 And for those of you who don't know, I'm gonna be running, I am running, it's almost official. I think they're doing the count tonight. Four Ward District, Central District, which is Ward 2 and 3, City Council. And I humbly request your support. The website will be Milo Grant, that's M-E, not M-I-M-E-L-O Grant-G-R-A-N-T dot com. Should be up in the next 48 hours. Got a little work to do on that tonight. And then coming to a door near you soon. So if you would like to invite me and schedule a specific time, I'll be happy to do that. I'm gonna do some in-coffee house appearances and probably, I wanna see if I can do something with the Richard Kemp Center and some other places as well just to get to know everyone. So thank you very much. Vote for Milo Grant at outlook.com if you wanna say hey. Oh, I've also been told I have to ask for money. So there's that. Thank you. Wonderful, anybody else? Okay, great, we'll move on then. So we wanted to do something a little different being the new year and wanting, we're a fairly new steering committee overall. So we're looking for feedback on what is, what do our members get out of the NPA meetings? What do you wanna see more of? What do you wanna see less? So we put on 15 minutes on the agenda so that we could have a dialogue with everyone to see if we're missing anything in how we organize these meetings. So I'll turn this over to Roxanne and... Thanks, Molly. I don't know if you all got a chance to look at one of the piece of papers that's on your tables is NPA visioning prompts. There's five questions, it's okay if you haven't. We're gonna go through each question one by one. We're taking notes, this is recorded. So we will, the steering committee will take all of this discussion back to our meetings. So these are things that we decided together that we really wanna hear from you. Well, we do also have the survey online. That's, it's quite long and that's a little more, it kinda takes a different angle. So the first question on here, we'll get right to it, is what are the most important parts of NPA meetings to you? And would you like to see some things have more time allotted to them than others? This partly comes from the fact that these meetings are long and a lot of what we've heard from the survey so far is could we shorten them a bit? Not from everyone, but it's something that's been out there. But then what do we do? How do we make that call? So we will hand the mic to anyone who wants to talk. Does anyone have anything they wanna say on this topic? Like what is most important to you? Would you like to hear more from city counselors? Do you wanna talk more with city counselors? Do you love hearing the presentations or feel like they go on too long and want to have more discussion? Or all that kind of stuff? Or maybe something totally different. Does anyone have any response to this first question? One of the things I've found so valuable is essentially when there are really big changes that are happening in our community, sometimes NPA is one of the first opportunities for us to learn about it, digest it, really understand how it's going to change things or impact things, positive or negative. And then for, and I've found this group very much focused on like what is the next step? We can take like an action thing together as a community, like writing these resolutions and having direct communication with our city counselors obviously is invaluable because that just saves a lot of time, right? We're all super busy. Crafting emails is not like anybody's first choice of things to do. If it is, please volunteer to help elect Milo. But yeah, I think being able to know what changes are happening, schedule them for the NPA meetings has been probably the best use of our time. Christine? Yeah, a couple months ago there was a meeting where we got an update from someone on the police commission. We got an update from the director of DPW. We got an update from the developers of City Place. It was like these big juicy issues and we were hearing directly from the city and the source and like the people most involved and closest to the thing. And I felt like I had heard a lot of like misinformation or like emotional hot takes and it just felt really good to show up and hear facts and like exactly what Jeannie was just saying. Like in a sort of matter of fact action based where do we go from here kind of way? So, good job you guys. That's all I wanted to say. There were two NPA happenings in the last couple of months that were eye opening to me. One was the parking enforcement guy only he doesn't want to be called parking enforcement. I forget what he wants to be called. But the other was the people from the big hole because actually seeing the people who were going to hopefully fill in the hole and hearing what they were saying even if I didn't really trust it was really helpful to know what was coming. Cause I live on St. Paul Street and those trucks are going back and forth in front of my building every day. But it was nice to get the warning even which I wouldn't have gotten any other way. So what I'm hearing so far is like good news. Like people are seem pretty happy. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to change the structure of the meeting or if it is a decision between a shorter meeting and having an additional presentation or having an additional presentation or longer Q and A with another. Do you have any takes on that. So I'm kind of new here. This is my first time being here. But sorry so my initial thought for how to make this just more accessible for more people is is there like a group chat for this where we can like schedule it for more people instead of having it be like once a month Thursday thing because I think having it on a Thursday might limit who can participate. Yeah that actually in the survey we had sent out a lot of people asked about a Facebook group or an email group specific to this and right now the way we get the word out is front porch forum mainly and that's a lot of people also said that is very important of course. And we added an Instagram but as for some sort of forum I mean there is like the old North End Facebook group but that doesn't even cover the whole our whole words. Do you have any suggestion for like the place? I think just like expanding your social media reach might be effective just multiple platforms but centering it on like one location like you can have multiple links on an Instagram profile and there are ways to have like a Google calendar with like a voting system that allows it so more people can join these meetings at the same time and it just automatically tells you which one more people can RSVP for. So I think having like a flexible like meeting that more people can come to but also like a set schedule thing might be good. Thank you so much and welcome. I'll move on to just so we hit all the points on here but we can like come back to general structure and how we do things. We haven't invited the mayor to the meeting and I don't know how long. Does anyone have any takes on that? Like should he come once a year? Should we invite him every time? Should we? I couldn't run rough shot over the meeting, you know. It's true. But frequently. Mayors used to come kind of when they wanted to. So I guess it means it should we invite him to be on the agenda or should we invite him to come hear what people think? Those are might be two different flavors of visit. That's a good point. Yeah, and I guess it's a matter of inviting or really asked like requesting can you be on the agenda versus yeah. Or it just could just be during the community dinner for more interaction. Does anyone else have any takes on that? I just make the suggestion that if the mayor were formally engaged in the agenda in a regular way of any kind then you might generate a sense of responsibility to the NPA from that constant interaction and expectation that demand. Thank you. Anyone else? And another kind of related is what about city departments and commissions? That's another. So who we regularly invite for those who don't know. So we always invite our city counselors, our school board members, our state reps and our state senators. So we generally don't hear from city departments unless it's related to an agenda item or if they talk during public forum. Does anyone have any takes on this topic? Are there maybe we have a meeting dedicated to all of those different commissions or maybe we keep doing what we're doing? I'm just curious if you've ever had opportunities like for people to speak in smaller groups because I know that sometimes I can feel intimidating like in front of the whole meeting to have a conversation or like to ask a question of a commissioner or something. So is there ever opportunity for like smaller group discussions with maybe like a few members of a city department or something like that? I think that's a really good idea. I think that sort of came up during one of our student committees, committee meetings. I think one of the things that's a matter of recording the meeting it makes it trigger for that aspect but if we can get around that or have it be a supplemental thing or I don't know. I think it's a really good idea and would make it easier to speak up. What about people submitting questions that then get read by an NPA Steering Committee person? I wanted to, I really loved, like I said earlier, the presentations that we received from city departments and commissioners. What does rub me the wrong way is when people ask questions that are about completely irrelevant topics related to what they're talking about. So I don't know if there's like a way to sort of manage that but like people being really opportunistic and using the head of DPW here to ask about the Raleighard District where actually we're supposed to be talking about the North Reduske Avenue pilot program is like pretty irritating. So that doesn't really answer your question but it's related. Thank you. Yeah, it's tricky. I'm used to coming to NPAs and having very large scale city initiatives discussed by departments, that kind of thing. But I wonder if the NPA might consider occasionally stepping up to help us advocate for neighborhood specific issues. And the reason I'm asking this is on Lower King Street, every, somebody from every house on our street signed a letter asking for a please slow for pets and children sign that we would pay for and DPW would not. So it's one of those things that feels like a conversation starter that should be between neighborhoods and DPW and this might be the proper place for that kind of conversation. But it's far more localized than I'm used to here for topic. And I'm sure everyone, not everyone might even think to reach out to the NPA. So it's also something to like advertise like this is part of what we do or something like that. Very nice. All right, hey, I think it's great to invite folks over, maybe not every single time. Everybody's got a life and people got family and stuff like that. But love to have different folks from the city come in and obviously if there's a particular issue that they want to bring forth, that's great. I think it would also be great to just kind of have in the background, whenever the opportunity strikes to just cycle through the different departments and committees, because I think there's a lot that we don't really understand as a normal citizen of what the city does. And so it would be great to meet the faces, understand this whole mechanism that the city is. Yeah. Thanks. We actually used to do that years ago, like about eight or 10 years ago, we would have a different department come to every meeting. And so we would not actually invite the city department so much as we would invite the commissioners. So we would invite the public works commission and commissioners more than the department head. And we would do like, for instance, we invited the cemetery commissioners, which are kind of an overlap there. But we did do that in the past, but you also have to realize that the meetings used to be much longer in the past. So they started at 6.30 and they routinely went to 9.30. So the meetings went three hours. And typically, especially in the January and February meeting, there'd be like 150 people there. So if you go back like 10 years and you look on cctv.org and you look up for any meeting any second Thursday in January, February, you're gonna see a room at the old multi-gen building with like packed. So every seat would be filled and the walls would all be lined with people for the January and February meeting. And so the only reason I'm just saying that the meetings used to be longer and we used to have many more, you know, we would go more in depth with things. For instance, for instance, believe it or not, we actually invited all the candidates one month who were candidates for the Vermont Senate from Chittenden County. So we actually had like 15 Senate candidates come for that meeting. So you can tell that the meetings used to be a lot longer than they are today. But yes, we did use to cycle through the commissions years ago. I don't know why we stopped doing that because people really liked being able to talk to the commissioners more than the department heads because you do get a different take on what they're talking about. Thank you. Thank you, Charlie. What, yeah, I mean, the other questions are a little more open-ended. Like what are there certain topics you wanna hear about? It does seem to be just whatever is topical, but does anyone else have anything to add on what we covered? Maybe this can be done through reframing of public comment. But when we were talking about the removal of parking spaces on North Manuskiyav a few months ago, I was feeling really upset. And I was craving, I've been thinking a lot about the role of positivity in change-making and how it's important to focus on what's working and it's important to find commonality. So I was wishing that as I was feeling rage bubble up that there was an opportunity for people to share good news so we could all just celebrate and we could talk about things that are working and I could sort of like focus on that instead of focusing on differences. So maybe that could happen in public comment, but it could also be like a nice little, God, what's like the opposite of the amuse-bouche because that comes before the meal? We need like an aperteef at the end of the meeting to just like end on a positive note. And I think it would be really sweet and I kinda wanna hear about things that are really nice that are happening. It could be like the moment of sin. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Stay for that. I feel like we should add that in somewhere and it would be really, really good. Oh, thank you. Manya, last question. Any other feedback? I'll, since I think we have a couple more minutes, another, some other ideas that the steering committee had talked about, one was having a themed meeting. So one all about public safety, one about transportation that hasn't really taken off. It's also like as we get requests for people to speak, we usually say yes. If there's still time available. So does something like that interest people? It wouldn't mean we're hard and fast about it because we'll still take what matters in the moment. But that was just one idea of how to do things. Cool. One more. I'm just curious, cause I was surprised to hear that 10 years ago there would be 150 people at this meeting. So maybe this is sort of a side question, but from those who have been here for like 10, 20, 30 years in the MPA meetings, like what, in your opinion, what do you feel like has changed? Cause I've, you know, I've, we've been homeowners here for like two and a half years in this neighborhood. So we're relatively new. Is it like that there's more renters? Is it people's resources? Like a breakdown in the community feeling? Like just, I would love to hear opinions on that actually, cause that might help guide really what we should be doing in the MPA. I haven't been coming here that long, but I've been in Ward three most of the 10 years I've been living in Burlington, except for a brief sojourn in Ward five, don't go there. And we have had a big fall off in attendance since the pandemic. Before the pandemic, all of these tables would be full of people eating dinner and probably half of them would leave at the end, but we would have a good turnout of 40 or 50 people on regular days when there was some big thing going on, we'd get more than that. But I think the pandemic, we, people haven't come back from the pandemic and I don't know when they're going to come back if they are going to come back, but I know a lot of people are not willing to come to a place like this and get exposed. So the MPA also had reduction in its budget when the MPA first came around. That was around Bernie's time. It was very powerful. Bernie kind of encouraged it to be a way to pass policies, circumventing the Council of Outer People back in the day. That's what it actually, it was called Council of Outer Men. And each MPA had a $50,000 budget. You know how much it is now. I think it's 2,500. And it used to be an independent budget, independent of the City Council because back then the City Council was very hostile towards the MPA. So there has definitely been active neglect on the part of especially this administration, seeing, you know, they are interested in not having any accountability at all in my opinion. So they've decreased the MPA budget and now you have to go to your City Council and kiss the ring in order to get the 2,500. That's measly budget. And it's really sad for me, especially like the Ward 2 and 3 were like the one MPA where the sense of community, I live in Ward 5, our MPA sucked. The sense of community was really palpable. Like whenever you show up to the Ward 2 and 3 and you know, I'm hoping this will get back to the kind of attendance that you're talking about. So we need to push for City Charter Change that will actually fund the MPA and give the MPA some real power. Right now MPA resolutions have been traded as no more than advisory if that. It doesn't really have any real teeth. But we can change the City Charter. We can refund the MPA. I do think like some of this public safety issues that we are facing would be best solved at the MPA level. So let's work toward that. Thanks. For the sake of people who don't follow things this closely, not too many years ago, the MPAs were given three or $400 maybe. And there was an initiative from within the MPA to raise that budget and it was a struggle and it was an argument and we did to the $2,500 level. And the logic was that with that large increase from where we were demonstrating how it would be spent to strengthen the MPAs, growing the strength of the MPAs organically and purposefully, we would then be able to return and argue successfully for even more funding. So that pattern of initiative has existed here in the MPA in the past and is one that we can all, if we choose to move forward to any goal we would set. But the topic is not one of regret or remorsefulness. It's one of opportunity and optimism for us and for what it's worth. Thank you so much. I think we're nearing or at the time for this agenda item but I think this is really good and we have notes. Thank you again. We'll move on to whatever's next. Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much. It's so great to have everyone's voices in this meeting. So we will move on to our resolutions. As our members said, they are advisory but they do have a certain voice to them so we do continue to do these resolutions when topics come up. So we have two of them today and they are both written out on the document that looks like this that should be on all of your tables. So we will do the first one, the top one first. This is a resolution that came from within the steering committee upon the passing of our steering committee member, our friend and our MPA member, Tony Rennington. And Chris, you were the one to propose this. Would you like to speak to it or should I give the introduction? Okay. Yeah, so Tony was a long time advocate, member, community organizer and we felt that his particular advocacy for pedestrian and bicycle safety and his fierce dedication to roundabouts and bringing them to every corner of the street that they could be squeezed into, deserved recognition and with the exciting completion of the Shelburne Street roundabout, we saw an opportunity. So Jess drafted up the resolution as follows. Community advocate, former transportation planner and former NPA steering committee member, Tony Rennington, passed away this summer in recognition of Tony's decades of tireless advocacy on behalf of pedestrian and bicycle safety, his commitment to transportation equity and his vocal support for roundabouts, the Ward 2-3 NPA hereby requests that the Shelburne Street roundabout be officially designated the Tony Rennington roundabout. So we would like to open it up for any discussion of that proposed resolution that would be sent to the Department of Public Works for consideration. So before I had met Tony, I really didn't know the difference between a roundabout and a traffic circle. I've since been educated. I think if Tony were here, he would remind us that Burlington has 10 of the 11 most dangerous intersections in the state of Vermont located right here in Burlington. He would also remind us that the roundabout is the only traffic control device that has got the approval from the National Highway Traffic, National Traffic Highway Safety Administration, NIST I think, as being deemed to be safe. You'd also remind us that traffic fatalities often have a different portion of impact upon people of color in lower income neighborhoods and he'd probably be continuing to advocate for changes to the Great Streets designed to include some roundabouts. I think there was some interest in definitely putting one in the immediate neighborhood at Main Street in St. Paul. So I learned a lot from Tony and I think that this is a very fitting and appropriate way to honor his work and his legacy and I would encourage everyone to stand with us on this issue. Thank you. Anyone else like to comment? We'd all do well to be a lot more like Tony when we grow up. I'm just glad to have a microphone to shout. I love you, Tony, into Tony was an example to everybody for his commitment and for how generous he was with the wisdom he had because it was immense and I just respect him deeply and I love that we would honor him this way. Actually, I think it's a no brainer that it be called the Tony Reddington roundabout and maybe we ought to tell him that. Other discussion? Anyone on Zoom? Go ahead, Barbara. I think you should be into Tony and especially when you have a lot of money to pay, I think you would be good to honor a public citizen to almost the day he died advocating for safety and for roundabouts like this one and this is the first one and it would be just wonderful to name it. Thanks, Barbara. Anyone else? Oh, great, Steven, go ahead. Great, thank you. With that, could I get a motion to vote on the resolution? Okay, remind me of your name. Barbara. Move to approve the resolution. Anyone second? Jeannie, second? Okay, great. Anyone, any discussion? We kind of already had discussion. Everyone who supports, please raise their hands. Anyone opposed? Okay, the resolution is supported unanimously. Thank you, that's very exciting. Wonderful, so our second resolution has to do with the city put out a request for proposals in I believe October for the redevelopment restoration of Memorial Auditorium that those were due by December and at our December NPA meeting we had a brief discussion about how big heavy world, Jim Lockridge, had submitted a request to join one of the redevelopers to reinstate the youth center in the basement of the Memorial Auditorium. I'll give you an opportunity to correct me if I get wrong, Jim, in a second. So we had a brief discussion at the meeting. We decided to postpone a resolution to January and a resolution has been drafted that we can discuss now. So I'll read it. So whereas the residents of Burlington have identified support for performing arts and youth programming as two of the top six priorities for a restored Memorial Auditorium, whereas the city of Burlington put forth a request for proposals for Memorial Auditorium and a local non-profit big heavy world has proposed the reinstatement of the youth music and youth-led programming in response to resident priorities in the city request, whereas the proposal from Big Heavy World is compatible with the other proposals and can be incorporated into future proposals and programming proposed by other developers, be it resolved that the Ward 2-3 NPA supports the proposal of Big Heavy World to reestablish the teen youth center formerly known as 2482 Main Street located in the lower level of Memorial Auditorium. So Jim, would you like to say anything about your proposal? The proposal that Big Heavy World submitted was specific to the historic 242 Main Space and the janitor's area behind it. And it's not a competitive proposal to redevelop the whole building. It's a programming proposal that we hope that the successful developer of the whole building will incorporate. And it is significantly a proposal that aligns with the public interests expressed in the 2018 public process for what they'd like to see reinstated for programming in Memorial Auditorium. It's one way to cling to the public's vision and voice for Memorial, as well as serve the youth that had this resource taken away in 2016 when the building closed. The vision is one of a collective effort to bring youth programming from across the city to the space that has infrastructure for the performing arts. Great, thank you. Any discussion or questions about this resolution before we make a motion? I would just like to voice by support for this resolution. Thank you. Thank you. A personal story. I had to do some family drama. I had to take in my nephew, which I was happy to do. He came to live here with me when he was 10 and when he was 12, I got guardianship of him. So he's my kid. And two for two was a vital space. He's very creative musically. And they had this wonderful rock camp, which they had for many, many years, which gave kids opportunities. You didn't have to know how to play an instrument. You could show up and you could learn how to play an instrument and they would just group the kids by different levels. They would have opportunities to perform together to write their own music. There would be performances for their friends and family. It was just a really vital space in terms of that rock camp. It was cheap for the amount of times he could go three days a week after school. I didn't have to worry about where he was because he loved it. And I just think that we are really, it's left a huge hole in our community for that. We do not have a lot of positive resources for teenagers. And if we can somehow get this back, and it just pains me that it's not a priority of the city, but if we can all approve this resolution and give voice to its importance, that would be great. Thank you. Questions or comments? Any on Zoom? Would someone like to make a motion regarding the resolution? Would someone make a motion to vote on the resolution? Joe moves that we vote on the resolution. Thank you. Chris would like to second it. Great. Any discussion before we vote? Okay. All those who support the resolution as drafted, please indicate by raising your hand. Anyone opposed? Great. Thank you. The resolution passes unanimously. Wonderful. Moving on to our next agenda item. At our last NPA meeting, we had a presentation about community block grants and requested that a community member volunteer to serve as the ward two rep for the community block grant advisory committee. And we have someone, Tara volunteered. She is a member of ward two and just wanted to create a space to say that we now have a representative. Thanks, Tara, for stepping up to this volunteer position. And would you like to introduce yourself? Hi, my name is Tara. I've been a resident of Burlington since 2008. I moved into the Old North then in 2012. So I've been around for a bit. Moved back here about two years ago. I live over on Spring Street and I'm working for a grant program related to the performing arts for COVID relief. So I also worked for Efficiency Vermont for about six years. And so I did some grants through there for energy efficiency. So excited to be able to take kind of my professional expertise and apply it to some local community work. So happy to answer any questions or I don't know. But nice to meet everybody. Awesome, thanks, Tara. Great. Moving on to our main agenda item for the evening, we're going to spend the next hour learning about ballot initiatives that will be on the town meeting day ballot. So we'll start off with, we'll have 10 minutes for each ballot initiative. There's six initiatives. We're hoping to have about a five minute overview of that initiative. Some of the initiatives we have a pro and a con presentation about. Some of them we just have a semi-pro or informational type presentation. So five minutes for information and then we're trying to have five minutes for Q and A or comments about it. So we'll start off with all legal resident voting. That works, oh yeah. So again, I'm Gene Bergman. I'm the ward two city counselor and I'm on the Charter Change Committee and in fact was the chair of that. So Charter Change Committee brought this particular item to us and work through the adoption of this proposal for all legal resident voting in local elections. Since we started really a meeting in April and it simply put it allows, it would authorize if the people of Burlington approve it and then the legislature and the governor adopt it. It would allow anybody who is a legal permanent resident of the United States, not a citizen but legal permanent residents to be able to vote in local elections and just to put it into context, this is what Winooski and Montpelier did and despite the governor's opposition, it was adopted in both of those cities. So ours is based on those and is before us. Why only local elections? That's because the US and state constitutions prohibit non-citizens from voting in that and we just can't overcome that. So this would allow anybody who is here permanently with legal status to not only be able to vote but also be able to serve any of the positions that a legal voter has to, a person has to be a voter, a legal voter to be able to run for and serve. So the mayor has to be a voter of the city of Burlington and this would allow a legal resident to run for mayor. So you don't necessarily, not only do you get a chance to vote for mayor but you could run for mayor. It would allow any of our commissions to be opened up to legal resident, legal residents that are permanently here in the United States. So it's really that basic and I think that now's a good time to answer questions if there are any. Yeah, thanks. Any questions or comments or statements about this ballot item? Barbie. I would just like to give a little bit of my experience because I worked for immigration for many years and the two big steps when you come to this country are legal permanent resident and citizenship and from the government's perspective the big issue is legal permanent residents. Citizenship is easy but legal permanent resident is where they do all of the research into the background of the people. It's where they check to make sure that they are suitable for our country and it is a much bigger hurdle so that I think we can be fairly confident that anybody who is here as a legal permanent resident has met all of the requirements other than perhaps the language and the knowledge of the Constitution and would be acceptable after seven years of living here without getting busted to be citizens. I should just point out that we've been working on public engagement with the CEDO office and so there's a webpage with frequently asked questions and assorted other information I just made a copy of them in there and so that stuff is available, I gotta find my URL at burlingtonvt.gov backslash all legal resident voting. So you can get that information that's got some pretty interesting stuff on it and we tried to answer the detailed questions so if you don't have them here and now. So I'm Charlie G. I just wanted to say one thing about this. This is a very modest proposal, okay? So there's the reality of what has happened in Winooski and Montpelier where they're already using it. There hasn't been this big flood of people taking advantage of it, it's very modest. So for people who are concerned that suddenly there's gonna be a flood of new people utilizing this, that's really, I doubt that's really gonna be the case. It's very, very mildly taken advantage of. I supported myself and as a ward clerk, believe me, I'm always trying to find more people to participate in the voting process so I fit in very nicely with this but it has been very modestly utilized up to this point Montpelier and Winooski, thank you. I'd say that they'd also be eligible to be ward clerks and inspectors of election and help and also assistant election officials to help with the process of the election and let me just end this then by saying to me it really gives life to the concept of a government of by and for the people and we've been striving for that since Lincoln said that at the Gettysburg Address and we haven't gotten there yet so this is one other step. I understand we have two questions on Zoom. Okay. So Christopher. I believe it's very, very mildly noted the case will be more important for us to report at least that the premise being that even as it quotes local level on municipal level is that it affects the school budget with a dozen steps in time. The community and the audience is a very low-cost state it's as close as the argument before it works right now. So does that mean that it's just an addition to what this talk is about? If I can just mention, we've brought this to the Trusted Community Voices which is a group made up of members of various New American communities as well as and I'm gonna forget the name another group that is a statewide group and they have not expressed opposition they've expressed support for this that is not to say that there aren't members of the New American community who would feel that way and as a grandson of an immigrant myself who ended up getting citizenship along maybe 20 years after he got here I mean I appreciate the differences of opinion and that's why we have elections is to have them go on out there and just in terms of the court cases Vermont Supreme Court in, Vermont Superior Court in two separate cases has ruled that this is a valid and constitutional act and if it's being appealed to the Vermont Supreme Court we'll just find out how that shakes out when it shakes out. I believe Steve on Zoom has his hand up. Okay, we've reached 10 minutes for this agenda item so we'll move on unless it's really, oh okay, I'm a softy. Thank you, I just want to say as a candidate for city council I strongly support this valid item. Okay, great, let's move on to rank choice voting. And I'm on for this one too so that's why I'm sitting here. Quite simply last year we as a city by a 64% vote have adopted rank choice voting for city council races and this proposal is to expand that to all the other elected positions in the city, the mayor, school board and the election officials like Charlie or Wendy Coe. So that's the long and the short of what's being proposed and yeah, I mean I will let people talk. Shelby just asked if you could explain the process of rank choice voting. Rank choice voting would allow you to put your choices if you want, say Milo is running and say there were three other people who were running. You would rank how you would like your vote to be cast. So if your first choice is Milo, you put that down. If another person was running was your second choice if Milo dropped out, you'd be somebody else and down the line. So they just ran that in ward one and in fact, no, in the East District in the special election and you've got to clear the 50% threshold for getting elected and in that case, the winner, Maya Brant got 55% on the first ballot so there was no need to see who the second choice votes were for the third candidate who lost on that. So that's sort of how it works. There's rules that are created so that the whole tabulating process works but that's more of the mechanics of the voting, the tabulating machines and what have you but basically you just get a chance to say how you would like the people to be and what it does is it means that you can vote your conscience and there's a person who might not be likely to win can be there without being seen as a spoiler because if nobody gets enough votes to put them over the top, then their votes or the people who voted for them have a chance to have what's effectively an instant runoff and if you don't want that to happen and you just say I only want one person and I don't care in a runoff and I wouldn't go out in a runoff anyway then that's what you would do and so that's how it basically works. Great, we'll turn to Zoom first and Chris for Aaron has his hand up. That's okay, Chris, the gene is appropriate. I personally don't know. So in case people are really unfamiliar with it which I have no idea how to guess, it used to be called instant runoff voting and that's more clear explanation of how it works and the other thing is what you alluded to about spoilers and confusions and messes like that. If you want to vote for your friend and you still want to have a say in the final end even if your friend doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell you can do both, you can have your cake and eat it too in this system I think by my understanding, if I'm wrong, correct me but that's one of the beauties of it and it is used in a couple of places in the world much more widely than it is in the US. I mean, the state of Maine is gonna be, it does run its congressional races. The state of Alaska just used it as well and a host of other Ireland. I'm gonna give a not so long ago example, Murrow, Karina Driscoll and Infinite Co-Claesure. I think I'm probably not pronouncing anybody's names correctly. I definitely wanted Karina to win. I definitely did not want Murrow to win. I would have preferred to have Infinite be our mayor over Murrow but I could only cast one vote. If I was able to do this system I would have been able to say, this is my first choice, this is my second choice. I don't know if you get a third choice or not. You do? I probably wouldn't have put Murrow down at all but, or maybe I would have, I don't know. But therefore, I wouldn't have to choose between voting for either Infinite or Karina. And I think a lot of people did and that was unfortunately more people voted for Murrow than they did just Karina or just Infinite. This last election, the mayor won with like 43% of the vote, 129 vote difference and Ali Jang got like 13 to 18%. That's a significant number. Nobody knows what would have happened but this way a person can run with significant support and not be considered a spoiler. You get a chance to run on the merits and people get a chance to vote for them. So on a personal basis, I think that it's a good system to have. So as I was part of the Infinite for Mayor campaign, in that election though, most of the fault lies in the threshold of the election, which is only 40% whereas in most democracies it's 50% plus one. Our position was that we, and had we had democratic election in which somebody has to win at least half of the vote, then we would have forced a runoff which would have given more attention. Sure it's more expensive but this is the only time the mainstream is ever gonna talk politics really. So it would have given us three, four more weeks of discussions with our neighbors and that's what's really unfortunate is that 40% threshold, which I think this will address that, right, so you have to clear the 50%. That's correct. Steven on Zoom, you can go ahead. Yeah, I have a question, just that quote in 50%. The answer is yes, if you then allocate the second choice votes from the person who is the lowest vote getter and if that, then they clear the threshold. Janet's right, it's more like an instant runoff right then and there. Yeah, I mean the argument is that people have to appeal to broad categories of people. If they want to get the second vote, it's their second choice votes or even third choice votes then you alienate people at your own peril. So I don't know that I would call it gaming but it is definitely part of the campaign strategies that need to be adjusted when you've got ranked choice. Thank you, we've reached 10 minutes for this agenda item, so thank you very much for presenting and we'll move on to redistricting. We have two presenters who would like to speak to redistricting, we have Councilman Joe Mage and then we also have Chris from the steering committee who was also involved in the community effort around redistricting. So if each of you could have two and a half minutes to present, we'll then move on to questions and comments. Okay, thanks everybody. So I will be quick and I'll just touch on some high level points. I know that redistricting has been talked about a lot in this room over the last several months. We've talked about it a lot at city council and between now and town meeting day I'd be happy to sit with folks and answer any questions. I did send Sam the map to put up on the screen here. It's kind of small so it might be difficult for folks to see. I think it would be great if there was a way for the steering committee to potentially add this to the agenda so that if folks wanna view this map they can find it. But the few points that I'll touch on right now are we are gonna be sticking with the eight ward and four district configuration for this round of redistricting. So we'll have 12 counselors continuing to serve on the council if this passes on town meeting day. Earlier versions of the maps considered for redistricting would have had seven wards which would have meant that one of the new North End wards would have come down into the old North End and scooped everything west of La Fountain Street and North of North Street to the most extreme extent. And most folks North of North Street would have had to go to a new North End NPA. I fought pretty hard against that. I'm not very happy with the map that we've ended up with. It still has Ward 3 losing a significant amount of the neighborhoods North of North Street. But the old North End will remain part of, will remain the old North End. One of the primary questions that the council grappled with throughout the process was the number of counselors the size of the council. Myself and others advocated for increasing the council to 16, so that would have meant sticking with eight wards and having two counselors per ward. Others felt that that was too many. I personally feel like there is enough work to go around for us to have 16 counselors. I think we are growing as a city and I think it would make sense for us to have a larger council. Another question that kind of took control of the conversation towards the end of the process was the student populations in wards one, six, and eight. And that is really what dictated the map that you see on the screen right now. Which has created an arm of Ward 8 going on to Athletic Campus, an arm of Ward 1 going on to Athletic Campus, and Ward 6 being drawn to keep Edmunds Middle School in the ward so that they can have that as their polling location because there aren't very many other places for folks to vote in Ward 6. So that is I think some of the larger issues that drove the redistricting conversation and I'd be happy to answer any questions after Chris presents. Where to begin? I think we have to go back 10 years to the last time we did this. And coming into this, the last recycle in 2014, we had a map where we had seven wards with two councils for a total of 14. And the last time that the map had been done before that was 1993 and in that time the city grew. So one would think initially that if the population grows, maybe we should have greater representation to reflect the growth in population. Yet the last time around, despite a growth in the city's population, we ended up with this hybrid model where we had eight wards and four districts. So we lost representation, yet the city continued to grow. And so this time I think folks were to Councilor McGee's credit, wanting to bring back representation. And one of the things that I think folks were wanting was to have, go back to a model where we had two councilors for war. They kind of didn't like the one and a half councilor model and yet that's not what we ended up with. And at the end of the day, for me it really comes down to public process here. The council did put together an ad hoc committee on redistricting to identify community concerns and priorities for the process. And that group met several times throughout the fall of 2021, held a number of public hearings to solicit input from the community regarding this issue and ultimately issued a final report on those efforts. And of the final report, a couple key themes, three themes emerge that one, the current award eight is not working in its current configuration. There are a number of issues with this. In the last cycle, there was a kind of a desire to kind of have all the students be together in one ward, a practice known in political circles as packing. And this time around, they saw that, well, we had a ward with a large number of students, we had issues with turnout, we had issues finding people to work the elections. There was a number of issues with that. So they said, well, let's spread out the students, let's distribute them across multiple wards. So that's how we ended up with the current shape of ward eight, which you see behind me. I'm not sure that we really met the criteria that people were looking for in terms of eliminating the current ward eight. A second theme that emerged pretty strongly was a desire to eliminate the district system, whereby we had districts that overlaid the wards, each district being comprised of two separate wards. People really want to go back to a system where we had two counselors and that didn't happen. And then the other theme was, is that folks wanted to preserve neighborhood, keep wards compact and provide equal representation. And that's really what this is about at the heart of it. And as someone who was intimately involved, I had advocated for a re-establishment of a downtown ward, also the unification of the King Maple neighborhood. One of the, I think, challenges that we saw with the current map is that the King Maple neighborhood, which is Vermont's largest community of color, is divided right down the middle through King Street. And so there was an initiative to kind of unify the neighborhood and really kind of keep them together. And ultimately what we ended up with is a boundary that was moved one block south to Maple Street, which severed the Bob and Mill neighborhood from the remainder of King Maple Hood, so it failed. And to Council McGee's point, there was a lot of concern from people in the Hill section of the city about having college students in their ward and that their vote would somehow be diluted by having it. So really they got what they wanted at the expense of young people and at the expense of Vermont's largest community of color. And at the end of the day, when you go through the public report, which I hope will post up on our website and look at the criteria and look at the feedback and then compare the map on the ballot to what was discussed, it seems to me that it really didn't satisfy the criteria that we had articulated as a larger community. And so for that reason, I will not be supporting that and I would encourage everyone here to kind of review the report, take a look at it and come to their own conclusion. Thank you both. Questions and comments about redistricting? Okay, so again, I'm Charlie Gee. I just have a couple of extra points to make. So the first thing is people saw the ward eight from the last go around about 10 years ago and a lot of people are negative about that as I was negative about it. And people look at it and the first thing that comes to their mind is gerrymandering or gerrymandering, even though packing is the proper expression for it. Right, well, it's not technical. Anyways, it's really not all that bad because if you look at the history of Burlington of all the city councilors, how many in the history of Burlington, how many city councilors were under the age of 30? Okay, but what happened when they put in ward eight? All of a sudden you had these very, very young. So for the first time, you actually had the students actually represented on the city council for the first time in almost Burlington history. That's one point. The second point when it comes to redistricting, anytime you have something like a city, it's the central part of the city that gets affected most by the redistricting. So in Burlington, that means that wards four and seven in a new north end, they're barely gonna be affected by redistricting. Wards five and six, except for maybe some students, again, is very little affected by the redistricting. You're gonna get all the contortions in the middle of the city. Then it's just a natural way it happens in municipalities all over the world. So it's something we're stuck with. So I'm assuming that this is gonna pass. I'm gonna vote against it, but wards four and seven, I think those people will overwhelmingly support it because it doesn't really, there's no change. Same thing in wards five and six for the most part. It doesn't really affect them much. So my opinion is they're overwhelmingly gonna vote for favorite when it comes to voting. So again, I'm gonna vote against it, but what can you do? You're gonna have some change sooner or later. Thank you. And I'd just like to add quickly off of what Charlie said. Myself and my progressive colleagues on the council did vote against this map. We tried to move a map that would create a downtown ward and address a lot of the concerns that folks had. Ultimately we didn't have the votes and functionally the council had run out of time. I think Barbara has her hand up on Zoom. Yeah, I mean it's better to have no proposal because I don't support this. But mostly through it, it seems to be, certainly the councilors won't power you know it and it's also a specific representation. I don't understand why there are not two castors who are normal district and why they have these pro-war and why they have these double districts that really goes against my opinion. So I'm gonna vote against it. Thank you. I'm gonna make time for two more short questions or comments. So we'll go with Christopher, Aaron on Zoom and then somebody in the room if there is one. Thank you. And thank you to Chris and everybody, everyone who has the committee for the work that they put together in the pre-distribute process. I was on a lot of the meetings as well and I can confirm everything there's all the points that Chris brought up on the last week's group. People wanted to go focus on the space or for a specific, specific model. They wanted to return with the councilor's reward and reimagine the Maple neighborhood. I also agree with Councilor McBeat. There is enough work for additional councilors in the city and our city, our citizens are a reference to the purpose. And for this reason, I'm also looking for people to reject this map and tell councilors to go back to the line work, start again and really engage and listen to what the community wants. And I'm going to do everything that I can to make sure that people resist the map. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone in the room? Okay. Just a quick note that there are two public hearings that are gonna be held, one on the 17th and one on the 23rd. And if people are serious about beating this or actually any of the items even though I support all these other ones, it's very important that people go to public hearing and express the concerns. They're at City Hall and they're also via Zoom. So it's just gonna be like a regular city council meeting. So if you got issues, you should continue to raise it because that's how the democratic struggle is waged. The 17th, so that's next Tuesday. And then the 23rd, the Monday after that. Thank you. We are gonna move on to the next ballot item to keep us roughly on schedule. So thank you both very much. We have Tyler with us to speak to the ballot initiative of Police Oversight Board. Hi, thanks. Cool, yeah, hi everyone. My name's Tyler. I live in Ward 8. And I'm part of a group of folks in Burlington called People for Police Accountability. And we formed in 2020 kind of during the peak of calls for reform and accountability in the police department kind of brought to light by the battery park movement. And yes, just kind of bringing to light some of these really disturbing cases of violence against black members of our community and other people. Lack of transparency around disciplinary processes. And yeah, so this group we've been kind of carrying this proposal through the process to get on the ballot. And so basically this proposal would establish an independent board of Burlington residents that in cases of police misconduct would at their discretion have the authority to take up cases and conduct investigations and make actual disciplinary decisions. This proposal was developed by Councillor Freeman on the Charter Change Committee with help from Jean Bergman and a lot of input from the community, including black community members. And this proposal actually passed City Council in 2020 but it was vetoed by the mayor and one vote short of overriding the veto. And so over the past couple of years we've been gathering petition signatures to be able to get it directly on the ballot. And so that was successful this past fall and so that's how it's on the ballot. And yeah, this proposal has support from a lot of local organizations. ACLU Vermont was huge in kind of helping craft the language. The National Association of Community Oversight of Law Enforcement expressed support. Vermont Racial Justice Alliance, Migrant Justice, lots of other groups. Yeah, so yeah, happy to answer questions. If folks have it, yeah, go ahead. Do you have a draft of what will be written on the ballot yet? I know it hasn't been approved. Just to give us a general heads up. Yeah, so for one I do have some copies of like the full length of the proposal on the table here, if folks wanna look at that. I know the public hearings for this and I guess maybe other of the ballot initiatives are on the 17th and the 23rd. So I think some of the language will be finalized there. I do have a copy of the petition, which has, I think the language that goes on the ballot. Yeah, so I have that up here as well. Is that fairly short? Would you, is that appropriate to read right now for edification? Yeah, it's a little... Page nine. Yeah, you wanna, yeah, go ahead. It's a little jargony, but... I mean, it's long, you know, if you're looking to, because what it does is it actually cites the entire charter related to police discipline, which right now vests sole authority in the chief to do that and gives it to a public hearing. The board and then also gives authority for that board to decline for things that are too small, like being late, you know, something like that. So I mean, it's a fairly complicated thing and I think that for me and as one of the drafters of this, the most important takeaway is that this is so that the police don't police themselves and every other professional body when it comes to discipline has an independent body that adjudicates when somebody does misconduct and this totally vests the authority in a chief and you saw what the impact of that was in disciplinary decisions a few years ago and it seems to be a totally legitimate way of addressing this and it still gives the police commission, which we've got great authority over the auditing and monitoring of the department. I'm sorry, I'm sort of stealing your thunder, Tyler. It's the establishment, I mean, the most important thing is in a new section 190 that establishes a board that says a community police department control board consisting of no less than seven members and no more than nine members is established. The board shall be an independent department of the city and then it goes on to quorum and it gives qualifications and diversity and then gives the jurisdiction and the jurisdiction is the investigation and adjudication of misconduct. So it's not the running of the entire department. The mayor just put out a statement today that says that it's about the running of the department and it's just flat wrong. Great, thank you. So anyway, don't get me started. Thank you. Does it say who appoints the commission? Yes, yeah, so it's kind of a, I think, two step process that's focused on representation, particularly for folks who have historically or currently been marginalized by police in the criminal justice system. But yeah, so there's a section here called selection. Essentially, the city council with the mayor choose a set of seven community-based organizations that have an interest in, and there's kind of a list here, civil rights, immigrant rights, disability rights, mental health, racial equity, and social justice that also have an interest in the safety of the city and criminal justice reform. Three of the organizations, to the extent possible, should be black lead or majority black membership. Each organization shall appoint a representative to an appointment committee. And then this appointment committee will directly appoint qualified persons to be members of the board. So that appointment committee is then subject to open meeting law and those kinds of things. So it's not the mayor. So it's not the mayor. No, city council and the mayor choose a set of seven community-based organizations with particular criteria. Those organizations give a member to an appointment committee and then that committee directly appoints people to the board. Hope that made sense to people. Any other questions, comments? Thank you. This is a hard one for me. I support it. I wasn't sure I would support it. Speaking with my police commissioner had on because there was a lot of things that the commission was doing, pushing forward towards certain reforms. But we just keep getting the door slammed in our face and it's not gotten better. It's gotten worse. And thank you. And because of this pushback and this lack of desire for any type of reform. Remember when the mayor talked about transformation? Do we remember how supposedly important that was? It doesn't mean anything anymore. That was just the political spin back then. So we really need something to jumpstart the process. And I think I'll leave it at that. Thank you. My sense is that this will actually put some teeth into handling the police because I don't think the current police commission has the power, has the authority to do what this proposal gives the new commission. Because I don't think you have the ability to go over what is in the police contract for a maximum penalty. I don't know if this gives the commission the ability to give a punishment in excess of what is in the police contract. I mean, the answer is yes, this is state statute. If voters and legislature and the governor all approve it and it becomes a special statute and that actually does trump the contract. Yeah, if I could just make one last comment. I know that safety in our community and everywhere is a huge topic right now. And I think that something, you're gonna hear a lot of rhetoric around like resourcing and the size of the police department and how we address public safety concerns and just want to be clear that regardless of where you are in that conversation, this proposal does not have to do with the size of the police department or anything like that. This is purely about establishing direct accountability between our public safety systems, whatever we choose them to be and the community. And that's important in any sort of public safety institution that we give power to. Great, thank you, Tyler. I think we'll leave it at that and thank you very much for joining us to present. Great, so next we have Farid and Amy to speak to Prop Zero. Is that okay? Okay, I'm Amy. This is actually my first NPA meeting, so. Exciting. Okay, cool, so Proposition Zero. I always say this before I start talking about it. The powers that this proposes actually exist in every, well, nearly every city in town in Vermont. Just not here. And it exists through the longstanding tradition of town meeting days. So, but Burlington, Winooski were too big. So we don't get to gather up at an auditorium and debate and be able to propose ordinances or repeal ordinances by majority vote. We just have the ballot. So to fix this, Winooski actually changed their charter and I think 2018 or 2019. And we are just stealing the same language and trying to put it in ours. So what does it do? I think the most exciting part of it is about proposing ordinance. I'll talk a little bit about that. So let's say you have an idea. I don't know what you want to change about Burlington, whatever you're dreaming about, right? If you write it up into a petition, you run around Burlington and you get 5% of voters to sign that petition saying like, I think that's a good idea too. It can go to city council and they can say yes or they can say no. Or maybe they say yes, but then the mayor says no and he vetoes it, right? In our current system, things just die there. But what this would say is, hey, you ran around, you showed enough of Burlington's interested in this. It shouldn't just die there. It should get to go on the ballot and Burlington should get to have the final say and have the final vote. So what this does is in spirit, it really just gives a little bit more people power in the hands of Burlington, not in a really radical way, but just in the way that the rest of Vermont has been experiencing for a very long time. That's it. I don't know if Fred wants that more. If you have questions. Thanks, Amy. Yeah, questions, comments, concerns. Yeah, so I think you're asking what's the percent. Oh, so, okay. So you have to get 5% of voters to sign the petition and now as someone who has spent a lot of hours canvassing petitions, I can tell you that's a lot of signatures and a lot of hours in the cold. So once you get those, then that can go to city council. And if they pass it, totally cool. But let's say they don't pass it, once it goes on the ballot, the majority, so 50% of Burlington plus one, I believe, would have to vote yes for it to happen. And then also, even then, I believe if it isn't actually a charter change, at that point, it would still have to go up to the state level and they would have to approve it. So it's not just like anything can happen. There's still some guardrails there. So how many registered voters are there in Burlington? I don't remember the exact number off the top of my head, but I know that the amount that we had to get in order to get this on the ballot, which was 5%, was about 1,863, something like that. But then a bunch of them are gonna be invalid. So you're gonna have to get more than that. So it's really more about like 2,500 you have to get in order for it to really be solidly, you know, go forward. Other questions, concerns? Well, I just wanna say that it's kinda radical in that it goes to the root of decision-making. I do believe, especially with the current configuration of the city council, there is no check and balances there. The mayor could just now have, just pass like whatever agenda he wants. And so this will let us participate. And I do think people have the right to participate in decision that impact our lives. And those that are directly impacted should have more direct say. And that's all of us. I'll just add it's called Proposition Zero because once this gets passed, I mean the seed I wanna plant is like, what's Proposition One? Like what are we gonna do with it? The first thing that Manuski did, they made it so that all legal residents could vote. Thus, you know, and that's what, you know, things we care about. So what do we wanna do once we get it passed, right? Yes. Any other questions? Wonderful, thank you both. Okay, we'll move on to our last ballot question which is approval of our school budget. So we'll have our school commissioners come up and tell us about the school budget. And we have about five minutes for introduction and then five minutes for questions. I would like to frame this that, so for those of you that are totally new, every year the citizens of Burlington vote on the financial, the financial amount that the school is requesting to spend, to educate the youth throughout the city. And that is, I don't know what the exact number is yet. Of course, it has to get approved by city council before it goes on the ballot. And that's happening at the end of January. Jean, do you know when the final approval for ballot items are, or Joe? No, you don't have to, you only have to, oh, I'm wrong, that's happened before. That was just the bond. No, no, no, a bond amount has to be approved. This is just the regular school budget, right? Tell us what it is, okay. So the way that it's broken down this year, so the superintendent has tried to basically establish a baseline, which you might refer to as an equal way to approach funding each school's basic needs, or he's calling it the foundational model. And on top of that, there's something called the rise allocation, which is a monetary amount based on student population as in how many kids, but also there's a weighted per pupil amount that is based on their needs. And because it costs more money to educate different kids with different needs. And one of those is if they're living in poverty, it's more expensive if they are on an independent educational plan. There's a slew more staffing, legal things that need to be put in place in order to educate them. So each of, and the rise allocations are divided, each school gets their own based on their need, based on their amount of kids. And the principals discuss, they get together and they discuss how they wanna allocate these funds. And then they decide, and then each school community decides or gives input to the principal or whoever, I think it's more than just the principal that decide how those funds for each school community are going to be allocated. So it's kinda like city, or it's kinda like state and like city decisions. So it's like the overall and then the local control kind of piece. And that approach has been, that process has been incredibly transparent, not just the process of like how the foundational model but also the rise allocation school communities. Everything has been very out in the open about, though you only see a number on the ballot, there's all of these things that are gonna be done in order to achieve that monetary amount. And we had a recent presentation at the board and there are definitely some cuts that our neighbors are upset about and there's definitely additions. Well, not many, but the conversations are being had, meetings are being made, lots of emails are being sent. And we're hoping to work out some of those kinks. This is definitely a transitional time. Trying to get to this foundational or base model is about planning for the future. We all know the bond is gonna impact our taxes. We all know we're pretty freaked out about how expensive things have gotten in Burlington and we know what's coming down. But we know what's in store for us, not too far off the bond in order to build the high school, it's we're gonna be, we're going to be, that's going to start to impact taxes next year. And it's probably a whole another year before we really know what the weighted pupil statewide legislative decision is gonna do to our educational funding from the state. Which would be a positive, but we don't know how much of a positive. So planning for the future with a lot of uncertainty, but at the same time, trying to think about, it's basically like a three to five year plan. And right now the transitional stuff, I don't think it's as transitional or as slow of a transition as some of our neighbors want it, but hopefully those things are gonna be worked out. I think I would add that the superintendent, Tom Flanagan and the executive director of finance, Nathan Lavery have worked really hard to create a responsible budget and that the percentage increase that we're seeing is both the school annual budget and the cost of the bond. And it's not a very high number when you consider those two things combined. I think they're trying really hard to repeat something that Jeannie said to look at this parity across schools, like the student teacher ratio being the same across schools, special education needs being met across schools and that the distinct personalities of schools would be met by the rise allocation funding, which is a little bit more complicated than that. Like you can't just go in and say, hey, I'm this kind of school, I need this much money, but that's the gist of it. They are trying to respond to what is described as statewide declining enrollment. We have certainly seen some of that at the high school, although I would say that that could also be related to the pandemic and to the shutdown of BHS. So that's probably an anomaly, but they're looking at that too, because that's a reality. What I have concerns about in the budget that they've proposed is the proposed, they call it riffing, reduction in force. The acronym is riffing of teachers, people who are a couple of paraeducator positions who work directly with students and then adding in a couple of instructional coach positions at the high school. Instructional coaches do not work directly with students, they work with teachers or special educators. And I'm struggling with that because I feel like budgets are so lean. We need as many people as we can working directly with students. So that's something that I've shared openly at the January 3rd meeting that we had. If you wanna see the recording of that, you can find it on the website or on YouTube and that we will probably be hashing out again at our January 17th meeting. Great, thank you. We'll open up for questions or comments about the school budget. Steven on Zoom. Steven on Zoom. Yes, let's see the district and the state in that are spending for a non-teaching personnel. It's about $700,000. It doesn't seem to be like students and programs, field trips, these instructional coaches, I won't make it as briefly as I can, these instructional coaches have, again, it's all you said, they have no direct contact with students in our district. They're basically very good teachers who have decided they don't wanna be in the classroom anymore. And they're supposed to be coaching teachers to become better teachers. However, in the 20 years that this has been in fact in the state, at least 10 years in Brunton or 15 years in Brunton, there's no direct evidence whatsoever that shows any kind of correlation between instructional coaches in any district and improved through the performance. But anyway, I will stop there. I want to support this budget. And if people are gonna call me a micro manager and you can call me whatever you want. But I'm talking about a million dollars that can be better spent. I would ask the brothers to approve the budget but first, look at this particular budget item. Look at what we're spending on these non-instructional positions. And I would ask the superintendent and board to review this again and either cut the bottom line by a million dollars or redirect those funds to the rest of the services with the grant visitation. Great, thanks, Steven. In terms of personnel for programming. Thank you. I'll stop there. I will just work again. I was there the last meeting, I'll be there again. This is an issue that you can tell an emotional about. It's a very big waste of educational funds as far as I'm concerned. And then again, I have 15 years of experience. 39 of them in the classroom, in a high school classroom. Thank you. I'm afraid we're at time for this agenda item. So, thank you both very much for your presentation and we'll look forward to it. They can contact us directly. And look on the district website to find more information about the budget. Yeah, great, thanks. Great, we're at our last agenda item which is updates from our state reps and state senators that are able to attend tonight. They're all very busy with the start of the session but thank you for taking the time to join us. So, we have representative Malzany Stanek on Zoom. I see, do we have anyone else, Sam? Okay, great. Well, we'll get started with Malzany Stanek. Thank you for joining us. Any questions? You're in our five-day visit to the park. Great, thank you. Yeah, any questions in the room or on Zoom? Go ahead, Charlie. So again, Charlie G. So, my only question is, which you might find silly, but is anyone in the legislature working on raising the debt limit? What happens to the state of Vermont if the debt limit for the national budget is not increased in July or August or September? So, is there anybody in the legislature that has some kind of a contingency plan because that could be literally the most impactful economic situation in the history of the country? Thank you. And get back to you. What I will say is I believe there's some limitations on what we can do with our own state in terms of taking on debt, I don't know, to counter that, but I can research a little bit, Charlie, and get back to you. But I think there's also pieces that we can be creative about with our own resources in the state. We had the state treasurer in my committee this morning, and we were talking a little bit about the money that the state treasury has and what we can do in some of the local kind of incentive or local investment incentives that is already established under the state treasurer's office. But what you're talking about is way bigger of a scale, so I'll have to just do some research and get back to you on that one. OK, you don't necessarily have to get back to me. I'm just saying that I know that if that limit doesn't get raised, that low-income people in this state are going to be in a lot of trouble. So I just hope that somebody at the state level is working on some kind of a contingency plan for if something happens. Yeah, well, I mean, we'll definitely keep an eye on it. As you probably know, for the state of Vermont, we have more generous calculations based on federal, you know, these federal programs. So we would have to come up with contingency plans, of course, to figure out other ways to fund those programs. I think it's twofold, right, is the funding of those programs, and then it's the ripple effect that that would have on states. So yes, I agree, Charlie. Thank you. Christopher Aaron, I see you have your hand up. Hey, Emma. So I was hoping to talk about kind of a funding issue when it comes to the new high school and high school bond that we just approved for $165 million. This past week, the school district was at council and they talked about how rising interest rates are impacting the future total cost of the development over at Institute Road. As such, they're entertaining the idea of switching from a 20-year repayment plan to a 30, which will be dead before that building's paid off. So I'm kind of curious. The tech center is a regional issue because it helps out many people throughout Chittenden County. Our members of your caucus, both in the House and the Senate, really trying to push funding so that we can alleviate those costs because anything that we can get from everything we can get from the state to defer the cost of this high school and tech center will help try to keep our rent center housing in check. Everything, if it's skyrockets, the rents are going to be, nobody will be able to look here, really. So I'm just wondering, have you had any progress or talks about really pushing for as much as possible for this school? Really good question, Christopher. And sorry about that, I was just going on mute because the baby monitor is still turned on in this room. So I just sent my staffer, my other child to go make them be a little quieter. So thank you for your patience again. Normalize having children and doing this job. So a couple of things, because as you, I think we've talked about before and we've certainly talked about as we try to piece together the funding for Burlington High School and Burlington Technical Center is the fact that the state used to have school construction partnership funding basically, and that's been on hold for over 10 years. And that, first of all, would not only help Burlington, but it would help every single school and every single community because we've now asked them, those schools, all schools in the state to screen for PCBs and other toxins in their schools. So this is gonna be an ongoing issue as the flag starts to raise for toxicities and other buildings. So it's long overdue. I know there was a bill in last biennium. I'm confident there'll be one in again this session to really call that question. It's too much of a burden on any community. The second piece that I'm gonna just raise because we're starting to talk about this in my committee is around technical centers. I actually just came tonight from a listening session at, I believe it's one of BTC site on Cherry Street to really do a study on how we're funding. Well, our technical centers in general and both the program level, what we offer students accessibility, all of that, the actual program itself, but funding it as well because the funding mechanism there also is something we need to look at for making sure we're making the most of those programs, but also looking at the complexities of how we fund regional technical centers, but they're sending schools, et cetera. So I think there's a better solution there, but really to your point about affordability and making sure that how we put the pieces together and make sure the state's a partner, I completely agree and we're gonna continue to look for ways we can really leverage that as the Burlington delegation. And that's not even my caucus. I'm pretty confident I can speak for all 11 state reps for Burlington that this is right on our radar and we're gonna continue to look for ways that we can leverage more resources. Thank you so much, Emma, appreciate it. Yep, thanks. Great, thank you. We are at time, but if there's another burning question, I'll make time for it. Same thing, but instead of funding tech center, what about PCB cleanup? Yeah, so there is an initial fund and don't quote me on the, Jeannie, don't ask me about the amount. It's so at the end of my day, it's not enough is what I will tell you, the amount of money that we established so far and that money generally has been about making sure that testing can be taking place. And so sort of like, we had a little bit of a briefing on this in December and I'm happy to share that recording to folks. The secretary of ANR came to give that part of the briefing to legislators. So it's not enough though. And I think we've just started the first wave of testing in schools. And so we need to be looking for those resources as well. And we're on the cusp of starting to run out of federal resources and allocation of federal resources that have been coming from in the last couple of years. So Vermont's gonna be in this tricky place of trying to really look at what are our priorities? Where do we need to be moving resources and school construction and safe schools should be really high on the list. And we have to think, I think we have to really be thinking creatively around where we're gonna find revenue for that. Because if the federal, the one time money from the federal government is tricky to work with because it's not there forever. And yet we have an ongoing long list of infrastructure needs in our schools. So we need to find more. I'm like looking at myself. So hopefully, Jeannie, that what you're nodding or I don't know what your reaction is, but hopefully that made sense. Jeannie, so thank you. Awesome. I think we'll call it a meeting of that. Thank you very much for making time and joining us. And thank you everyone for sticking to the bitter end. It's great to see everyone. If you have a second to help us clean up, we're gonna be putting the chairs away. So we always appreciate a helping hand, but nice to see everyone.