taking public comment um yes go ahead steven and then donna yeah i i i really like i hadn't even considered the the model that you just proposed of the hybrid zoom meeting uh there are i tried to get folks uh around town who are most affected by the bathroom conversation then you don't have phones there's no place for them to go and find a computer uh to to participate in this meeting and be heard you know you you eliminate there's some people there's broadband issues i'm frequently have telephone capacity but not broadband capacity so i think you and and then presentations of a of anything likes parking maps etc those cannot adequately be done on zoom so i work up can capture those from a city council meeting uh full screen properly but i think you need to make efforts and progress and i earlier suggested better ventilation in that room with heat recovery so i would encourage you there may be more money available if you make it a telecommunications experiment for participation uh zoom i put particularly won't put that software on my computer because the encryption keys are passed off a server in china and that's just not an acceptable security risk for me so uh there's my two cents on that topic i would encourage you to resume uh socially distance council meetings in a hybrid manner yeah thank you yeah uh donna i definitely prefer zoom than the mask and the setup i think we have to be the example of the new norm i think it's a year to two years if not longer if the vaccine vaccination comes out if it all happens and gets distributed but meanwhile i think if we can accept this as our norm is how do we make this better i guess that was the piece i was trying to bring up with looking at not only holding our meetings with a different maybe approach but also steven's right this is not perfect from a meeting law at all but we're still trying and we need to keep working on ways where people can access electronics and we also need to i think for us as a council need to add a social component so we're having some what i call you know really casual social conversation and whether that's once a month we meet 30 minutes early and eat together at our prospective homes and talk about our dogs or cats and whatever i think that would be really good for us as a group and maybe we can get connor to smile more anyway i just think we have to accept it's it's it's gonna be a long hoe people that's all uh lauren go ahead um i i do wonder just the comment about you know looking at maps and things i mean even the winter parking conversation you know trying to either set up maybe in council chambers like maps that people could go have a certain window that obviously you know take some staffing capacity to um you know even if the conversation was not happening then like the public hearing but an opportunity to so people do want to go look at bigger maps that might be easier to digest than um than on zoom or people who don't have access to um to good internet which obviously is common around here um so so maybe it's hybrid also of how we're trying to just get the key materials will be discussed so people have different ways to look at it and process it and then even if you are then calling into a meeting or zooming into a meeting um you know having that kind of access a really great point and we can definitely work on getting printouts and put them in the hallway again we're open all day business hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays the public is welcome to come in and you know we can put those out for folks not a problem i'll just stay in here too i mean the staff obviously we would much prefer in-person meetings as well for all the reasons everybody else does um and recognize the limitations of this this situation we're equally concerned by you know a space you know for for maybe a lot you know when we say 32 people there's 9 10 11 of us probably with the city in any given meeting if not more so we're you know we'd have a cap at 20 members of the public for most meetings maybe less depending on staff or consultants or anybody that needed to come and you know from the average meeting maybe that's not a problem for but for the issue for the exact meetings we're talking about when there's a lot of interest we'd you know we would be sorry we're at capacity we can't let you in and so we're you know yes i think we need to figure this out i know this is what this has sort of been the default that folks all over the country are going to and um even even places that have town meetings you know actual town meetings have figured out how to do this on zoom but you know they just set up a thing and people people are calling in and doing you you know hundreds of people so it's not it's definitely an imperfect system but you know so is you know we used to get complaints about meetings that it was late at night and people couldn't come out or they had childcare or it was the weather was bad yeah they couldn't make it um um you know this stuff yeah may i again mayor uh and then jay the media the media quality uh suffers if it if you are the council in a room spaced orca can be capturing full resolution audio and video that's important we're forfeiting this entire era of transcription automated transcription will be impossible from the audio quality of these recordings and many people who are have damaged or limited hearing can't even understand the conversation over these zoom calls so we there are uh there are costs but there are also benefits to pushing for more than better than what we're doing right now fair enough um thank you uh jay um thanks uh bill and Cameron i wondered if you in thinking about uh alternatives for these meetings if you considered other space other than the than the chambers um is there somewhere else in town or is there somewhere nearby could we go upstairs could we go somewhere where we could space um where we could have more room um to to all be present the bottom line is but i don't fall on one side of the fence with either the either side i'm very conflicted there's a part of me that says that i you know i really appreciate the increased accessibility for people to engage in the meeting when it's most important to them i also hear um what you know what hear what steven's saying about you know being able to have access to broadband and to be able to see presentations um and i do also appreciate that it's a new norm but at the same time you know i i you know my i take my nine-year-old to school and expect him to wear a mask for four and a half hours five days a week and and my 12 year old and my 15 year old and so we we you know the state said to the school districts hey you got to figure this out and they've done the best they could and given the circumstances they had and i wonder you know i wonder if we could rethink the our circumstances could we be somewhere where we could have more space we could be present but you know um like the mayor mentioned the possibility of you just engaging via a laptop and in person so that we can find a balance between accessibility and also being there so that we could interact and have those you know you have those conversations where we're um where we're together in one room and it's it's you know it's increased access on on both fronts um i'm not arguing one side or the other i'm just sort of trying to sort of think out loud here about what what what could we come up with some more creative solutions could we think about different ways to be able to approach this understand hearing from everybody and knowing what's important for us as a council and also to the public those are all great ideas so we thought briefly about upstairs we could look at it some more i think you know the main objection there honestly was was number one the reliability of the elevator but assuming the elevator is working but um you know it's double the sword right so steven appropriately raised the orca issue all the orca equipment is in the council chamber i don't know what it would be involved in you know moving that but i would imagine it'd be you know maybe it's worth it um we thought about other locations um you know the school has monitoring the elementary school and in high school but under for understandable reasons school doesn't want other people in there we have not faulting them but those are kind of off limits you know most most places don't want us going in so our options as a city are really pretty limited it's to this building so you know upstairs is the only bigger space that we have and maybe that is we can at least try to tweak you know look at technologically and see how that works you know maybe it is something like what the mayor suggested where we're in person with laptop on zoom and you know maybe we could have a limited number of public in there but it would have to be you know i don't know first cut you know sign up take 10 reservations or something and that's it nobody beyond that you know i don't know um jack go ahead and then i have a follow-up thought i'm not really pushing for doing meetings in person although i like everyone else i i prefer that personal interaction one thought that occurred to me as i was reading through the descriptions of how we might set the room up is whether we could consider disregarding the dais completely and having the entire council lined up lengthwise along one of the one of the long walls in the combined council chambers and memorial room and that would potentially give us enough separation to do that i would do that but i just want to say it wouldn't change the capacity of the room in any way right i i get that but it would be seems like it might be a more workable way to get everybody visible not having you know people at the tables either with the back to the other members of the council or the back to the public i don't know the other thought that occurred to me with regard to the mayor's proposal is that the uh from my experience of doing uh trials in court rooms with uh video conference is that once we once there's more than one electronic device running the program at the same time it seems like we always get um feedback or other interference problems which we typically get resolved but it's uh you know if everyone has their speakers on you gotta have your speaker turned off or where's the mic what mic is going to be on to pick everybody up and so i think it's i'm not saying it's insurmountable but it's a challenge yeah that's that's interesting um just a follow-up just thinking about like if we use the area upstairs just thinking about the orca media challenges i mean they're they're on our zoom call now um and presumably they if we were going to do something similar in a hybrid model they could it would at least be as well they couldn't potentially engage in the same way anyway just making a note of that dn go ahead yeah i mean it's a little bit more complicated with orca because they do have cables and lines running into the room um that i don't know if they could easily be restrung up into the auditorium uh area and to run the cameras and of course the cameras are fixed cameras uh in the council chambers um but it strikes me that there may be um something worth looking at in the sense of creating a public location um for attending these meetings which is i'm comfortable staying on zoom it's not my preferred medium um i'm a three-dimensional guy i prefer to be seen in person um but at the same time um this is the safest option and just as i said my kids off to school you know if there was another really good option that would satisfy all of their their needs you know online that was a little bit safer i would feel more comfortable doing it i i think this hits more of the points but i think this to some of the concerns that we're facing as far as the ability to have public um access the meetings you know maybe there's should be some consideration to having one sort of hub where there is the possibility for you know the council chambers to be opened for public to to watch a city council meeting sort of virtually putting it up on the big screen giving them an opportunity to speak through the zoom maybe one or two people that would be in staffing in the city council room you know and or one of us if we if we chose to um but sort of creating that option with the idea that we default on zoom but have a have a city council option for either the public or a limited number and maybe i honestly oh sorry oh no just go ahead i i honestly feel a little sleep not thinking that one through but we're both bill and i are obviously here in the office we do have a computer set up per zoom in the council chambers if we could open it up and limit it to 32 people in that room the public i don't i'm just putting this out there if you guys seen fit opening it up during council hours so that folks can come in and participate via zoom that way um they would just have to talk at the computer wouldn't have to touch any of our equipment um orca would still be able to film it because i honestly did not speak to them about their comfort in coming in that's another thing that you know is a consideration as they might not feel comfortable coming into a public meeting at this point and i'm not trying to force that on anyone um but that is something that i at least would do to clean that space before and after meetings and clean that equipment for folks that they can use it maybe there's a way we can get it projected up on the screen we can do that that's super easy uh connor go ahead just one other idea to add to the mix the legislature is looking at this very scenario right now and they're going to probably be having in-person meetings in montpellier somewhere that's already covered by orca so they don't meet at 6 30 on wednesday nights we should probably reach out to the state to see maybe there's a room at the state house that's already outfitted for this interesting that's interesting thought that'd be kind of fun also um lauren did you have any handrails no okay just checking um okay i i don't know that i feel like we landed anywhere in particular except for that people are okay with where we're at or or it doesn't sound like we're ready to like jump back in but this this possibility of opening things up to the public um in a limited way in person that that was interesting to me just that creates an additional avenue um insofar as you all feel safe doing that um yeah let's kick that around a little bit you know those are some ideas right tonight that we didn't think of so let's let's play with that for a little bit and get back to your suggestions because the better the more we can do the better yep and so is this something that um you can follow up with us again about at the next meeting okay great uh jonna well i just really want the staff because my concern is being in that older age group and compromise i would really be concerned of the staff especially in the fall winter if we start having up ticks so that you really need to look at it for your safety please i think it's really important that we not ask you to do something we aren't willing to do ourselves yeah that's fair that's fair thank you we will have that in our consideration i appreciate that yeah okay any further comments on this okay all right um thanks everybody i think that is the end of our regular business so we are on to council reports and we're gonna start with donna okay i'll be quick uh lauren and i attended dpw's public hearing on their proposed gravelling of coming street and it was just the three of us but it was good zack did a very good job i i also along with several of you attended the ice cream social for can that was very well done in a lovely yard and i would hope by next meeting i would like to bring forth my impression of where the central vermont public safety authority board is and to have you start thinking along the lines in the next few months of appointing those two slots that you have on the board that are empty right now thank you thank you codder just best of luck to all the teachers and education support professionals going back to school it was uh like just living down the street from main street middle it was nice to see everybody out and about again but i know it comes with a lot of anxiety so um everybody's being very brave and best best of luck to them as as this rolls out yeah thank you uh jay yeah i'll just echo codder and say thank you to teachers and administrators and and and staff for all their work to to get back starting to school um and uh and that's it for me thankfully no uh no new medical emergencies thanks uh dine sure uh i'll echo donna's concern about the central vermont public safety i actually kim chainy reached out to me um you know expressing some concern that we are down members from mom piliar and wanting uh wanting us to sort of beef up simply because i think they're at a point where they need to make some decisions it sounds like on on some of the rfps that they've put out and without a full board it makes it difficult if not close to impossible so it's certainly something we really really need to emphasize and to get people um to to join and i know you know there was actually some pressure about putting it on this agenda but it came in too late but it certainly should be one of the agenda items next week um the only other thing that i think we should really um be aware of is you know i'm hearing some chatter and sort of reflects the conversation we had last week about the police uh which is the student resource officer and i i know that that concern is continuing and that i would in my mind it seems to make sense that if there is discussion about that because that's a joint um position that works with the school system but works for the city is that we should be talking to the school board and there should be sort of one one conversation with an opportunity for the public to have input but also sort of control the conversation in a sense of let's make sure everyone has an opportunity to be to be heard about it and that's all okay thank you yeah um jack all right well this may be the most boring possible council member report but uh i think it's worth starting the discussion now i was looking at the manager's report of upcoming council meetings and in the months of november and december we have three weeks in which the our scheduled council meetings are potential conflict with the holiday or adjacent to a holiday because we have a veteran's day the night before thanksgiving and then on december 23rd which of course is festivus but what occurred to me uh looking right we're in a five week month now so this september is a five week month so if we were to move all the meetings in october november and december forward a week so it would be the first and third uh wednesdays of those three months that would avoid the conflicts with all of the uh holidays that i mentioned i i know people have scheduled you know plan their uh their weeks and months in advance so i thought it was worth mentioning it now as a way uh to avoid that thanks for bringing that up uh is this something uh bill or cameron that you can put out some recommendations to us or should we break out our calendars right now it kind of seems like we shouldn't do that right now necessarily but good sure we could take a look whether we need to do all of them or some of them or okay and uh so you'll come back to us with some some date recommendations sure and the other i guess and you know another question is sometimes um especially with the november december ones we've been known to meet on a different night to like a monday night or something if that works because we sort of wouldn't want to conflict with festivals um last year we're gonna have defeats of strength well there's also there's always the airing of the grievances yeah we do and part of my thinking is that if we if we do first and third for all these months we would never run into the situation of having two weeks in a row of having to do a meeting so yeah any other thoughts on that from council there's a preference on that if not that's okay look at that we'll throw some ideas in the weekly memo this way okay uh great lauren uh few quick things um when i just wanted to note for people that the farmers market is being moved to 133 state street next to uh the tax department building so look out for that hopefully that'll be a great great new space for it um so hope people can get out there to enjoy our farmers market um wanted to note um and thank bill and cameron and the staff for the change in policy with the transparency around the lobbying it's been great to see that coming out and the quick implementation of that um change so thanks for making that happen and it's really interesting and helpful to see what our what our city staff are uh are testifying on so thank you for for making that happen um on the policing just um you know case people i know there's a lot of community interest and so my understanding is that next meeting will likely have or in a future meeting we will have a proposal from staff on um the next some next steps around um uh committee as the chief proposed strategic planning and visioning um so that conversation is continuing you know dan raised the school resource officer as one of the issues and then um you know there are a whole bunch of ideas put out there um by both the chief and community members so just to let people know those conversations are continuing that process is continuing um a lot of work is being done by staff i know um so i just wanted to make sure that was clear to everyone and stay tuned and though you know for when that's back on um an agenda um one other uh last thing um it's been a while since we've had an update from mop failure alive i know last week we get you know jay gives us great updates as being our liaison there but wondering if we should get you know especially heading into winter when outdoor things are going to be less of an option like what's what are our businesses you know needing you know how can we as a community be supporting them um so wondering if we should invite dan back or whoever a group of people to to come um you know give us an update and you know explore what we can be doing um as a city or as community members to help support our our local businesses want to throw that out great thank you so i just want to give everybody a heads up that um already starting to think about the budget process that we will be starting in probably more like october november i know like november but even so um we've usually started that process with a survey to see what everybody's priorities are um and i think particularly because this is a some unusual circumstances around planning for the budget um we want to start that um early and think about things in sort of a tiered way potentially uh so just to the heads up to be looking for that probably next um a couple of weeks again i know it's it's early but i i'd rather get that out on the earlier side rather than later um so just uh i'm gonna be looking for that um and then also just want to echo the shout out to uh to educators who are going back to school um uh and as well as as families who are are sending uh their kids to school um just thinking about everybody during this time and hoping everyone stays stay safe um so that is it for me uh john anything nothing absolutely nothing i'm on vacation this is why i look like this awesome i'm on mark's vineyard right now so dang this technology that means i can't get out of being in the meeting but it's too convenient i didn't even think about that when you popped on i just wasn't thinking uh bill go ahead yeah just a couple of things one um you know lauren did mention that we were working on police responses we were planning on that for the next meeting um going to take stock after this meeting to see what got added to next meeting because you know i and i mean that because i think that's kind of you know we if we have some lengthy conversations whether it's around winter parking or other things you know we don't want to go to 11 and not be able to take on a weighty subject so we'll probably take a look at um what's in the queue and it'll certainly be one of the next two meetings because it's timely and we've got to do it but make sure everything is balanced uh so there's that sRO uh was mentioned um prior to recently in some of the contact you may have had uh the mayor and i have scheduled the meeting with along with camera and the chief chief p with school officials um this friday uh for the express purpose of talking about a joint process so that um we can talk to them about how is this going to be addressed how how will these decisions be made um so that both the city and school are on the same page in terms of how they're communicated public about how this issue would be deliberated you know we'll talk about i don't know maybe we'll talk about a joint meeting who knows what we'll talk about but our goal is is not so much to talk about the merits of sRO as it is how will we together um or unparalleled tracks consider this issue so that is on our minds as well um quick question at the last meeting there was discussion in a some apparent enthusiasm for some kind of a covid task force to you know really be looking at downtown and those kind of issues but then there was no real conclusion to that no motion no sense of so i you know i don't really want to wait to another meeting or how you want to handle that but um there seemed to be a sense of urgency and i didn't want to have it pass the meeting so um if anybody wants to weigh in on that you're talking about like business development and yeah i think you and dan it sort of raised it as a key issue having council and business people and just how we're going to keep things going and um and i hadn't written it down and then it was prompted again when moran just mentioned you know we haven't heard from my people who are live what are the plans or like yeah gee we said we were gonna gonna also get involved so i don't know if anybody was yeah so i think that um long long story short is that i think that yes we'll definitely um want and need to be involved but we'll yeah i've had a couple conversations with dan um and others we'll have those guys take the lead in terms of managing that process but the city whether council and or staff member be part of it i think ultimately that's going i think that that's going to be the best um the best approach so i mean it's certainly a significant discussion and a much broader discussion but i this all just sort of kind of coalesced this afternoon i wasn't able to communicate with anybody ahead of the meeting so i think that's fine and i'll continue with dan tomorrow yeah so i'll meet you with dan tomorrow afternoon we have a regular meeting so we'll circle the waggits on this thank you yeah but i'll loop you in and we'll so we're all on the same page with it yeah super thanks and then just last thing welcome mary smith aboard uh as our new executive assistant she started yesterday so you'll start getting emails and things from her are they just gonna be great and uh they're just to dig into all the the details so we're happy to have her so if you're in city hall safely come in and say hi on tuesdays or thursdays and uh otherwise look forward to seeing her name giving you all sorts of instructions on what things to do okay super all right well thanks everybody um have a good night and so i will without objection uh declare this meeting adjourned good meeting see you later