 We're going to start, I'd like to welcome everyone to our free Halloween edition of the ward one at the meeting. And we're going to start the meeting off by self introductions. So, my name is Tom Darenthal I live on Nash place, which is across from Centennial field. I'm Carol Livingston I'm on the steering committee and I live on Calarico court which is just below the cemetery. Sorry about that. I live on Henry Street. Hi, my name is Milo Grant, and I'm vice commissioner doing the presentation later. Hi, my name is Jake Schumann. I am a resident. And I am working for the peace districts in the county. Hi, my name is Catherine Hill. I live on Ferris Street. I'm support engine children. Hi, I'm Linda Severance I live next door. Let's get here. I'm sorry. Oh, yeah. Richard, I grew up over that. I live on Riverside Avenue and I'm also the state council nominee for the progressive party. Hi, Tina. I live on Riverside Avenue and I'm also the state council nominee for the progressive party. I'm the steering committee and I live on North Cross Street with Angie. Hi, everyone. I'm Achilles Locosu and I am the scope commissioner for this work. I'm Sydney Wonka lives out question depends on the heart. Your heart. Sydney. And we've also got some people online. Dave, you want to introduce yourself. Sure. Do you call me. I live in Ash place. And Sophie. Sophie quest Sophie quest from the old East End. Old East End. Yeah. Okay. Sharon. Sharon you're on mute. Sorry. Sharon. You're on mute. Who just came out. Thank you. Okay. Welcome. And just a couple of announcements first. We do a food outside and out of meaning out of this room, not really outside of the building. It's from Alicia Masala, which is on the corner of Colchester Avenue and East Avenue. And, and just another announcement is that if you have received, which I believe everyone has a ballot for the November election. There was a piece missing. That's the CSWB ballot. It's for a bond issue for the solid waste district. And you have to request that separately. So it was not mailed out in the packet. So my understanding is you call city clerk and they can mail it to you. Or you go down when you're submitting your ballot or whatever. And it wasn't supposed to be, I don't know. We don't understand why it wasn't all part of package, but it's important issues. So we just find that for you. So we're going to start with speak out. And I'll start with introducing some of our candidates. Tonya, do you want to. You have the floor you can. Sure. Okay. Where was your name? It's against you. Take this one. Okay. I'll look back. Perfect. Hi, everyone. I'm Tony. I am a representative right now in Essex. So I'm running for state Senate to represent the chicken central. Mayor of Essex. And I'm a public, public representative. A public representative. Check in central is most of Burlington, all of. When you ski a tiny sliver of Colchester and most of Essex. I am a social worker and have done a lot of work. In my life as an activist and organizer and I'm really running to make sure that every day for monitors are represented in both bodies of our general assembly in the house where I've bought. from tenants who had been evicted in the committee room. It was really important to me. And my chair said to me, like, oh, don't worry, the housing commissioner can speak to that. But I know from my own experience, growing up in a single parent working class home and from my work as a social worker, that it's actually really important that we hear stories from the people experiencing them. And so I really want to continue doing that work in the Senate. We lost some really important people in the Senate and some people who should have retired maybe a long time ago. And we've got a lot of open seats there. And I think we have a real opportunity right now. We've almost a third of the Senate and more than a third of the House turning over to put people into their seats that actually get it. I'm a renter because I can't afford to buy hair. I am one of the many renters that went away to college and couldn't afford to come home. And I hear over and over and over again, the rhetoric around like, how do we keep people here? We pay them. We create affordable housing. We make accessible affordable childcare. And those are the things that I want to go quite for, not speaking for you, but opening the door for you to come speak for yourself. So that's me. I am happy to take questions. I'm happy to get, well, I can run to my car and get contact information because I was running late. So I didn't think to bring it, but that is just my quick approach and I don't want to take up more of your time because I know you have a lengthy agenda to get to. Great questions. Oh, I approved. That's typical. Well, thank you. All right. We also have candidates for city council. So. Jake, do you want to take this off? Thank you. Hi, everybody. My name is Jake Schuman. I was asked to express what I thought was the most important issue to the East district. I played with it in my mind. There were a lot of things that I wanted to say are the most important issue to the East district because they're the most important issue to the city. But I'm going to try and keep it focused on the East district. Yeah. I'm sorry. The question is Ward one. Ward one. Oh, right there. That's very good. Thank you. I think the, the, what I was planning on saying is still valid. So the way that I would respond to that question is, I think that for Ward one specifically. Even more so than the rest of the city, what's very important is the city's relationship with the University of Vermont. I think that when we think about the housing crisis, you know, we don't think about the issue of homelessness among the University of Vermont community. And I think that it's really unfortunate that when we think of the homeless community in Vermont, we conjure an image of this archetypal human being who has done things wrong and has messed up and is bad for some reason. And I would say that there are a lot of people in our community who deserve housing and there are a lot of people who are in our community who have housing, who deserve better housing. And I think that if we engage the University of Vermont in good faith, bring them to the table and, and leverage what we can, and we can work with them to address our housing crisis in a very meaningful way. Thanks. I guess before I give the microphone back, I just say if you want to learn more, get involved, you can email Jake, the number for BTB at geneal.com. Before we let you go though, I should ask this before, can you just give us like the two minute version of your background? Yeah, thank you. For the prompt. My background is in human services and social work. I've also worked in human resources, personnel type stuff. I am currently an EMT. I've also done policy work. Most recently I spent the last year working at DCF central office in their policy shop. I also in 2012 and 2013 helped write a bill that became the 2014 and act relating to equal pay. There's a lot of stuff, but we'll leave it there. Thank you very much. Are there questions? Yes. Richard. Would you just like to say a couple of words about public safety? Because your predecessor. Your predecessor voted for the funding of the police. Your predecessor was very. Agenda driven. Without the neighborhood driven. And would you please address that? Thank you. Yeah, thank you. So the question for those folks who might not have heard online was about public safety. How to address it. I think that in 2020, there was a national movement. And it got a lot of attention focused on police. And the problem is in the policing. I think it's very difficult to express into. Easily digestible sound bites, but I'm going to be my best. I think that in 2020. There was a national movement. And it got a lot of attention. And it got a lot of attention focused on the police. And the problems in the policing. I think that there was a lot of emotional thinking and reasoning around that issue. And I think that. Whether you agree that he was successful or not. Moreau had put in efforts and. Tried to bring our police force. Into a new Europe. I think that was his stated goal with installing. The police force. I think that some reactionary folks maybe moved a little bit too quickly. And maybe there was not. As much thinking around the process and the engagement and the way that it was done. But without relitigating the past, I would say that moving forward, the way that we deal with public safety. And I think that we have to be able to respond to all the calls for service that we get, but we don't need people with guns responding to all of those calls. I support the expansion of the CSL CSO program. I support addressing social determinants of health. And helping people so that they do not find themselves in these situations where they are running a foul at the law. Thank you. Other questions. All right. Thanks. Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Very good day. How many city council meetings have you attended? And what were the main things when you were there? Um, you know, I can't say I have attended like a whole bunch of city council meetings, but over the years, I'd say probably like one or two a year. Yeah. Just, just general. City council. I, you know, I asked only because I think sometimes there's a tendency. You know, I think it's just, you know, I think it's just, you know, I think it's just, you know, I think it's just candidates to run without understanding really the workings that sort of brass packed stuff that happened to run city government. Yeah. And I do know we had a candidate recently who won. And when she was asked about the pensions, she didn't know what a pension was. And I find that concerning. So I would hope whoever is running. You know, whoever wins the seat. They're very much agree with you. And I would say that the reason I don't go to city council meetings. Is cause they're boring. Um, but I, you know, I have friends who serve on city council and I have friends in the state house. Um, and, you know, I follow the news that comes out of those spaces. So, um, So I'll see you at the next one. Yeah. I have to go regularly for work. So I am often there. All right. Yeah. Any other questions? Any questions for people online? Sing them. Um, Dina. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Sing them. Um, Dina. You have one. Hi, everyone. I want to first thank everyone for coming here. It's been a long time to be here. Um, so I was nominated to my first city council. Um, and one of my main focus is. Public safety. Um, I work in the courthouse. So I will have the issues. And I've had to work in the courthouse. And I've had to work in the courthouse. And I've had to work in the courthouse. And I've had to work in the courthouse. So they, they ended up on my desk, five days a week. And that's my whole world. Is it deal with like the town issues. And the state issues. And having no responsibility and helping each person. You go to the court process. And I watch family cases. Turn into criminal cases. And I believe my goals and public safety seem the interconnection between them all. build affordable housing, get to build affordable housing in sustainable environments. If you want to increase public safety, whether make sure our kids are having schools or funding, I do work with the Lucie School District. And a lot of these kids, they live in environments where there's violence, there's drug abuse, you know, you just can't, there's so many little moving parts that I really want to focus on, you know, like just like to get calls where parents have legal abuse cases. And I always think myself, this kid's being exposed to that matter. And one day, they might be in the same position. So I care about public safety. I care about building that foundation because we can't build a home without a foundation. And that's my role. I'm a new American. I immigrated to Vermont at four years old. And my parents came at one time, they do know much English and they weren't provided the resources. So I had to grow up early. I had to want to have to create solutions for myself. And because of that, I, why am I, because I understand what it's like to have an issue and not have someone that can provide to the door. So if they go, make the door yourself and open that same door. And that's why I believe having a member who works in the courthouse and who mails these problems firsthand, I think that's what the county and fresh perspective needs someone with a law background. You can help pass bills because they have the legal knowledge to do so. And housing is such a big problem for me because my mother worked two jobs and we lost our home. We didn't have key for months, five kids. And she wants to bring us a formal house and her first concern was, is that a safe environment. Young violence happens because of young people because oftentimes they aren't a safe environment. And that's my focus. And thank you for listening. Any questions? Yes. Yeah, could you talk more about your upbringing? Because if I remember right, you come from a working class background, I wonder if you could talk more about that because I also did and I appreciate when elected representatives do. Yeah, of course. So I'm a child of health care workers and I think since the pandemic, health care workers are being so overworked and they're exhausted and a lot of them have kids at home. And when my friends became health care workers, they told us they're like, we're not going to be home a lot. We need you to look back for each other. And like, that's how I see things. If we want to improve and we want to increase public safety, if we want our kids have resource education, we need to make sure we're working with each other. And I think we're a working class family, you have to bend for yourself. And when you experienced that, we learned a lot. I was a legal intern for location law firm, I'm 18, I was the longest person ever, and I handle employee harassment cases. I handle cases where workers weren't, their rights were not protected, but they had to work there because if they lost our job, how they're going to pay rent, how to keep their kids in school, how to put food on the plate. So oftentimes workers just stop with it because they felt like they weren't protected and they felt like this was their only option. So it's not in that for a year. And then next thing I'm working close when you see school district, I think I'm just always working for working costs then because I know it's like to not really having the support. And so you're the only person looking after yourself. You have leaders who say, yes, we'll help bring change when that things happen. And I'm done asking for better. I'm ready to make it. And that's one of the reasons why I'm running. And that's why all of us are here. We're done asking. We just want it to happen already. You grew up in Maryland, just? Yes. I've lived here for over 14 years. Yeah. I went to Bryce Memorial High School. I had the privilege of having privilege education, but that came with my parents at home. And that's oftentimes what happens. We have to sacrifice so much of ourselves to have one little gut. But it's like, that shouldn't be that. I really want to focus on the way we're looking to send money the way like taxes, like these need to go back to the schools. And I think they should also like the police with the police model, like we need to create more beauty. I think it's more, I really want to increase the meaning like people of color to be sitting down the police tomorrow because I work with the police in my courthouse. So because I'm already working with both sides, I'm ready to have these many these gatherings, like we can't move forward if there's no unity. There's not listening. I mean, I know the answer to all the questions, but if I'm listening, then I can work with you. I'm not going to say, I know that social to every problem because I don't. But if I can listen, then I do. And that's why I really enjoy remediation delegation sit down. So that's why I'm here tonight. And that's what I'm going to keep doing. Yes. I appreciate your perspective and the work you do at the courthouse. Thank you. As a city councilor, would you provide to ensure that there's always a DVPL police force and ethnic violence prevention officer? Yeah. So domestic violence, I'm so glad you brought it up. I mean, you work in social work. So you understand a lot of social workers, there's a lot of them and they're not getting increased funding. So I'm very much open to seeing possible solutions, you know, like what you thought was a great initiative that I would be open to. I'm coming to city council because I want people willing to say, this is my idea. This is what I want to see and be listened to them. I don't think city council is about making this a decision. It's about listening to the answer. And that's something I'm coming to be open to because I know people in the police department and they really care. So it's like, how can we bring them forward? Say hi. So people are upset with us. But listen, this is what I do. And I really do care about the community. And I know that. So that's my role. I mean, they just kind of just, I really just want to put my thoughts and bring more unity and better communication. Other questions? Give it to me all. I can be here all night. Questions from Keville online? Oh, Sharon. Yes. Hi. Thank you for, for putting your name forward and for running. I'm sorry I couldn't be there tonight to meet you in person. But I don't know much about you, but I'd like to know how long have you worked at the courthouse? And then the other candidate was asked how many city council meetings they had attended. And I'm interested to know that piece. And if when you were in school, if you ever were part of a legislative process? Yeah. So, so I've always been a community member and a leader in the community. And that's always been my platform with the community. And I think, I mean, I've attended all the community council meetings. I attended like once a year because I was with the community. You know, I feel like the real conversations happen to things like this. And that's definitely what I care about. If I was not the state council, I'll still make sure I'm attending the town meetings, the town gatherings. I think that's where the real work starts. And in college, so I was a D1 athlete in college and I look like a lot of students here. I was working two jobs to help support myself in college. So, while I wasn't able to be part of a legislative bill, I was a double major and I worked a lot with law firms and I worked a lot with teachers and just, I mean, anything myself, I think my goal is to help pass a bill. I think having some of the legal knowledge to know how to maneuver that process. Because oftentimes, for example, like the just eviction got shut down. And I see them like, okay, is there anything we could have done through the law to help pass it? I think that's, that's my strength. I think that's what we need here. I miss another question. How long have you been working in this form? Yeah, so I was very fortunate enough, I got hired in April and I started working there around June. And it's, and I've been trained to have expertise in criminal, family, civil, probate eviction pieces. So it's, it's been four months and just like, really getting my expertise and like, I deal with like 40 clients a day. So it's a lot. And I know like, and it always, a lot of things I see in the news, like, I happen to talk to that person. And they called me like, hi, I have this issue. What can I do? And I'm really excited to bring like that into the city council. And I really want to focus on educating towns for you about their rights. Because I think that's another way we can help protect ourselves if we know our rights. And that's something to help with housing. All right. Yes. Well, I know you grew up on Riverside and I feel like there's a disconnect between the new American community and some of like the city regular city meetings like these like city council. How do you imagine like, or do you think you can play a role in sort of bridging those things? Yeah, so when I first came to America and went to time, my dad knew he had to drive. He knew we needed a car to get to one place another, but he was still learning English. So what he did, he had to teach himself how to drive. It teaches my mom how to drive. And he started teaching people how to drive. You know, like, a lot of these issues we're dressing about, like, I'm not going to see my thing is like, I might be like, I feel like I know we're both like the new American people in this room. But we're talking about these issues, like everyone has to show up. And I think my room has increased translators. And we want to, like, increase unity, like the police department, like, we just make sure you have new American people in there too, because oftentimes they live in the homes where there is a lot of, like, permanent activity and drug abuse. Because, like, for my experience, you can't afford to live in nicer places. And that's the reality, but we're not going to even hear how can really affect change. You know, like, they need to be here. I want to increase translators. And then my dad speaks five languages. So he was so happy to start bringing people in translating. I know so many translators. So I want to bring them here and tell them, like, let's bring everyone to walk. We are community. So we have to look like a community. All right. Any other questions? I'll be around to give provide any more answers. I don't have a conversation. Actually, any questions? Actually, I was going to, if folks are done asking you questions, honey didn't get a lot of questions earlier, so I was going to ask her a question. That's how we're going to go back to that. I'm going to interrupt here just for a minute and make a few observations. Okay. The first observation is all these people who ask questions were not heard by people online, because they didn't use a microphone. Oh, okay. So that's what this is. This is like, oh, okay. But you got her. Oh, okay. That was a good one. You're okay. You're okay. You're okay. Okay. Thank you all for your question. I have to have a question for you, so I'll have some line out and talk. So my second observation is that I'm not home. So our previous speaker was standing like this, so all people online could only see the back of them. Okay. So I suggest the person stands. So the camera is set up this way, so that people who are online can feel that they're part of the meeting. So they're looking like this, so we can see everyone except the speaker. Okay. So at the very least, you should like turn around and do this occasionally or something. I'm just, those are my observations. So the room has certain limitations, and I just want to go down. Thanks. Thanks. So we're running, can you just talk maybe about one or two pieces of legislation that you worked on as a representative in your virtual product? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the bills that I'm really proud of that I moved forward was a mental health expansion bill that sets up a workforce development task force that looks at not, it does a lot of sort of boring licensure things that unless you're a mental health professional, you don't really care about, but the most exciting part about that bill was setting up this workforce development task force that didn't just name commissioners to a task force. It named, it asked the Vermont Center for Independent Living, which is a disability rights organization, to put someone on the task force. It asked our great Vermont to put someone on the task force. It asked the New American community to put someone on the task force. And to really look at not only how are we growing our mental health workforce, but how are we diversifying our mental health workforce? Because I know when I look around, the mental health workforce is largely upper middle class white women, and we're truly going to provide mental health care. We need to make sure that we have representative mental health care. And so while I was being asked by the people who work in the same bill that I do to really look at how do we diversify that field? Because without a doubt, there is a price in that field. It wasn't simply about bringing more numbers and it's about who are we bringing into that field so that it's truly representative. I was also really happy to fight for the voter expansion bill. So universal mail balloting was something that we passed through my committee and two of the committee amendments that I was able to add to that that I was really excited about were electronic ballot caring. So ballot caring came over to us from the Senate and I was able to expand that to electronic ballot caring. And previously, if we made a minor technical error on your ballot, it got thrown out and marked defectively. Now, if you make a minor technical error on your ballot, your task force will call you and say, hey, you made an error. Would you like to fix it? And as long as the error doesn't mean you have to revote, you can email them and activate it. Fix your ballot and have your vote count. The other piece that I was able to add into that bill was around primary voting. So it was really confusing, this election cycle. I talked to so many people during the primary who said, I'm just waiting for my ballot to arrive. And I had to tell them it's not going to, because we didn't do universal mail balloting for the primary. And the Secretary of State's office was really oppositional around that. And what I was able to do was to get a feasibility study that will come back to the legislature in December of 2023 to tell us how we roll that out for the primary as well. Because I think it's the more consistency we have, the more engagement we have. And I think for us to really save our democracy and to really fight for a democracy that includes everyone, we have to have that kind of engagement. So those were a couple of the things that I worked on. And I worked on a lot of things, I guess, that I really fought for the Just Cause Eviction Bill. I fought for all of the Burlington Charter changes because I really feel like that direct democracy that comes out of our towns shouldn't be stopped in the legislature, especially a legislature that if you actually look through it, isn't representative of the demographics of Vermont. So there's a couple of things. I mean, I could probably go on and on, but I won't. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. You're welcome to take that. I think, Vina, did you have a question? Yeah, yes. Oh. A lot of my work includes working with social workers and family cases. And oftentimes the problem they bring up to me is just that there's not a lot of them. They're not clean enough, but there's so much children needs help. How, what's your response to that? And what plans do you have to help support them? Because I think that's a very big issue that we're having right now. Yeah, absolutely. And certainly the bill that I've talked about to really expand that workforce is part of that. And the reality of it is, is we are having across our mental health system, across our health care system a real crisis in workforce. I think we really need to look at how we invest in those workers. Those are low pay jobs. You know, I even go into social work because I thought I was going to get rich doing that. And as I said, I have a master's degree and I ran this because I can't afford to buy here. And so we need to really look at like, how do we forgive student loans, whether or not someone is working within a qualified health organization. Perhaps they need to do more work if they're working, you know, whether it's in private practice or whether it's with DCF, or maybe it's a percentage if they're working with X percentage of people who have Medicaid. Or like there needs to be some metric that allows people to do this work for multiple angles and not carry. I mean, I have $60,000 of student loan debt and I have paid off student loan. When I was in grad school, I worked full time. I was a teacher, graduate teaching assistant so that they would help pay for my education. I went to school full time and was able to pay down my loans a little bit. But the reality of it is, is that we are making these low paying jobs that are largely women doing this work just unacceptable. And so we have to really look at how we incentivize people to get into this field by paying the better wages, by forgiving their loans, by providing support. I work in private practice now and I'm on my own. I think if I'm navigating something, there's nobody to talk to. So I think there's a lot of different avenues. I had a really great events. I've been working for my university, talking to first generation college builders about what they wanted to do. And lots of them are like, no, I want to go to business, I want to make money. Because of course, because statistically, our first generation college builders are people who grew up in poverty, grew up in the working class. And they don't want that for themselves. So if we want more people in the human service field, we have to pay them. We have to make that a field where they are not going to spray by and wonder if they can afford their rent this month. And I don't have the magic solution, but what I can say is that from my own experience and from the experience of the people that I work for, I will be there every day advocating from that lens. I hope that answers your question. Oh, yay. Well, thank you very much. We're going to move on to the second part of Speak Out. People have things that they want to bring out. Great. Go ahead. Number one, I brought a couple signs if anybody would like them about supporting the high school. We really need a high school, I think. I know. And people are going to stop living here if we don't have a high school. Macy's, they're trying hard, but my granddaughter's there and it's just not great. But as far as public safety, I agree with Jake that we need more people without guns just kind of hold in the line. And around the high school, so my granddaughter lives maybe a quarter of a mile from the high school. She lives on Elm Terrace and she will not walk to school because she has two ways to go down her street through the park, Smalley Park, which often people are sleeping there and they're sleeping bags. And then on Lower Church Street to get to the high school or she can go on Wynuski, South Wynuski, and go to the high school. She's now 15 years old. Last year, the 14-year-old, the freshman, she had some really scary experiences. So this year it's ridiculous because my daughter drives her to school. And we, she grew up living on Henry Street and walking everywhere or taking the bus or riding her bike to the high school when it was on Institute Road. So I think we don't need, and I've been riding our counselor, I don't think we need policemen with guns down there, kind of rousing up people who are having to sleep on Church Street. But I think we need people down there helping them. And I just, I don't agree with Richard that we defunded the police. I believe we were trying to rearrange funding so that we met all the needs of our population. Anyway, thank you. Thanks. Well, just general comment. We, I just, I'm just going off what you said. I mean, the reality is that the police budget was one of the only budgets that didn't get cut year over year during COVID. We did rearrange the officer count and the officer count wasn't just picked out of the hat. Stephanie, so you know who's well respected in terms of being an academic in this field, compared us to cities all over the country, similar sides, and we came to that officer count based on data. We haven't hired the unarmed officers, and that's not because the council didn't improve that months ago. It's because the police department hasn't hired, and I understand that hiring is difficult, but you know, I don't think there's any question there. And the other thing you have to say is like, overall crime and across the board is down. That is just a fact. Instances of gun violence have spiked. Instances of drug abuse and overdose have spiked. Instances of mental health price use have spiked. And that's true in the most conservative counties of Vermont. So I just think like, you know, it's a tough issue and like, there's no perfect answer, and I don't know the perfect answer, but like, there's been so much misinformation flying around. And I'll also say, Iroco and Councilor did vote for the Public Safety Transformation. So did the majority of the other parties as well, and the mayor signed that resolution. And so when it was politically convenient for the other side to champion the issue, they championed it. And they certainly said this is where we're going and took credit for it. And 2,000 people, the most public participants at any city council meeting in history of the city showed up. But then when it become, you know, a little more politically dicey, or when the police union decided they could use this as a cheap talking point to express fear in our neighborhoods, all of a sudden we're walking back for it. And the police union putting out every time there's a violent instance, you know, implying that someone getting shot down pounds in the fall of the city councilors because they have a policy disagreement. I mean, that is so out of bounds. Like when we talk about partisanship and like not acting as a community, like that is just so frustrating. Like how do you even have a conversation with that one? If the other side is saying, you're responsible for a murder. Like, I mean, we're just, I don't know. Anyway, that's my point. We're going to... Okay. You heard, you got a quick one? Yeah. Just very quickly and not to pile on I mean, I think Karen and Kurt both expressed what I feel. Yeah, I heard something louder. Sorry, Karen and Carter both expressed what I feel pretty well and strongly. I'll just add on a quick anecdote. I was at the LaLiga city's pound fair for work last week. And I happened to talk to a couple of folks that were, that live over in the Connecticut Group Valley and just overheard them say, oh, I'm never going back to Burlington again. It's so dangerous there. And this is what is happening with the politicization of this issue. People don't want to come to Burlington. Vermonters think they're not safe if they come to Church Street. It's crazy. I've lived here since 1976. Crime has gone up and down. House got broken into twice, 10 years ago. And it hasn't since. I mean, it's just, politicizing this issue has gotten us nowhere. And it has just scared people away from Burlington. It has scared money away from an economic development away from Burlington and it's scaring people in town unnecessarily. Thanks. We're going to move on to our next agenda item, which is a little bit different from our original agenda. And we're going to hear from, I feel like she's going to tell us about what's going on with the school district, which is probably another political topic. Remember, speak to the camera. There's the camera. You're awesome. All right. Well, for people who don't know me, my name is Achilles. I grew up here. And I actually, next to me, I was with Dina. I know some of your similar faces here. I know that, of course. I was elected this past March to be your World One School Commissioner. And so our biggest agenda right now is passing this bond so we can put our kids into a real school environment. And so this is what I have to say. I'm just a little update from the board as a whole. With the board and community volunteers having a busy and former boarders on the need for a new high school, but while it's important for you guys to vote yes. The bond is asking to be given the ability by the bonding service to borrow one 65 million from the bank as it is needed. So we need this amount to do the work that we need to do in order to put our kids in a sustainable normal school environment. This is the amount that we need. And this is not that we are pushing for. The board and district administration are continuing to pursue state and federal grants, both private and corporate connected being other plenty of possibilities that will lessen taxpayers. So we're not to borrow that for one 65. So the one 65 number is a little bit of a reach. And so we are pushing for it to be lowered. But time will tell there hasn't been too many changes in the last couple of weeks. But we've learned that taxes going up is a huge thing that might hinder people to vote yes. And so which makes sense for sure. Some of the federal and state grants that we'll pursue need to have the bond capacity in place to be able to apply them. So this is why it's really important for us to push the narrative for our word to vote yes, but also continue the conversation outside of our word. And make sure that we're on the same page because it's not really about the students, you know, about the kids in our community. We as a community have to come together to make sure, to make our voters understand that the yes is so important. And there are so many ways that we can all get involved in making this thing come true. We all like to say that it takes a little less to raise a kid, but it takes a little less to build the high school to put our kids in them. And so I just think it's really crucial coming up in these next couple of weeks. It's going to be very evident that the car shouldn't be there. And we just have to push it and make sure that we're doing our kids. Like you mentioned, there are some signs here. I can try to get more signs for us and bring them. This is my first time actually at an NPA meeting. I have a lecture around this time, but today got canceled. And so Kathy asked me to come in and give this update because she couldn't be here tonight, but if our signs are needed, then you can definitely reach out to us on Kathy or I. And we can do that for you guys. Yeah, it's just really important that we do this. And the plan is now. Thank you guys. Any questions? Nina? Yeah. So my focus is strength around my data. So I entered the Winston School District where my role was to help them pass, support their building, funding. I did a lot of data work and my jobs were across the high school mall. Now we start talking to a lot of students. And my question for you is, do you think increased data that shows statistics of why the school needs these free funding would help or why do you feel like no matter how much data we've shown that it still is a big issue? I think taxpayers and taxes are a big reason why people don't want to go forward. A lot of what I've been hearing is that, oh, the school board wants to put so much money towards this new building and make it this new 20% unit check development. But I just really think that people are scared of actors going up and it's going to occur the economic development we have in Wellington. And also, people are obviously, you know, have the respect their own opinion. So I think if we just answer those questions and make sure that we're all on the same page, then they'll understand what was really going on. So just to put it out there on record, I'm all for voting yes and funding and building a school. I'm just curious if you can speak to maybe some opportunities for saving that the school will bring us, right? So if we have a more efficient school, like we're going to save a little bit of money every year in our school budget. And I'm also curious about like future proofing to a certain extent. So it's like technologies change. We have a new form of classroom that we want to integrate or maybe we decide that we want to scale our classes up or scale our classes down. Like in what ways are the building that we're building going to be able to get bigger, get smaller, move walls around, things like that? Yeah. So to answer your first question, a lot of the core work is somewhere with applying and looking for grants to minimize the cost. I will say that there is a good amount of things that I cannot speak to right now in this room. And so I kind of want to stop myself there. But to answer your second question, could you please ask it again because I was focusing on the first question. Yeah. And just to clarify, like I wasn't really necessarily saying like, I assume like I think it's safe to assume that the school board did the work to make sure that like this building can be built actively and thoughtful. But like, I think like we're going to build an efficient building, right? And our current building is super input. So like, I don't know if you could put a number to it. Like how much money are we going to save every year on like our heating costs and our, you know, all that stuff. But the second question was just about future proofing the building. And like as educational styles change and our government's progress has changed, like is that being considered so that when we want to renovate a high school 10 years from now to incorporate a new learning style, we can do that as economically as possible. Yeah, for sure. I think that, you know, right now this is both the first high school. Unless it's seen out, see how that goes. And then when 10 years come then, 10 years is, you know, a long way. But I guess, I think that right now we're just trying to build the space for everyone. Make sure that it's really, that it's an inclusive spot and that it draws people to our town and that, you know, it just creates a sense of community. I know that a lot of our work is, you know, making sure there's spaces for individuals or kids who are, you know, can't be part of the larger, you know, part of the larger classrooms, you know, having more spaces for them to, you know, learn on their own pace. And I think that is really important for us to just, you know, just include everyone. Wellington has been, we've been just diverse for a while and it's, you know, we get to be in high school, honestly. But yeah, I don't have to answer your questions at all. I've heard that it's going to be a super room out in our state. You know, I mean, they are, it is very expensive, but I had heard that, you know, they really try to save what they could of building A and that it turned out they're just starting over. And I mean, that school was pretty big, you know, really big, yeah, for, for a while. It's, I mean, that's why we passed the money before because we were going to renovate it. And that money was not used. I mean, except for maybe, well, some of it for this testing, but that bond that we approved however many years ago, that was not ever spent. So this is like a new bond that is replacing that one we agreed to renovate. But anyway, I did, I thought that was kind of cute. I think it was Jeff Wick that wrote that in a thing about, you know, he's been very following it. He's a school board person. And, but then it was a super room out in our state. Yeah, I also did want to mention that, you know, there's been talks and building a high school for a really long time, even prior to when I joined the VHS 314, but I think that, you know, the consideration is doing what, you know, halted the, you know, just keep talking about it and actually put acting towards it. And displacing our students and putting them in the department store is really the last line that we think of. And it's just like not really, it's like the appropriate environment. You know, these kids are in the department store, they're in cubicle classrooms, there's no window, they're in downtime, really, at the end of a lot of distraction going on. So, but yeah, it is more. Any other questions? I actually have a question. Yeah, I've heard that it's not an insignificant item to do the PCB cleanup. And is anyone working with the EPA to get EPA funding to do the cleanup piece of the rebuild? I can't answer that. I'm not. I don't have any information on that. Okay. Thank you. Really. I think we'll have you all know well. And I think that they are doing all they can to find funding for anything and everything. Yes. So I would say yes. Okay. We'll tend to that. All right. Well, thank you. Yeah. Yes. I'm probably breaking through it all right now. My name is Catherine Bremant. I don't actually go back to that issue that we just, that we shouldn't be talking about. We have one around public safety. Neighborhood safety. Oh. Oh, I don't think I said we shouldn't talk about it. Oh, okay. Is that all right if I bring that back? Sure. Okay. So I really appreciate it. I don't remember your name when you spoke about how there are stories that circulate. And then we believe those stories. And so one of the stories living in this neighborhood that circulates is that they're break-ins. I mean, in the last month there's been a break-in right next door to me, to the east, to the west, to the south, right in my, you know, right in close proximity. And the narrative that's going on is that there's not enough police to be able to have a presence in this area. And so crime is easy to do. And that when there is a crime, such as the break-in and, you know, I lived in Burlington. So I've only been living here in this neighborhood for about five years. But I lived in Burlington, let's say 25 years ago, 30 years ago, in a neighborhood that had quite a bit of crime and my house was broken into. It's really horrible experience to have your house broken into. It just stays with you. I know this isn't extreme. But it's a little bit of healing like you've been assaulted with your home being broken into. So what's spoken about here is that there's not enough police protection and then there's also not enough police to have a quick response and to get to the bottom of why these break-ins keep happening. And I don't know whether that's true or not. I don't know whether that's just a story that's being circulated. I don't know whether really statistically, whether it's there are more break-ins these days or there, you know, it's been going on for a while and I'm just become aware of it. I don't know. But I like to talk about that or at least a hear perspective on that. I don't want to blame anybody. I don't want to get into a polarized conversation about it. I just want to bring this to the floor so that we can have some attention on our consciousness. Okay. Just one comment. We are going to have Milo sort of talk about the police commission engagement. And okay. I might have misinterpreted you. I thought you had told the conversation that I was bringing it out. I'm just unfortunately part of my job is to try to keep on track. It's really important to hear the discussion and the voices. So we're caught as a steering and we've got this agenda but are so glad that you're here and it's really important to hear these viewpoints and to talk with one another, trying to get through the politicizing and misinformation. So it's really important that you're here. We are very glad that you are here and voicing your opinion. All right. So I apologize if I gave the wrong impression about it. So we're going to move on to our bylaws review and vote. Are we getting through that tonight? Let's do it fast. Okay. Because we have a forum. Jonathan's, we have a forum. I want to do this because we never had 10 people in the room. It's an introduction. Jonathan put a lot of work into creating our bylaws and we have not had them in the past. So this is a new thing for us. Yeah. But the word one bylaws disappeared in a file cabinet about 20 years ago. Nobody could find it. But Earhart probably had it. Ward day has come and we'll go and they can't buy one. Ward one never got it. So I'd love to just do this. According to the bylaws, maybe we'll pass the 10 people to pass the bylaws. So I would love to do it right now. And with your permission, rather than read the bylaws into the minutes, I would do the PowerPoint lip charts. And which has all the content and none of their force and where force. So if I could just get started with this, I don't think this should take long. I should also say that most of this has been crimped from the work of Richard on Ward 8 and on a long history of bylaws from other words in the history of the MBAs. So the name of this organization is the Ward one neighborhood planning assembly referred to as the NPA, the Ward one NPA or what we're hoping we can reframe as the Ward one community group because NPA has is a little confusing to some people. The purpose of the NPA was to set forth in a resolution adopted by the Burlington City Council in 1982. So many of us weren't even born then, which stated in part, the neighborhood planning assembly shall help provide citizens with information concerning city programs and activities, help obtain citizen views of city needs and help provide citizens with an opportunity to participate in making recommendations with respect with respect to governmental decisions, including allocation of revenues. This is what we're supposed to be able to do. And this is what the NPA was born to do. In addition, the NPA should be organized and operated for the following purposes. Create and nurture a vibrant communication between residents and officials of the city and institutions within the ward. Maintain and enhance the quality of life in Ward one. Ensure that the voices of Ward one residents are heard in all matters pertaining to life therein. Provide a vehicle for residents of Ward one to collectively act. So the Ward can put together a resolution vote on it and bring it to city council. Increase the level of citizen participation without political partisanship in the civic sphere. guiding principles of the NPA are to provide a safe and welcoming forum where residents can actively share their voice about issues that matter to them and where they can learn from the voices of others. Cultivate involvement by a diverse spectrum of community members through active outreach and through eliminating barriers to participation. And if we have barriers to participation, you have to point them out. Because as you know, as us on the steering committee, we really need help and we really need help to make sure that every voice that we heard and everyone who wants to wants to participate and get involved get involved. Operate in a matter of a model of respectful, inclusive, culturally and economically aware practices and be a fun creative vital organization that benefits from and values the multitude of perspectives held by those affected. I think that's most of the words in the whole thing. So maybe the next page will be shorter. So now it's like membership and responsibilities and stuff. Everybody 14 years and over living in Ward 1 is a member of the NPA. Member writes, participate in meetings, equal vote on all voting matters, including election of the steering committee, serve on the steering committee, receive notice of the minutes. Non-members are welcome at meetings without vote voting privileges and participate and speak out at facility discretion just to make sure that non-members don't necessarily dominate the meetings. At least four NPA meetings meet a year. We traditionally do a second Wednesday of the month when we do about 10 a year, nine or 10. The combination of in-person and hybrid meetings is encouraged. Meetings are worn through CEDO. The steering committee determines the facilitator and the agenda and a quorum of 10 is only defined for the purposes of voting and not simply meeting. You can have three people show up and we'll have an NPA meeting, but there's no proxy voting. So you have to be present either on screen or in person. Majority vote rules except for dollars, changes to the bylaws, and removal of steering committee members where we want two-thirds of the people present. Votes for money, election of steering committee, CEDVG, city advisory committees, NPA resolution of normal communications and bylaws. That's what we do vote on. And just for those of you who don't know what CEDVG is, it's the community development block grant which assigns, which is a committee which makes recommendations to the city council as to how to spend federal HUD money. And one member from each ward is appointed to that committee. And we have a right to make that appointment for ward one. And that we had at least 10 minutes for screen counting. Article three. Steering committee should have three or seven NPA members. We currently have three, maybe we'll have four before the end of this meeting. The youth members and college age membership are encouraged. Election will be at the March meeting, one-year terms, no term limits. Two-thirds are required to remove a steering committee member and must be warranted to an agenda item if somebody here, the group wants somebody to go. Steering committee quorum is a majority steering committee members. Meeting notifications of 2048 hours is required. Voting by the steering committee is by simple majority of the quorum. Vacancies only need to be filled when the steering committee falls below the minimum. So if we have six people and one person wants to go, we don't have to replace that person. But any time that there's fewer than seven people on this, or fewer than eight people on the steering committee, or seven, and somebody wants to join, they should speak up to join the steering committee. Meeting management, neighborhood outreach, municipal monitoring and oversight, recording and representation to the all awards meeting. Those are the responsibilities of the steering committee. And then we've added a steering committee member conflict of interest statement. This is a little controversial when I was originally written up. But the idea is that a steering committee member has a responsibility to disclose to the steering committee potential conflicts of interest concerning the agenda and voting items. And then the steering committee makes a decision as to whether there's truly a conflict of interest. Conflict of interest does not include any interest that is not greater than that of any other persons generally affected by the outcome of the matter. So let's take, for example, if the subject was accessory dwelling units, mother-in-law units, or something like air BNB kind of thing, let's say air BNB kind of thing, where a steering committee member might have an accessory dwelling unit, which they rent out. That doesn't mean that the steering committee member has to not advocate during a meeting. But they should say, I have an accessory dwelling unit. And I do rent it out. So you shouldn't be aware that that may be where I'm coming from. I may have some prejudice and bias in that regard. That's really all of the conflict of interest. Or if you're going to make money off of it, you really shouldn't tell me something that you're telling me about it. Like if we offered food and asked you to pay for it, then I know the rest of it. That's kind of what you're asking. That's not the case now. That is not the case now. We didn't make that a list. See no pay for the food tonight. Article four, amendments, 20 days notice, warning, two thirds majority of the MPA, non-discrimination and public meeting laws. Just copy and paste what's on the city, non-discrimination, public meeting statements. And that's what we have in our winners. And that is the proposed bylaw. Here. Question. Maybe I missed this, but our city councilors, board members, allowed the steering committee members under the bylaws. These bylaws don't do that. There's not a couple of them. So if I'm remembering it, it's been a while. That used to be in our bylaws in order to prevent someone who might be an elected official from in some way sort of dominating a meeting through the steering committee politicizing the MPA by virtue of serving both on the city council as well as on the steering committee. So my suggestion would be to add something to the copy of the interest provision that prevents city city councillors and city school board members from being steering committee members. Why? Why are? I think city councilor, I think city councilors and school board members are, as elected officials, get plenty of voice. And they are asked to come to MPAs to provide reports. I don't think they need to have that voice further. They're on the city council or on the school board. I think they need to voices further amplified through and their opinions further amplified by being steering committee members as steering committee members. I think your role is to run what Jonathan just described, a good public process where neighbors can talk freely. And I did it on the city council and it's extremely political. It's pretty political right now. And I think we all trust our elected officials not to do something like politicize the MPA, but I think there's a risk and I think we should build that into the bylaws to prevent the MPAs from becoming politicized. Thank you. Before I get formal about it, are there any other people, not people, but roles specifically that should be excluded from the steering committee department? That's safe. I'm asking. I'm not saying that the case, but I'm just curious because if we make an amendment, let's make an amendment and vote on the amendment, vote on this. We haven't had a motion in a second on this yet, but we're more casual in that also. So is there, does anybody think there's other people who should be included in the conflict of interest category roles that you need to be a couple of years. Jake, you go first. I'll just say the mayor, right? Yeah, I'd say the mayor. Calculates by the mayor. Sorry for not using my name. I'll just repeat for you. Jake was suggesting that the mayor also be personally. I think department heads probably should be appointed department heads appointed by the mayor, something to cool by the city council. It should also be prevented from the steering committee members. I don't think rank and file city employees should. I think that's different, but department heads, you know, that have just generally politically appointees. I like, I like that you were specific. Okay. Because a lot of people are on boards of commission that end up being appointed by the state council with the mayor presiding. Good point. And so my preference would be to stick to specifics. Okay. Okay. All right. So why don't we, why don't we play pretend. And Zariah is here. Hi, Zariah. Let's pretend that we're like the real thing and could I have a motion to accept the, the bylaws as presented. Sure. Do you think 10, I mean, just survive on these meetings for years and years? Sometimes I don't even know how many we have here besides people working here. 10 seems like a pretty big number to require for a quorum. Okay. Do you think? I mean, I don't know. What have the meetings been? I think we've gotten 10. Yeah. I'll be on that as early as possible. I'll be on that as early as possible. Okay. That's okay. I guess in person. All right. Keep it at 10. Hello. Can anyone hear me? Yeah. Okay. I had my hand raised and you had moved on, but I didn't. I'm sorry. But I wanted to, I had wanted to bring up the same issue that air heart brought up regarding elected officials. Although I am aware, because I was on the steering committee early on, I think he was two years ago, but Ward one sort of was an outlier. Other other NPA is allowed elected officials to serve on the steering committee, but we had felt pretty strongly about it and the people in the ward felt pretty strongly about it because they wanted it to be an expansion of involvement, not just the same people having a voice over and over again at the NPA and then at the city council. And so I think that's the real fear that you have just one voice and you don't have as many voices as you could have. So I do agree with maybe adding department heads, but I think we have to be very careful because we are a small community and you don't want to exclude everybody and there are some very good people. So department heads is what I heard Earhart suggest and I heard kind of agreement from at least you, Jonathan. I don't know if others had agreed, but is your intent now to vote on those changes to the proposed bylaws? Yeah, I'm going to get all muddled in the rules of order, but we would probably want to put the as presented, get that moved and seconded, suggest an amendment, get that moved seconded and approved and then added in and then vote on the bylaws. Does that sound okay or should you just do it all at once? I would recommend that you move the amendments and then vote on the final draft. That's what I would recommend. Okay, even though we haven't actually moved and seconded the bylaws as presented. Right. So I'm just I'm looking back at city council where you get a resolution, which hasn't really been moved, but it gets amended before it's finally moved. So I've just used that same process. If you're hearing no objection, why don't we hear her? With all due respect to Sharon, I think we can combine it too and make it not quite as formal as the as the city council process. So I'm going to move approval of the bylaws with suggest with an amendment, recommended amendment to eliminate the ability. I'm not going to get the wording right. You can get the wording. You can word snippet later to eliminate participation by the mayor, city council members, school board members and majorly appointed department heads. Prevent them from being preclude them from being steering committee members. Seconded is their discussion and sharing your hands still up. It's probably not still up, right? Right. I'm done speaking. Thank you. Okay. Thanks. Any further discussion? Hearing none. All those in favor say aye. All those. Sessions. I think we have bylaws. Congratulations. This is the last meeting the board was in tax. It's a quarter of history. So but at least word one has some. Okay. Thank you, Jonathan. Jonathan, thanks a lot. I think that was very well done. And following now we have a new steering committee member, candidate. You want to introduce? We are, I nominate Carter advisor to be our, not an additional student committee person. Maybe since you've got a new crew of people, if you could just quickly introduce yourself. And what you see as an important part of being a steering committee member. Yeah, my name is Carter advisor. I've lived in Burlington since 2017. And I've been trying to find time to carve out to join the MPA for a while now. And I just haven't found it. But the third of my three jobs is now over officially. So I'm not getting another part-time gig. And I'm going to hopefully put time towards this if folks will happen. And yeah, I definitely want to learn the ropes before I start making suggestions. But certainly like my hope, I think two, three is a really strong steering committee or a really strong MPA rather. And, you know, the idea of just having food and having like a space like this. Instead of the more sterile like UVM hospital room. I thought that was good for a lot. It's good. So thinking about ways that like we can bring more folks in. And many of you know, I have not done a bunch of doors over the years. Now, I would really like us to get more folks from the neighborhood who often don't show up involved in this. And you can see the value of this and hopefully advocate at some point for some like decision-making or decision-making authority and funding to go towards the MPA. So let's sort of now, I would see the role. But obviously being nonpartisan enough, we have the space for folks to talk about issues. The news is second. It's second. All in favor. Opposed? Hearing none. Welcome aboard. All right. We're moving on to the city council update. Soraya, you're online. Yes, I'm here. Amazing. I am sorry that I'm not there in person. Good update though is for the East district race, which obviously Ward 1 is part of. Ben and Karen are still on an ordinance call. We're trying to figure out the ranked choice voting so that we can have that in place for this race, which is great, of course, because we will have three candidates, which is an exciting development to both have that many candidates and to be able to use ranked choice voting to vote for them. So apologies that I'm not in there in person. And I might see if we're still meeting when I finish my update. But yeah, so redistricting, I think is the first thing that I was supposed to talk about. You may have seen some of my front porch forum notes on this, but there we really, I think as a council, and we're not always as partisan as folks think we are. I think we've been very collaborative on this, trying to figure out what really made the most sense for the city. We don't necessarily love districts. So we thought about, can we have a model? Can you all hear me? Can we have a model where we keep roughly the same amount of counselors, which was the priority of some counselors and the mayor, but reconfigure the districts. There were a lot of things we looked at. We looked at a six by two model, a seven by two. Then we kind of started looking at ones that had different types of representation, but we decided that that was no better than what we have now, which of course is the eight words for districts. So we started working mostly as a smaller group, which has been Mark, Barlow, Ben Traverse, Joe McGee, and myself, because we kind of represent all parts of the city and across the party. And what we got to is to stick to an eight word map. So there was a few different configurations of the eight word map. We're definitely getting rid of word eight as it's been configured. That was something very early on that we wanted to do and moving it a little bit more into a downtown ward, which has important implications for ward one and ward six. So if you all did get the chance to see, I don't know if there's a way, I don't know who's operating. We have the maps arise, so. Great, fantastic. So if we're looking at the, oh yeah, great. The maps have, if you're looking at the four option maps, so the first version has us cut off at that prospect. Street, at Prospect Street. I didn't hear whoever just. He's preparing to bring the map. Okay, great. I'll kind of talk through them and maybe somebody can slowly scroll through them once that happens. I think the ward one option, so part of what's going on is as we know, ward eight was very student heavy because it kind of intentionally snaked into the east end to capture as many students as possible. And so what the debate has boiled down to now is that we've kind of decided that the aid ward map keeps some of the neighborhoods the best and this is really the one that we want to focus on is where do on campus students go? And that's part of what the difference is between these maps. So great. So in this first one, we've got ward one kind of jutting into downtown. It kind of keeps us somewhat close to what we currently have but cuts out part of the hill section and puts it into ward two. The next map is, you can't see it on the map, but what actually changed is we cut some of the west side off, but then I think we actually have a little bit more on campus. I think it's not on the map, but I think there's like a building across from highway two that sneaks into ward one. Then on the next map, it's a slightly bigger chunk. Oh, nope. Sorry, I'm getting confused between this and the PowerPoint. So it looks like an option one. Those are just different things. We don't get anything across highway two. The third one, which says option two, is labeled option two. We get a small chunk of what I believe is called athletic campus across the highway. Option three, we get a bigger chunk of athletic campus if he keeps scrolling down, which means we lose a little bit more of the hill section. And then option three is just a version two. Also hard to see the differences between those, but then if you go down to option four, we lose kind of all of Riverside have a pause further. Yeah. So that's option three, two keeps scrolling down. One more. It's really hard to see it. Yeah. And then this is the most drastic where that Riverside chunk is cut out of ward one and we get most of athletic campus. I can just talk through this in the PowerPoint with that means the reason this matters to a lot of people is ward six is about to have a lot more students, which word six, as you can see, is that kind of southern southeastern part of the city. They're about to get a lot more students than they have been because their student population used to be captured into ward eight. And with us moving ward eight into a downtown ward, they're about to get a lot more students. So ward one had 21% on campus students. Ward six had 14% and ward eight had 76%. And that 76% is what folks are mostly looking at changing is having ward eight not be quite so student heavy. Ward one, which is the option that I like the most just in terms of keeping ward one as close to what it has been historically, makes the ward six on campus student population 77%. Which ward six is not excited about option two and keeps the ward one the same. Option two makes ward one 33% on campus student, 68% for ward six and 20% for ward eight. That's the one that I'm kind of leaning to as a bit of a compromise, not least because ward one does have not amazing voter turnout. We've obviously worked on it over the past few years and I think there's been some interesting races that has helped with turnout. Of course, my first year just happened to be a presidential election, which that always helps and is an independent of what's going on locally. But I am a little bit worried about if we have such a high on-campus population because ward one has a lot of off-campus students, which ward six does not have. Ward six has a lot more single family homes than this configuration of ward one, for example, would have. That I think option two is just a good balance in terms of still having a student-heavy ward. I would guess probably about 50%, which I think is a good thing, but not having it be quite as student-heavy as then replicating some of the problems that we heard. Keith talked about a lot with ward eight, but curious to hear what you all think. I know those maps went by kind of quickly, but really the difference is for the first ones, how much of the Hill section versus just across the highway for highway two for the athletic campus we have, and then the fourth option being the most drastic, including Riverside in ward two. comments, questions. State highway, not interstate. The question is, what's technically the Hill section? Yeah, the Hill section is the western part of ward one. I don't know if there's official boundaries, but I think we kind of considered everything kind of like between moderate Christie down the hill towards Willard. Yeah, so if you want to zoom in a little bit there. So that would be from Mansfield to Willard? Yeah, so we're losing on this one, on some of the things. So if you scroll up towards ward one. Yeah, so like those streets that are like on that left upper left-hand corner, like how much of those we're losing, that's the Hill section. So could you, could you scroll up till we get the ones Zariah that you like? I'm just going to stand up here and point to things so people can see them, because it's hard to see on the map. Yeah. So it's option two? Yeah, I think option two is the most likely. Okay, so it's this one. So can you zoom in and move it over so we can. Yeah, yeah, this is McAulay square, this is Mansfield, this is Prospect, this is Pearl Street. Yeah, Pearl Street, right? And that just kind of shows where the divider is. Pearl, which turns into Colchester. So where it's North Street. So that means. This is North Street. So Jonathan, you and I would be in Ward two. We would be on this map. Everybody, everybody all the way to this highway would be on Ward two, in this model. And one more piece of context that I should have said is Ward one has to become smaller if we keep it. The reason I originally really liked the seven Ward map is we're the biggest Ward by far, which means we're a little bit underrepresented because you just get me for an extra 1000 people. But if we keep eight wards, we have to cut Ward one because it's so much bigger. So everything else pretty much stays as is except that you pick up this piece of campus over here. But the other all the other Warders stay as they are, right? Let's see athletic campus. What is that? Yeah, that little chunk across main street. So East Avenue. Are you talking about East Avenue? No, it's even past East Avenue because East Avenue, I think is a little bit further east towards the woods. So it's across from Main Street. So if you're kind of heading towards I-89 coming from downtown, historically all of Ward one has been to the left of you. And that's talking about just adding a small chunk to the right, which I was originally really opposed to just because I'm like, how do those students even, how are they part of Ward one? But I think just with us not having the gerrymandered Ward eight anymore, which I think all of council wants to get rid of. And I think a lot of citizens want to get rid of. It just means that it would be really politically infeasible to put all of that into Ward six, in terms of not having them being 80% student ward. So that's why we have that outcropping there and the sort of in the bottom. Yeah, to try to balance the population of students between Ward one and Ward six. Soraya, this is Sharon Bushor. And I feel that one of the things about redistricting is you're supposed to respect natural boundaries. And I see Main Street as a significant natural boundary. I, and I feel that I understand the issue for Ward six, but I do believe that when all is said and done, they are going to have fewer students total. I understand they've got the on campus students, but they don't have students that are off campus. You mentioned that. And my real concern is that what gets gutted out of Ward one of Ward one is the predominantly stable residential neighborhood of Ward one. And so we then end up with a more renter population and very few homeowners. And I think that that is a factor that I hope redistricting will look at. Because I think you're looking for stability. And you already mentioned the fact that voter turnout is an issue. And although it was two years ago when I went door to door, I found that there were it was a turnstile. People were the renters were no longer long term renters. They were short term and they were only there for a year or two. And so that doesn't bring stability or engagement in a community. And I'm concerned about that. Yeah, I think you're you're saying I agree with you. You're saying all the same things that I said, which I think is the reason that I think option three, even though it doesn't look very different on the map is problematic. Because even though Ward six still has more on campus students, I do think it would make our on campus very high. I think that 33% on campus isn't I don't think that's a bad number. I think Ward one still has quite a bit of diversity in it. Like even just looking at my apartment complex Hildred has a lot of graduate students, but it doesn't have as far as I know any undergraduate students. We do still have a lot of single family homes in this, as we know, kind of on that east eastern side that goes towards patch and road. And I think part of the and I agree with you on the natural boundary. Um, the, the kind of question mark on that is, we don't really have that much like your strategy. Like if you're a city counselor or school board member, your strategy for talking to students or engaging with students isn't really based on their dorm, right? Because you're can't we can't access their dorm anyway. So I think that it truly being just a dorm makes it a little bit different in terms of who's going in. And then the other thing is that Hill section, I do know that folks, like I know that there's kind of like a Mansfield like prospect contingent. And then I know that folks on Loomis and Henry are really close. And so I, I think that's what this we talked about this is I certainly like those are, you know, like folks, that is a voting block. Like that is a very big voting block those folks, like you said, they turn out for voting a lot. But I think they would rather be moved together than split up. And so that's, that was, and again, we have to cut somewhere, right? Like Ward 1 can't stay, can't stay with the limits that it has. And there's, we're at the edge of the city. So we can't cut to the east or the north, because those are natural limits to Winooski and South Burlington. Erhard. Once again, I have to agree with my former seatmate on the city council, but with Sharon, I mean, I don't like any of these maps for Ward 1. The, the area that we're talking about, Henry's, you know, really cutting everything that is for large parts of the area, east of Willard Street off of Ward 1 does not respect historic neighborhood integrity for Ward 1 in the slightest. It violates one of the main principles that is supposed to be adhered to in redistricting. Folks, some of you may have been around long enough to remember, there was a study done in AIDS that really focused on the historic nature of the Old North End. It was called West of Willard, North of Pearl, and that really defined historically the Old North End. West of Willard is the Old North End, east of Willard is Ward 1, and that's really the way it ought to be. And taking the Henry Street neighborhood, Luma Street, you know, all those blocks out of Ward 1 really guts Ward 1 in a way, you know, as someone who's represented Ward 1 on the city council that I feel just doesn't respect the historic nature of our district. I know, I hear you've got challenges. I understand that. I think one of the keys is that Ward 1 used to represent a significant amount of the campus to the west, sorry, to the south of Main Street. Ward 1 used to include Living, Learning, Marsh, Austin, Teller, and Harris Mills. And there's a statistical problem with including some of those areas, which I would argue could be included back in Ward 1, but for the fact that the census has created a huge census block that needs to basically be broken up in order to create fairness between Ward 6 and Ward 1 in terms of the numbers of students. And I guess I would just ask you, those who were drawn the lines on the map, to look at raking up that very large census block. It has 2,600 people in it. So Earhart, sorry, just because I want to get your answer to this, I'm going to interrupt. I hope that's okay, which is that we did break up the block, right? So that that block, that campus block is we're taking parts of it. So my question is there's no way in Ward 8. So either we take part of that neighborhood out or we take all of it out if we have an 8-Ward map because Ward 1 is too big. And so the only way to keep Ward 1 north of Willard sorry, east of Willard, north of Pearl is to have a 7-Ward map, which I don't think I'm good. I just, there are no, like, I don't think we've got the votes for that because the old North End and new North End counselors don't like that because it takes a chunk of the. So I guess my question is what, knowing that we, there's no 8-Ward map that makes that work, even with splitting up the census block, what would you like to see? I guess what I would like to see actually is probably a 7-Ward map. And are each of, maybe I missed this, but are each of the Ward's represented by two city counselors? So there's a 16-member council. I missed that part. Yeah, that parts up for question. I think we're going to try to push this as a 8-by-2, so 8-Wards to counselor map. And if that fails, maybe we'll stick back with the district and Ward model. So a total of 16? Right, 16 or staying with 12. Yeah, okay. I guess what I thought might be possible is an 8-Ward map where two of the Ward's are represented by one counselor and the rest by two. And that would give the new North End three counselors, which it currently has. And it would give a smaller Ward 8 that's focused in the downtown area one counselor. Yeah, and I talk about, thank you, Arard. And to talk about the process, yeah. So we, I originally thought the same thing, not, I don't think it was 8, but I think it was a 5-Ward map where there were two counselors and two where there was one. So similar, but not quite the same thing, where the boundaries did work out really well. A lot of folks, including some of the folks who are on the room with you, really didn't like that. And it felt like we were trying to get away from the 8-Wards district. And maybe we should put it back on the table. But so it was similar. It kept all the options, kept 12 counselors, kept neighborhoods more intact. Actually, yeah, I think it would have kept Ward 1 closer to what it is now. I'd have to go back and look at it. A lot of folks didn't like that. They thought that it was really unfair that some folks would just get one representative and other folks got two. So that just became enough of an issue when at least some of the surveys showed that folks wanted to have two representatives that we decided to abandon that model. Hey, Zariah, I'm interrupting because what's the next step? We only have a few minutes left to talk about this here. Is there going to be another public meeting where people can voice their opinions? Or how do we move forward? Yes, so I'm not 100% sure because it depends on, so yes, there is another public meeting and that it's coming to the city council, the next city council on Monday, where the working group is presenting the, sorry, basically why we went to the, why we chose the 8-Wards model and giving these same things that you're looking at to the council and letting them get feedback. Based on that, we might have another smaller working group, which again is those four councillors that I named, including myself, or we'll just move forward with that being enough direction for the map makers. So definitely continue to give me personally feedback by email for what folks want. I think that this is going to be hard because I think that not, like I said, there's folks in the room who would very much disagree with Earhart on having a one-vote representative. I think there's no good answer. I agree, I really like the seven-word map. I think, unfortunately, it only made sense for Ward 1 and not for the other wards. Any final comments? Yeah. Richard, right there. So one thing that I put forward 10 years ago whenever we were involved in redistricting, and I mentioned it again this time, but no one seems to give it any traction, is keep roughly the Ward configuration that we had 10 years ago. So that's seven wards with two councillors. My suggestion was meld Ward 6 and Ward 1 together so that you've got 90% of the university you're following. And you would have Ward 1 and Ward 6 together. You would have five councillors for those two wards. Two would be dedicated to one ward, two would be dedicated to another, and the other one would be a large councillor. Yeah, and that's... Arithmeticly, that works out pretty well. And it also neutralizes to some degree the student issue that is so problematic apparently. Yeah, one of the proposals is definitely, and I think folks don't again like the different number of wards versus not, but there is a thing where we could just have four districts with three councillors each, which would get to a similar place and make the boundaries, and the students a little bit harder. I think other folks had a really hard time with that because some folks wanted us to have 12 single ward districts, and the smaller it is, they felt like they wanted the wards to become smaller so that they felt like they had more close, that it was a closer representation. And so I think the melding problem, one for fairness again, I think folks would want us to do that for the whole city then, and then that just means you've got bigger city council races, which the last slew of races, we already had people raise between $15,000 and $20,000 reward races, which is just, it starts to become very, almost like very large races, which can be very hard. And there would only be one. Play it again. Only one of those races would be larger than what we have at the moment. Anyway, I'll drop your line and say, well, the other thing is you've got to prepare for the fact that the mayor is not going to go for anything more than 14 castes in a month of Sundays. So you've got to go to plan B for that. Right, yeah. I think before, and somebody else emailed me and said, hey, stop thinking about what the mayor will veto and just do what makes sense, but with us being two counselors down and knowing that some of the folks agree with him, that starts to make the veto, that overriding of vetoes look very unlikely. Hey, Zariah, thanks a lot for giving us an update. If people want to get delivered ideas to you, they should use your counselor email address. Counselor email, counselor phone number. You can text me or call me. Calling is a little hard, obviously, in terms of me being available just then, but call me or text me or email me. Okay, thanks. We're going to move on because we're a little bit behind schedule. Mila? Yes. I know you've been waiting a long time. No, no, no. It's no problem. And you each in the panel, but you know what I mean? Thank you so much. I should put a piece of tape on it, Zariah. Thank you for having me. My name is Mila Brantz. I serve on the police commission. I year two into a three-year term. I previously served on the committee to review police and policies. I also served on various joint committees between the commission and the city's public safety committee, reviewing the RPs for the consultants that research community engagement and also the CNA consultant that reviewed the police department. So I have been needy in it. I'm going to actually change my presentation a little bit based on some earlier questions and discussions. So I think that just giving, I want to educate people as to where to find information because we talk a lot about the numbers. What are the numbers really? So I want to dive into that. First, I'm going to cover some general things and what I was just talking about over here is let's bring up the chief's report, which is presented once a month. In general, your Burlington Police Commission is represented by people across different wards. As I mentioned, I'm in Ward 3 and I think currently we do have representation in almost all of the wards. One of the things that we've been talking about ad nauseam is public engagement, public engagement, public engagement. So I'm kind of saying, hey, let's get out more to the MPAs. So here I am. Our police commission meetings are held once a month. They are generally held on the fourth Tuesdays of the month. The schedule for the meetings can be found online. Go to the city's website, click on calendar, government meetings. And you'll see not only police commission, but all your commissions as well as your city council commissions. And when you click on the meeting date, there's always an area to click on the agenda, which takes you to what is called board docs. And you can see the agenda for the meeting, for the meetings. You can see the minutes for the meetings. And you can see any attachments of various reports that are discussed during the meetings. So that's how in general you get to information. So a couple of quick things I wanted to talk about is number one, state plate fix. We all have heard of it. I hope if you have not, it's a pretty crucial app. And the reason I mention it now is because of the massive amount of drug use that we have going on in Burlington. Needles are everywhere. The best way to properly safely dispose of needles is to use C, click, fix, report it that way, and they will come and pick them up. Also regarding drugs, there is a online tip line. So when you go to the city's website, click on the departments tab, click police department. And right on that page under the modified BPD priority response plan, which you can click on and find out more about that response plan if you're not familiar with it. But there is an area that says reporting any and all suspicious activity helps to solve and prevent crime, suspicious or drug activity. It says call dispatch or submit tips online. Don't call dispatch. Dispatch is not going to get you anyone that's going to come stop a drug. That's the reality of our situation. And it's actually been that way for a very, very long time. It was one of the reasons that there was a lot of distrust and anger in the community when drug issues and certain boards were not quite frankly being addressed. But that tip line is crucial because what it does is it helps the police department track where drug activity is occurring. You will be asked to provide the names and addresses of individuals if you know them. So for example, sometimes people live next to houses that are unfortunately the sites of large amounts of activity. And so they report comings and goings. If you can report cars, especially out of state, we have a lot of issues without a state. Individuals coming in, selling drugs in our community. If you can safely get license plates, time of day, location. This information is tracked to help the department make a determination as to where they need to focus. Investigations, okay? Dispatch is shorthanded to not just not having enough officers. There's not enough people working. Dispatch, which is why when some people say that their calls aren't being answered or their calls aren't being stacked based on the priority response plan, that's, I believe, personally part of the issue. The police commission meetings, in general, we receive a chief support from Acting Chief Mirad, which I want to review in a little bit more detail momentarily. We do updates from the commission based on things that we are working on, directive updates, working on the complaint policy, oversight projects, and also we have speakers and various presentations. A review of use of force incidents, although the report that you have access to does not include the names of any individuals. It has general descriptions of what occurred, age, and race of the individual and gender if identified. Most of our review, quite frankly, of use of force occurs in executive session. Most of our work is in executive session. And when you see us pushing back on certain things publicly, it's because of things that we're dealing with in executive session. But we're not allowed to talk about that with you. So there has to be a little bit of faith in that. I hear a lot, it's like, oh, you guys are complaining about every little thing. We do not have the time to focus on little things. We do not. So I would say right now, two-thirds of our time over half is in executive sessions. I watch a lot of body cam footage and what little spare time that I have. So I see things that are not okay. So these things that led to the vote, the call for different positions, especially for CSLs, social workers who could deal with mental health issues because that's exploded, social workers who could help deal with substance abuse issues because that has exploded. Future agenda items and combinations. People who have positive experiences with police officers. We want to hear those stories and we will talk about them publicly at the meeting. We had a mental health summit, that's actually us, but the police commission, based on the explosion of mental health issues, mental health issues drive a lot, a lot of what we see. Drug abuse issues, substance abuse issues drive a lot of what we see. So when we talk about the increase of crimes of opportunity, we talk about the larcenies, the increase in stolen cars. These are happening because of drug abuse. Happening because of people trying to find something that's going to help them get their next fix. A lot of people who've had their car stolen report, if they get lucky enough to get it back, that there's drug paraphernalia in it. The police department's reported finding stolen cars with people passed out in them. So we have all these larcenies, but we have the root causes of mental health and drugs. And as we can all imagine, if you have mental health issues, let's say you need medications, you don't have the stability or the health to stay on your medications and you get in trouble and you get arrested and you get put in jail. Well, that's just going to make your situation not stable. Then you throw in homelessness, right? Because people with mental health issues or drug abuse issues are more likely to be homeless. So it is all related. So if someone says, oh, the police commission is not addressing these things, we are well addressing these things. We are just trying to say we have to be looking at the root causes because incarceration is a very temporary solution. It is not the end game. And if you incarcerate someone without giving them help with their addiction or without doing their mental health issue when they're released, what happens, right? And we've seen that over and over again. We have a group of people in our community who are quote unquote repeat offenders due to these very issues. So on August 23rd and 4th, the city of Burlington, along with United Way of Northwestern Vermont, hosted a virtual mental health summit. This included 65 attendees over the course of two days, learned about our local system, care from the Howard Center's school-based clinicians, their crisis services in age well, discussions were centered on what role the city has in supporting the local system of care and affecting the necessary changes to increase access and services for all of Chittenden County. This is crucial reading. It is crucial reading for everyone. I think we all need to understand this issue and where we are at and where we need to go. I will be emailing this out so that it gets posted with your minutes and you can read it at your leisure. The police commission did our annual report. It contains statistics. It contains summaries of the directives that we were working on. Including our vote to say, hey, please do this mental health summit because it's needed in our city. It has a summary of the different speakers that we've had where we try to educate people on the different issues that are occurring in Burlington. Also things like officer wellness, informed trauma from an officer's point of view, as well as the public's point of view to make people understand what officers are going through when they're out there, because they have to deal with some, really, drug odies, suicides, the shootings that we have, and other violent acts. Shootings can stop tomorrow. We don't need to have one more shooting. Someone emailed me and said, someone's being to death with a baseball bat. Why isn't that in the news? We have violence occurring, period. So we need to be addressing all of that. That report also crucial reading so that you understand what your commission is doing, the issues that are being covered, and look at the numbers. These numbers are provided by the city statistician. Our main meeting reviewed their report. I've emailed that report too so that you can read it at your convenience in more detail. What else do we have? We had a presentation from Vermont Interfaith Action and they did a guide to community engagement and local police departments. I'll also email that. I thought it was a really great introduction talking about what we expect as a community from policing across the state of Vermont and also what policing should include. Very good read. I'll strongly recommend that. And now, if you wouldn't mind putting up the chief's report, the other thing that is reviewed each meeting is a report that is given by the chief. Yes, if you click on that and thank you. So the chief presents this once a month at the meetings. This is crucial viewing. And I actually recommend sometimes that people view it with a sound up because I believe these reports have crucial information. But sometimes when talking about the politics of the situation, sometimes it's just too much politics. Too many games being played with the numbers. And let's just give the people the information that they need. If you can go to the next page and we'll kind of go through the pages. This is keeping track of the sworn officer count. Officers continue to leave. One of my big issues I talk about frequently is lack of public engagement. We got into this situation because we didn't have proper engagement with our department. It's a two-way street. You cannot force people to trust police or respect police. It has to be earned, especially given some of the situations that we have. We still have two outstanding use of force cases involving black bodies that have dragged on for years. That's not okay. You want to take a positive step? Resolve that. Resolve that. And other things too. So I always, always talk about that. Officers are leaving because they don't feel wanted or respected. No one fired them. They left of their own accord. So how do we fix that? We need lateral transfers to build this department back. But if you're an officer in another area and you want to stay in the profession but move somewhere else, there's a lot of competition for jobs, including in the Northeast. So in addition to the salary increases, the sign-on bonuses, we have to be working on improving the environment because if you Google Burlington, Vermont, what are you going to see? Right? So if you're an officer that wants to come here, which we want people to do that because we can't just have new officers coming fresh out of the cabin, has to be a mix. It's crucial. So these numbers continue not to look great. I would like to see some more engagement. I have a lot of ideas about that. If you'd like to talk about it, please reach out to me. Not enough time tonight. Next page, please. This is a summary of the revised priority response plan. If you've never looked at it, crucial viewing tells you what are considered priority one, two, and three. This means that you might pull something in and it's stacked. Like if someone is not in immediate danger, you are not necessarily going to get an officer right away, but if it's stacked, you should get someone to reach back out to you. Now, of course, we've all heard the stories where that is not happening. I don't know how to prove what the extent of this problem is, but it is a concern. So if no one gets back to you, I would use the online incident reporting. This is different from the drug tip line, but the online incident reporting makes sure that what you're concerned about gets reported. Next page, please. Okay, excellent volumes, right? We hear a lot of stuff about the numbers. What are the numbers really? So the numbers are, if we take a look at trends over the last several years, going back to 2017, incident is down, although 22 is up from the previous year. Now, 2020 and 2021 were COVID years. So the beginning of 2022, through now, we're in our new normal, right? We're out of COVID, we got the vaccines, so we're starting to see the incidents go up, but when you look at the total incidents, they've trended down. And at the very bottom, it talks about the number of incidents, roughly 16%, that have been stacked according to the priority response plan. So if it was in a priority one incident, that meant you might have gotten your immediate response, but you should have eventually gotten a response. Next page, please. So this is selected Valcourt incidents. Valcourt in a nutshell is a program that's used by the police department to track incidents. I personally have a lot of issues with Valcourt. It has some limitations, and it doesn't always track when it thinks I found out as a commissioner is that there are some things that our officers do that aren't properly tracked. And that's a problem, and that is something long-range that we really need to think about because we should be able to have a really full idea of what officers are doing. Now, I'll give you an example. You have an officer who might follow up on an incident. Kidbar, Kidbar was a family car. Kid supposed to be home by a certain time. Kid doesn't show up. Families like texting, calling. Kids aren't responding. Family reports the car stolen. Please find a kid in another town with a car. Bring it back to the family. Now we got a follow-up. Do you really want to pursue and press charges, right? That's a follow-up. That's something an officer has to do, but he can't log in Valcourt if he does that. He or she makes themselves unavailable for another call and they don't want to do that. So they're out there doing some work that's not actually counted. Everyone kind of follow what I'm saying there. That's a concern to me. That's a concern to me, especially when you're complaining that everything's not being tracked. You know, but how do we fix that? How do we fix that? So just wanted to throw that out there. So this is a very interesting page. Once again, going back to 2017 and tracking various things. Now we have some things pretty much holding steady. Some things down, larceny, big jump. Larceny, drugs, addiction, right? The crime that accompanies that. Mental health, big jump, overdoses, big jump and probably undercounted. Robberies, slight jump, sexual assault, only the same stolen vehicles, big jump. The stolen vehicles, this is all across the state and this is easy pick-ins. Too many of these vehicles are not locked. Too many of these vehicles have things in them that are visible, that encourage people to try to get into them. People will leave their car running with their keys in while they run and get a coffee at a convenience store. There are literally people waiting at these convenience stores to just want to take the car and drive away. You're becoming the car. This is what is happening. Are some of the cars forced to be broken into? Yes, but a large percentage are us not recognizing the times that we're living in. And I never thought we, I really felt for some time, and I came here 40 years ago when y'all were living in your doors and I'm like, what are you doing? I'm like, this is insane. But people are doing that. You really can't do that anymore. Wards two and three, we've always had problems with kinds of opportunities. So we were kind of ready for that. But now it's all over the city, right? It's all over the city. They go, they figured out to lock their doors and let's go someplace else. So they haven't figured that out yet. It's kind of what's happening. That's really what's happening. So some of these things that we see increases in, it's related to the drug activity. And yeah, it's a larceny, but why is someone breaking in and taking things? Right? People are using these cars to sleep in, to use in, and other or worse. Oh, I appreciate that. Next page. Okay, five year averages at the bottom, gunfire, stolen vehicle. Hey, Bennington, did I ever read about Bennington? Bennington is what, a third of the population? They have 17 gunfire incidents here today. Yeah. So it's not just us. Now that doesn't necessarily make us feel better that it's not just us, but it should keep the politics out of it. This is not because of some vote. This is bigger. And we need to be aware of what's going on around us in our state, in our country. And we need to know what other solutions people are trying. Right? We need to be keeping up on that to know what's being successful in other places. And can we try or can we do something different? We need to have that. And the next page, I don't think there's too much after this. Gunfire incidents. This is a pretty interesting graph, color-coded. White is a gunfire incident. The light blue is a gunfire incident known to be a person, a gunfire incident where a person is struck, i.e. a shooting, and a gunfire incident where someone was killed. The very bottom is the current year. I do believe the murder or suicide that we had, that was something very different and should not have been lumped in with the others. It should have been discussed differently. And I think there was a failure of leadership there. And then I think the last two are related to building back the department. And you can just kind of flip through those talking about this is the total numbers of officers and total number of patrols. They are maintaining detectives. They don't want to move detectives to the road because we need detectives doing the investigation, finding out who's responsible for some of these drug rings and drug activity, finding out who's responsible and capturing people who are doing shootings and the killings. So that's very, very important. And if you can scroll down through the rest of it, building back the capacity, currently six CSOs through CSLs as in this report and scrolling down again. The CSLs have been crucial, crucial, crucial. They allow an officer, if it's a nonviolent situation, an officer can be released to follow up on something else while CSL works with an individual who needs, who needs services that don't require a sworn officer who doesn't have the training to deal with that. Tears of response, that's worth reading at your leisure. And if you can scroll down, I think we're nearly and if not, a recruitment officer has been training. This drove me crazy because we know we don't have good records as to who actually got what training that came out in the CNA report that has come up a number of times at police commission meetings where we're talking about racial disparities. So I feel this is a little bit, but happy to talk further if anybody's interested. And we scroll down there. This is the new contract, starting pay, top pay, hiring bonuses, part of the build back. And if you could scroll down, and that's it. So I thought it was important, I wasn't going to go, I was going to mention that we do the chief's report, but based on what people were talking about earlier and the questions that they had earlier, I felt that it definitely warranted viewing the whole thing. It is a very important report, although I don't always agree with how it's presented. Because we don't want the manipulation of numbers. We don't want the politics. We want to see what's actually happening, but it's available to you once a month. And if you have problems finding it, let me know. I will download a copy and make sure that's emailed as well. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. We're sort of out of time for questions, but I think there are questions. So can we get you to come back? I'd love to come back. I would love to come back. I will put you much further ahead. And people can email questions ahead of time too. And so maybe depending on the categories of questions, I would definitely do that. And we're looking to have more of a presence so that we are talking to people and providing this information. Because that's a big thing. I hear a lot. Where do I find this? How do I know what's going on? So that would be great. Thank you again very much. And I'll meet now if anybody has any questions afterwards. M.E. Grant at BurlingtonBT.gov is my police commission email address. Thank you. Thanks. We have one more item in our agenda. It's a presentation by FBI Ireland for Apple Probe Development. And do you need a hand for someone who'll hold that up? Oh, I think we have the slides for this too. Or would they include it? Okay. If you just put the slides on, it's the same information. Okay. And then if people want a packet, I'll have another one. Yeah. I might not have enough for everyone, but hopefully everyone will need one. We can share a couple. And I'll kind of just keep it brief and keep moving forward here, because I know it's on a lot of time. My name is Nick Smith. I'm with FBI Ireland, discussing the Apple Grove Project, which is located at 284 Grove Street. This is right on the South Burlington-Burlington line. This is probably, I'm trying to think about it, quarter-mile to the east of the Baybury Project. Sierra Leone has gone over the last five years or so. This was a project that was originally constructed around 2000. All of the homes are modular homes. They are all single family, except for, and I'll just kind of point up here, this unit in red. These are the old units, all the red here. So this is an old apartment building. With three units, and the rest are all just single family, modular homes, single floor. They're kind of reaching their end of life. And some of the infrastructure is beginning that, it's been taking a toll on. So I think this is a prime opportunity to come in, do a redevelopment, maybe maximize some of the density in here so that we can kind of meet some of the housing needs. And match some of the newer development that's happened in the area recently as well. The units, and I've got some examples of the Baybury units, which are the same condo units that you can see are actually on the Grove Street, again, about a quarter-mile down from here. Kind of the same setup where they have access directly on Grove Street, but there's no driveways coming into them. So it'll be kind of a similar situation where you still have the remaining access of this loop, and then all of the units themselves are fed off of those, this loop access. So nothing is coming on from Grove Street, no additional driveways, just connections to the existing sidewalk. So in total right now, there's 15 units plus the three apartment building. So that's 18 total units. And we're proposing 13 duplexes, which would be 26 units. Four of these would be inclusionary units under the required regulations. And this is meeting density based on the parcel, you know, this general parcel here. And I think that the small portion of parcel is across Grove Street. So, and with that, I guess what we're really here for is to get a little bit of feedback on this project, generally. Answer some questions. We understand that it's really conceptual for us. We haven't even met with the city or anything yet at this point. So we want to get a little feedback, see if we need to course correct it all, and then take it from there. And and we'll probably present this to the city in the upcoming days. We have a technical review committee meeting tomorrow. We'll get some feedback there. And we'd like to take the two kind of match them together and see what we can do while still making this feasible endeavor at the same time. Great. Let's jump right into it. Oh, that works. First, congratulations on your new baby. Oh, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. I think you might have just said this and I was like looking at the pictures instead. What, how many of these units are condos and how many of these are apartments? Yeah. So currently it's 15 modular single family units with three apartments. And in the center building, there's one there. And the proposal is 13 condo units. So 26. So you end up 26, there's 30 now. And there'll be 12. 15 out of 15 condos. It will be 15 to 26 is the deal first. Great. Okay. That works for me. I'm a big, I'm a big fan of homeownership starting at the bottom because that's the only way you can build well and intergenerational well. Jacob, you got a question? Yeah. Yeah, I'm curious about the folks who are in the units currently have like the process of looping them in and where they're going in the meantime and how do they get their pitch on what's new? So there's a certain number of units already that are vacant. Just number one, because of what we talked about. So kind of end of life. We've also, yeah, I just have not renewed on leases or things like that. So yeah, there are some that are obviously still plenty of people still living there. And this is a process that, I think it's a standard process. I don't typically deal with that portion of it. I'm the site engineer. Sorry about that. So, but I think it's a typically it's a year to plus long process to begin notifications. I mean, I don't think we'd even start that process until we're farther along with getting approvals with the city. So realistically, maybe a two year before we would see even a shovel on the ground or something like that. You know, that would be an ideal plan probably. Can I weigh in? Yeah, Sharon. Yes. So my name is Sharon Busher and I used to represent this ward. And so the last time I was at that complex was in 2020. That is a close knit family oriented group of houses modular. Yes. I would say some are not did not look end of life in 2020. I'm really concerned. It's not like I don't like SDR land because you do so much for the community. But you know, with Baybury Common, we asked if there would be some family units and no. And I'm not sure I really like the idea of the duplexes sound good. But I really think that I want this to be family oriented. And I'm really worried. The other Jake asked the question about the displacement of some of those people that live there. I understand there's a process, but we have people that don't have places to live. We know the affordability factor and the sheer thought of displacing people, knowing that there's limited places where they can go is very troubling. And I would like to think that SDR land would think long and hard about a process that would maybe update or remove some of those houses that are vacant and do the new construction. And then allow the people that are there already to maybe have an opportunity to, I guess, buy them or rent them. I'm not quite sure. I didn't hear that answer if the question was raised. But I am very concerned about this project. And that old building that was an apartment house was actually the original structure. And there used to be horses that were raised there. So it was a home. It wasn't an apartment house. It was a home that was made into an apartment house. So there's a lot of history there, some of which some long-term residents know. But I really would like to think that we are going to be more humane and provide housing that's needed for families in Burlington. We don't do much of that. And I'm hoping that SD Ireland in this development will step up and do the right thing. Yeah, I appreciate the comment. Let me try to address some of it. And some of it is just really something I have to take into consideration and make sure that it's on the record. And I appreciate that as well. You know, yes, I think that we agree that condo units, it depends on the family that for some that is a family unit. And there are plenty of families that live in condo units now. At the same time, not everyone, we're picturing maybe a single family unit. I mean, that's something that we've kind of taken a look at as well. The problem here really is that we really do have a small area that we're trying to maximize not only obviously the feasibility based on the cost of construction right now, but also to like we talked about address the housing crisis that there is in Burlington trying to get as many units as we can in that location. I mean, you'll see that these buildings are really, you know, there are two story units and they're kind of the same footprint as the modular units themselves with all attached garages. So, you know, we're really trying to, you know, without coming in and putting in these multi-family buildings, you know, 22 units like a Bayberry come in and kind of meet in the middle, provide these smaller units, kind of maximize the density that way we can maximize the housing up here. I just want to say one other thing. We have a housing crisis, but people leave out the one key word, an affordable housing crisis. And so just creating more units doesn't really solve the problem if it's not affordable. So, thank you. All right, and that I think is going to be our last question for tonight. We're way over time and I appreciate everyone's patience. Yeah, no participation. If people want to, I have my email on there. Please email me questions that way, you know, if I find that we're warranting another meeting, maybe we can reach out and come back for another meeting. Yes. And maybe it's going to take a couple of months when we've already got a little bit of a feel of the city. I appreciate your time. Thank you, Robert. Thanks.