Great. Well, I am going to call the meeting to order. It is 6.31 p.m. Welcome everybody. I think within seconds every member of the council will be logged in. And so we can get started. A moment about meeting logistics. Anyone who is joining remotely and we welcome remote participation, please change your name display to indicate your first and last name. So we have a record of who is participating. Anyone who is speaking, we would ask you to start by stating your name and where you live. And if you are coming to speak about a particular agenda item, we ask that you address us during that agenda item and limit your comments to three minutes. Councillor Bate will assist us with the timekeeping. Anyone who wishes to speak must be called up. She is holding up the yellow card which is one minute left and red card out of time. Anyone who speaks out of turn or on German main topics will receive assistance to bring, come back into compliance with the rules. And the first item on the agenda is to approve the agenda. Everybody happy with the agenda as proposed? Okay. All those in favor? All right. The agenda is approved. Next item is general business and appearances. This is an opportunity for any member of the public to address the council on any topic which is not on tonight's agenda. And we will take people here in the room and also people on the online. If you are participating remotely, we would ask that you use the remote hand function on your computer because that is the easiest way for us to know that you are asking to be recognized. And I see online Ken Russell already has his hands up. So Ken, I will call on you first and you will have an opportunity to unmute yourself which you may already be. Thank you, Jack. Good evening, everyone. My name is Ken Russell. I live in East Montpelier. I work in Montpelier. I am coming tonight because tomorrow at 4.30 on the state house lawn there will be a vigil for people who have died outdoors in the last year. It is an event being put together by our local used to be called Continuum of Care, our local Washington County homeless housing coalition.  Those of us working in these issues, we experience a steady drum beat of people dying or being ground up by the conditions that they are in. It is a very heartfelt, heart moving event. It is an appropriate thing to do on the longest night of the year and invite you all to come out. It is again 4.30 on the state house lawn. There will be a circle there and if you know anybody that has died in the last year or even within you feel like calling out beyond that, feel free to do that. I will definitely have some people myself and so thank you for all your good work. Thank you. Thanks, Ken. Do I see any other hands online? I don't think so but I'll pause and there are also other scouts in the room who are looking for hands also. Okay, is there anyone in the room who would like to be heard? Come on up. I know, Steve. Hi. Is this picking up okay? Yep. Hi, I'm George Olson. I live on 25 Hubbard Street and I want to speak about the Elks Club property. So in light of the changes by FEMA recently, this might be a good opportunity to review the city's plans for the Elks Club. If I recall correctly, the vote to fund the purchase was a close 50-50, 50-50 vote. We mostly agree that we need housing as soon as possible. I don't believe that the city is known for its ability to develop properties in a timely manner. I don't think that the city should be involved in developing properties as a matter of fact. So a question to consider is, is it time to sell the property to experienced qualified developers who can create the vision that we have in a timely and efficient way? If yes, perhaps we can use the revenue to support flood mitigation downtown. Thank you. Thank you. Steve, come on up. We've got several trip hazards, these cast iron sidewalk grates that get hit by a plow or cracked, even the brand new ones get cracked and left to trap, you know, and public works goes by it every day. They need to be removed and gravel put there to level it to make a simple, you know, hazard innocuous until we can afford new grates, which might be a while. This has been plowing onto the sidewalk on Court Street rather than plowing the snow off of the sidewalk. So I was traveling to the State House today and we got snow piled in the middle of the sidewalk, apparently intended to stay that way. Flood prep, we have LIDAR data for the whole state, very, very accurate three dimensional topography. We could have not set everybody retraumatized so many people by having completed flood maps in our GIS and shown just notified a few parcels that were needed to take extra precautions. You know, we know who they were. They weren't all the whole town didn't need to react this past week. We don't have any method to do that to actually we don't track. We just figured the water's coming and everybody should, you know, I heard from a tenant on Elm Street, Down Street manages those properties. The city was heavily involved in the development of those properties back, as I recall in the 90s. Rent jumping from 700 up to 1200 and being forced to move. You know, I think we need to keep stronger attached accountability to who's managing assets that we help develop. That's an unconscionable rent increase for subsidized housing, which we intended it to do. Transit Center, the silt is still on the high handicap ramps. Down Street's not doing their part in the maintenance. Neither is Green Mountain Transit. And nobody's policing it or enforcing the lease, as I've said before. Now's an opportune time to address the walkway. Let's talk about real world impacts on people every day. The access between and among the Haney lot up to the hotel lot or behind the Christchurch and then up to the bike path. I foyered the plans. I found there was at one point a walkway supposed to attach to that curved wall and it disappeared from the plans and there's no paper trail for who disappeared it or why. But now would be with a new hotel owner, now would be an opportune time to renegotiate expansion of that easement onto their lot to get a curved walkway hugging that round wall accessing those three level lots because walkability in the downtown is one of our primary goals that you've been grounded in. Elks Club, still no shower. COVID outbreak, you were warned about congregate shelters are not a smart thing in an ongoing pandemic and here we did it and we are suffering with it. That was addressed in the Appropriations Committee. They heard from folks about shelters. One of the folks there who has that section in our budget clearly says congregate shelters are not smart. I heard you.  Well, I've got a couple more items.  Well, I've asked for the expended, I last at a prior meeting for how much have we expended so far on the Elks Club and I got no answer. Okay, your time is expired. So you just want to sweep all this under the rug. We'll get you that answer. Okay, is there anyone else in the room who would like to be heard? Come on up. Hi, I think I know all of you here know me, but I'm Dan Toll. I'm a resident of Montpelier and the head of Parker advisors were a process improvement consulting firm focused on ending homelessness and improving dramatically the lives of people of mental health conditions and substance use disorder. I'm here tonight to discuss the unfolding situation relative to the permanent homeless shelter. Right now, there's a confluence of factors that are offering us an opportunity if we act now. And most importantly, there is available there's funding available at the state and federal level, which will either be allocated and or expire during the early part of 2024. In addition, another reason to act now is some of these funding opportunities may require legislative action. So the sooner we get in the queue and get organized for the legislative session, the better. Just to give an example, right now, the governor has proposed allocating funds to set up shelters across the state. And Montpelier is one of the localities that's being considered. But again, the sooner we get organized, the sooner we get our ducks in order, the better. Meanwhile, of course, you know, the primary candidate for this was the rec center, which as you all know on the committee, my partner Paul and I in our report to you in March proposed as being at that time the the best option for the homeless shelter. In addition, there are other other alternatives that are that have surfaced recently, including the Bethany Church is for sale. And of course, many of you probably aware that was used for a number of years as the winter overnight shelter. So there's some experience with that space. So what's the key issue? Money funding. Now I'm aware, Bill, that that your team has raised or at least as close to raising, Bill, 1.5 million, correct? From efficiency, Vermont. Well, we have a grant application in for that amount. Okay. And of that, I understand, either of that or in addition to that, we have to come up with $300,000 of match funding. That's correct. Okay. And there's at least one other grant that your team is working on that I've heard of through the grapevine related to the shelter. Possibly. Yeah, I'm not aware of a specific grant. We've been we've been talking to people who may want to all I guess I was prepared to be questioned during your comments. But let me get my we've applied for a grant for efficiency improvements that would deal with our systems. Electrical heating all that time modernize everything. That's the efficiency Vermont. The council authorized or directed the staff to look at the feasibility of this building being upgraded and used for homeless shelter along with the potential other activities possibly cohabitating with recreation, possibly in housing if required to move. And so we have been talking with shelter providers and their funding sources as to whether they would be able to provide funding to bring it up to a state of art, including the front bathroom section being available to the public. So that's what we have. Thank you. That's all we've talked about a couple of meetings ago. So and that 1.5 is for HVAC and electricity, correct? Yeah, all building systems. I don't have all the details. Yes, yes, all building systems. Sorry, I'm hard of hearing. Yeah. Yeah. So in addition to that 1.5 if that comes through, obviously there'll be additional funding needed. So my proposal to you all is that my firm, Paul Capcara, myself, and we are now part of a consortium of consultants who have a set of expertise, including fundraising, grant writing, both at the local, state and federal level, that you engage us.  I suggest you put this together. It looks like we've already got it in writing. Please get it to us in writing so we can sit down and talk about it. My proposal is that you hire my firm on a contingent. Your time. Can I just finish my sentence? I enforced the time with the previous speaker and I feel I'd need to, in fairness, enforce the time with you also. Okay. But time to act is now, though, team. Got it. So just so you're aware, there's a window of opportunity. We need... He meant to say in unfairness. What? He meant to say in unfairness. Okay. Is there anyone else in the room or online who would like to be heard? Okay. Next item on the agenda is the consent agenda. Is there a motion to approve the consent agenda? All right. Any discussion? All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Thank you. You have approved the consent agenda. Next item, we have the complete appointments to the Complete Streets Committee. And we have some clarification on this topic from the previous meeting. Do you want to...? I think we sent it out to the council. There had been an applicant who had withdrawn, so that's why some people had seen the application because that had been, in fact, happy. But the final version that everybody had was correct. So it looks like we have three applicants, two seeking reappointment, one seeking initial appointment, and four vacancies. You accept the three applicants? Second. Any discussion? All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. So thank you to Matthew Thayer, John Kim, and Nancy Schultz for continuing to be willing to serve. Jack? Yes. I do a little housekeeping. Can we push this back so I can see you? I have the same problem last week. That would be really great. Everybody's in love with me. Thank you. That's enough. Thanks. All right. Next up. Evelyn, are you up for the budget priority survey? Zoom just kicked me out. Let me log back in. All right. I think we are there. So hi, everyone. I am Evelyn Prem, the communications coordinator for the city, and I am presenting the results of the fiscal year 25 budget priorities survey. We just finished on December 13th. So just a quick overview of what we're going to be talking about. So I'm just going to give a very brief overview about the survey, its purposes and goals, some demographic characteristics that we had included in the survey, some advantages and limitations that are inherent in the survey, and then describing how to understand the results for best use, and then run through the questions and the answered results about the survey. So we hosted the survey on our Zen City project platform, the community project portal. We opened it on November 13th of this year, and it closed December 13th, so it was opened for just over a month. So the Zen City project platform has a lot of options for us. It's one of the main reasons that why we decided to move forward with that is because we could host these more complex survey questions, or survey styles, and have a lot of different options built in. So one of the security features that it had is for survey validity. We were able to enable basically to discourage people from taking it for multiple responses. So for instance, anyone could log in to take the survey, and they were not asked to provide any sort of verification on who they were, but it collected a digital fingerprint, so it would know if that device were to take the survey again. So it's a pretty low barrier way to increase some validity there. We received just over 646 completed submissions, and I put a little asterisk on that because one of the options that we did not do was to require everyone to answer every survey. We probably all have taken a survey in the past and then go to submit it, and then it says it can't submit because you didn't complete them all. And for me, that's kind of frustrating because then I have to scroll back and forth and find the one that I didn't click on. So we wanted, again, this to be open-ended and allow people to not force an opinion onto any option if they chose not to. So for instance, if I just wanted to answer the first 10 questions and then skip the last two, that was an option that people could have. And so another really great feature about the survey is we're able to see on the answers of every survey or every question how many people completed that answer. So it gives us a really good cross-section of the sample size that answered the specific questions. And all of that is included. It's not listed in here in this presentation just for to save space, but if you access the digital report that's published on our Zen City platform, it's also published on our website, you can see the breakdown of all that data right there. And I did print out a few extra copies if anybody wants a paper copy of that too. So it's up here on this desk. So the purpose and goals of the survey, so as a leadership team, we sat down and really talked about how we wanted to bring people into this budget process. As everybody knows, this is probably the most challenging year we've had so far. And even in the year and a half that I've been here, I can see how much of a challenge this has been to folks that have been here much longer than I. So we really wanted to make the community part of that process. So we started basically asking the same questions that we all asked ourselves. Where can we focus our limited resources to maximize the gains? And so engaging people in the process was our number one priority for why we chose to do the survey in the first place. And then the second is obviously to learn about community members' expressed priorities to help you all in your decision making process to understand a better cross-section of what people are feeling in the moment. And then also there's some limitations to that as well that I'll get to in the next slide. So some demographic questions that we asked. So one of them was that we asked if people owned or rented their home and we had the option of people could choose another option or prefer not to answer. So 86 percent, just over 86 percent of the respondents to this survey reported that they owned their own home. And this is quite different than the actual population of Montpelier. So that is one of the biggest limitations of this survey is that we saw just a lot more homeowners answer this than renters. And in the description of the limitations in the report that I passed around, I go into detail on to why that is and how to account for that as we're interpreting the results. And another question that we asked is which age bracket represents you best. And so you can see here that the majority of folks that took the survey were between the ages of 65 and 74 with a pretty decent third and fourth ranking of the 45, 54 age group and 35, 44. So overall a fairly even split except in the 18 to 24 and 25 to 34 were slightly underrepresented as well. Excuse me. Before we get past that, do you know, did you do a cross check with the census data to see how close this is to our population? I did not, but I can definitely do that and then do a comparison for sure. Because that would be kind of interesting, I think. Absolutely. We have some of that data in the report we got about the rec center. So we can put those two together. Definitely. No, that's a really good point. Also too, go ahead. Tell us what the percentage is. It's under 25. Is that 15, 20? Yeah. So the green one there looks, I would say that's about 20%. And so the other ones would be about 18 and 19, 17, 18ish. Yeah. Again, if you access this online, if you hover your cursor over it, it gives you the exact amount. So it's pretty nice. Yeah. Sorry. Where is this online? So if you go to our homepage, right underneath there's the flood information. Right underneath the budget, it's the community project portal. And if you go in there, you'll see all the tiles of the different projects that we have. And it's under the FY 25 budget tile. It's in the engagement. I went to the annual budget and I got sent to this agenda in order to get this part of your survey. And then on the same homepage on the far right under the budget was FY budget, but wasn't the actual. Yes. So the survey is within that. It's like a nesting doll. What's that?  Yeah, I'm on the. Are you on the homepage? Project portal. Okay. FY 25 budget. Yep, scroll into there. So scroll down. You should see the engagements. Engagements? Yeah. Look on the portal on the FY 25 budget link. Yeah. Yeah, it's right here. She's there. Yeah. What, I don't see engagements. I don't know what you mean by engagements. I don't see that word anywhere here. Okay. Well, I can, I'd be happy to do a tutorial after I've done this. There are probably people who are watching this. But I do think people want to have access to this information. Definitely. And also too, I didn't mention this as I was going to mention at the end. So the other huge half of this survey is we had an open ended question where we asked people to share their thoughts on anything they wanted to, basically. And we got, I have 29 pages printed out of thoughts. So there's going to be a lot of data analysis that I'm going to be doing over the next couple of weeks just to process all of that. And so with that will come a second installment of this, the report basically. And then that I'll absolutely make sure that that's featured front and center when I have the whole thing packaged up. Packaged up. Any other questions before I move on? All right. So again, mentioning the advantage and limitations. So you also, you may notice in the, just I chose to feature a lot of infrastructure photos because that has been the by far the most advocated for thing in this budget and all the different avenues that people have been able to share their thoughts with us. So I just wanted to mention that. So some of the advantages to this survey, it was available both in paper and online. So you could take it online or you could stop by here at the senior center or at city hall and take the survey right there, pen to paper. So we made it as accessible as possible. It also, we use multiple metrics for interpretation. So again, there's a lots of different, if either of you had taken the survey, you'll see there's lots of different styles of questions. And so we really wanted to, again, to make that as dynamic as possible to get the answers that are going to be the most helpful to you all. And also to increase public knowledge in the budget process. As I mentioned in the beginning, one of the biggest reasons that we chose to do the survey is to just, to bring people into this process, to see the types of decisions that you all are making and we all are making and to really use that as an opportunity to increase our community's knowledge just on how their tax dollars are spent and decided on. And then again, an opportunity for dialogue. So the survey, I talk about this a lot too in other, in other areas, but my position specifically, my position, I really focus on two-way communication. So it is not just, you know, we're asking a question, you give an answer and it's a done deal. This is the beginning of a conversation. So I encourage in follow-up and whenever people had questions about the survey to, you know, to reach out to their counselor or to reach out to us. And if they had something that they'd like to share that didn't fit into either of the brackets to tell us. So that was just one of the the thoughts going forward into this that we really emphasized. And then so again, some limitations. Obviously, no survey is perfect. Again, we saw how the demographics don't exactly line up with our population. So just taking that into consideration when you're understanding the results. That said, it's skewed more towards homeowners and distribution was limited due to the flood. So one of the ways that we had advertised the survey is on public bulletin boards around town. And as you know, we lost a lot of those during the flood. So a lot of coffee shops that used to have bulletin boards no longer do or some coffee shops aren't even open that don't. So that is also a limitation as well. And then also, as I mentioned earlier, incomplete responses. So because we allowed people not to, we didn't require people to answer every single question, not everybody did. So for instance, the first question we had almost 700 people answer it and the last couple just over 300 people answered it. So again, just thinking about that when you're looking at the at the answers and making drawing conclusions from them. So how to understand the results. So just as I mentioned, so one of the good best practices of survey understanding survey results is rather than saying, you know, 45% of Montpelier residents rated infrastructure as the most important city priority, emphasizing that the number of the survey responses or respond respondents that rated that. So again, just some nuance in just when we're making drawing conclusions from their results. And so why is that for all the reasons in our limitations? And then so also just notes to remember this is one of them, the survey is one of the many tools that city staff are using to inform the budget process. So we are not just taking the answers of the survey. And that's our only consideration. Obviously, there's way more that goes into this process than just a survey. But we wanted to emphasize that this complements all the decisions that the city leaders are making. And now we also wanted to balance the express preferences with what's actually possible. Obviously people may have really strong feelings that, you know, for one option, but it just might not be a possibility for one reason or another. So just taking that into consideration as well. And as I mentioned before, the survey is the beginning of a conversation. So the end onto the questions. Now we're actually at the survey. So the first question we asked people to rank on a matrix their preference for their first through 12th priority, based on all these different categories. So the way that you understand this question is so this is a table. So the higher you go, the closer you get to 100%. And then it's a little difficult to see here, but the colors represent different different departments, summer projects, but the sort of the big ticket items in the budget. And so the best way to understand this is if you take column one, and you see that big brown chunk, you look for what's the largest. That's the public works, operations, plowing, paving, and street maintenance right at the top of that graph. So if you're looking at that, it looks like just about just over 45% of respondents ranked that as their top priority. And then so you can go all the way down and look at the different colors and see which one is the biggest. And again, if you're online and you're hovering over, you can see how the exact percentages of each of these. But you can see the trends. So if you're looking from left to right, you can see how the colors sort of even out on a downward slope. So that actually tells me that most of the people tend to agree on a lot of these things, just based on the way that people have ranked them. So the top three were public works, basically public works at the top two. We broke it into operations and projects. And then third was public safety, fire and EMS. And a very close second was public safety, police and dispatch. So the next question we had, we asked people to how they would address the current city budget. And we had four options there. And the pretty much just about two thirds, so a third for each ranked as cutting city spending by cutting programs and services and raising taxes and revenues and cutting programs at the same time. So another interesting breakdown there. Another top three. So this one, we asked if they had chose to cut city spending and programs, where should the city make those cuts? So basically really asking people to prioritize based on a limited number of resources here. So again, the top three, where they would make cuts based on the list that we had here were the top two were basically some net zero activities and indoor recreation. Are amounts associated with these choices in the survey? There were not. But all these items came from the last, some of you would remember the city projects presentation that I gave about six, seven months ago now. And so all of those projects were listed as either they were a project that's currently in the works or is being considered by a committee or a city group. So that's where those categories came from. Thanks. Yeah. And then in the following set of questions, we asked people to rank, to increase, decrease or maintain the current funding for each project or department on the list. So for the public restroom, 42 percent reported to maintain it. And that is the trend going pretty much consistently throughout is maintaining funding just to spoiler alert. But you then hear this one, you can see in the total number of responses there down the bottom, bottom right 650 people responded to this question. And then you can see in the breakdown of how many either increase, maintain or decrease. And then the homelessness facility, people also at 37 percent voted to maintain that as well. And you can see slightly less answered that question that was 647 people. And then so for street maintenance, over 50 percent chose to maintain it. In the senior activity center, over 55, almost 56 percent voted to chose to maintain it as well. And then for the recreation and new community center, 59 percent chose to decrease funding for that one. And again, you can see the total number of responses slightly dropping off there at 636, the further we go down. Capital improvement projects, 53 percent responded to increase spending in that one with 42 percent maintaining it. And then for parks, 59 almost 60 percent again maintaining and 35 percent decreasing it. For public safety police dispatch, 61 percent responded to maintain. And again, you can see the numbers there dropping off quite a bit at only 362 total responses. And then for the last one, public safety fire and EMS, 69 percent choosing to maintain there. So that is a really quick run through of those survey results. Like I said, I have 29 pages of answers to analyze, which then I'll be coming back with a more polished document to explain and code some of those answers to hopefully pull again some bigger themes from those answers. And so for people to learn more, so I will double check and make sure that it is there's a quick button to get to it on the homepage, but you should be able to go to the community project portal on the homepage, look for the FY 2025 budget tile. And then also we'll be following up with the budget YouTube videos. We did the administration budget today, so you can look for that. I'm hoping to have it done editing by tomorrow, so it should be up there by the end of the week, if not tomorrow or if not sooner. And then absolutely everything is linked to our website somewhere. And if you can't find it, please reach out to me, ePrim at Montpelier-VT.org, or you can come come find me in City Hall. Thanks, Evelyn. This is super interesting. Questions? Go ahead, Carrie. Thank you so much. This is really helpful. I'm really curious about the exact numbers on some of these things, so I'm looking forward to being able to find on the website, which I cannot do right now. But I'm wondering if you do you have the detailed information with you right now? Of all the responses? Yes, I do. Could you, would you mind just giving us on the priorities and values where people kind of ranked their one through 12 priorities? Would you mind just kind of reading the one, two, and three priorities? Because I can't really tell by the colors all the different things. But all of them, I want to know how many people said public works and how many people said parks and all that. Let me let me pull it up online. My computer will cooperate. So 294 respondents ranked their number one priority as public works operations, and that's 43%. And what were the other number ones? The other number ones were, so public works improvement, so the capital improvement projects, that one is 18%, 18% of the number one responses. So it gets a little screwed when you try to understand. And then, let's see, 14% fire an EMS. And what were the other ones? For number two choice? Or for number one, no, whatever. So then just going down the list. Could you easily share your screen so people can see what that's going to look like? Or if you email it, I can just read it. I don't need to take everyone's time to see it, I just want to be able to see it. It's actually, it's the way it's showing me, it's very, very tiny, so I don't think showing my screen is going to make that much better. But when I get back to my office, I can take a screenshot and yes, and blow it up. So then, so that was their choice. Fourth place, police at 9%, housing at 8%, parks at 2%, EMSAC at 2%, and then everything else is one or less than 1% of one of the first percent. Okay, so that's enough, that's fine. I appreciate that, that's helpful. Yeah, no, there's a lot of data. And that's again, what's one of the kind of the beauties of this data, this platform is there is a lot of data. It's just taking the time to package it and put it into a way that's understandable to everybody. Likewise, like one on the page of the public restrooms and homeless facility, the increase was 213 and maintained was 277. That's a huge amount that says what we need to do as well as the homeless facility. It's the same thing, they're both almost within a third of people who voted. That's huge. That's, and that's a really good point of another really good way to understand the results. So when we get back more from you, is it going to have some of that perception, not just what's top, because top doesn't tell the real whole picture? Correct, yes. So thank you for the presentation and your hard work. My question is, did we ask participants if they have seen the budget presentation or the numbers? We did not ask that. That's a really good, that's a good question to ask. Yeah, they would have, because this was in advance of presenting the budget. And that was my point, because I took the survey before seeing the budget numbers and now the survey makes different thing to me. So I think this survey is good to understand general perspective of residents, what they think about items, but this one doesn't have the FY25 budget for me. So maybe next time we can switch the places that we can talk about the numbers first and do the survey or we can put, I don't know, a link before the survey and everybody should see the numbers, because when they talk about cuts, they don't know how many dollars or when they say increase, at least as a survey taker, I didn't know that what is the percentage in budget, what is the number, can we do this or not. So I think it will be better if people see the numbers first, then answer the questions. And it's exactly something we talked about doing as well. We ended up deciding to go with it before just to kind of get that snapshot in time pulse of what the community is thinking. And we also talked about doing a follow-up survey. So now that we do have numbers, we have the capacity to put together another survey based on what we're actually dealing with. So yeah, really good question. Yeah. I just want to weigh in on that a little bit too. As Evelyn said at the beginning of the presentation, this is one part of the decision-making processes, the be all and end all. This was a follow-up to the community survey we did last year, which we presented the results. We had a sense of what was important to the community then. And it was also in response to a request from the council to try to get some early information before we started the budget process. So to get, to be informed of what the public was thinking as you make decisions. So this is, you know, the general public is probably not going to have the same level of detail as far as budget lines, but they know what they like and they don't like and what they want to see more of and less of. And I think that was the point we used. We didn't have the final results because it was still open, but we used the results we had in trying to at least understand as we made our own budget decisions and presentations. For example, the capital plan fully funded and cuts in REC and those kind of things, reflecting the priorities here. But, you know, in the end of the day, now we have a full public process where we provide public information is what's in the budget, all that's online, all that's available. And public hearing process and of course a vote. The biggest survey of all is the first Tuesday in March when people get to say how they feel about all of it. So. Anybody else have any questions or comments about this before we move on? Thanks, everyone. I think this is a really powerful tool and we should think about whether we want to do this, whether we want to cultivate an understanding amongst the community of how important and powerful this could be. If we do it twice a year, you know, or do it and break it into subsections and do it more frequently and hold little workshops in senior center, different constituencies to teach them how to do it online so that we get maximum engagement because this is the way you can drive zero-based budgeting. This is the way to really get a pulse on what priorities are and they will shift frequently based on emergencies. So I think we found a good tool to use but we have only begun to scratch the surface of the potential of engagement and frequency to drive decision making. Yeah, George. So I'd like to amplify what Steve said. I like his point. I also agree with Pail and I think that we need to start the budget process a little earlier. I think the car is before the horse. This is a little bit late now and I think if you're going to do an FY 25 you need to be starting at a zero-based budget and have the discussion earlier about what the budget is going to be in that process and then the surveys can come later because now you've got low information voters out there and you need to have people informed. I really feel like we need to switch the way you set up the budget process. Thanks. Just to that point I would add we did have a budget discussion in October where we went through preliminaries, asked council for guidance and public input and at that point is when they said we would like to see if we can get some more public input in advance of our budget process which launched this survey and then also been doing work on setting priorities and getting that out and we obviously everything is runs off the March Town Meeting date and we don't have a lot of information about state funding and those kind of things until it always is going to change. So the budget process when it is is but getting public input on it all year round is really important. One of the reasons why we wanted to go to this so we can continually survey people on priorities and on yeah there's only so early we can start it because fiscal year starts July 1st. We started too far too early we and in fact I think I think some of us were busy with other things in July and August but in September but but start too early people aren't we don't have that much data about what's happened in the current budget year. But it's not a survey that starts that it's your budget process that you started. Right. You can start that budget process early the earlier than October I'm saying that's what my point is. Okay. You can start that process early to get those data information to the public school. Okay. Any other council members have any comments or questions before we move on to the to the main act? All right. We are moving on to if I may Mr. Mayor between between budget I have between agenda items just response to an earlier question. The city has spent spent three million dollars on the purchase of the property at the Elks Club spent 161 thousand dollars in development costs that included the entire public process and the the master plans that were created and approved. We also have operating costs and revenues lease etc so I don't have the detail on those but we've netted about 2400 to the positive so we've taken more in than spent on that but that was as of the end of September and then we had some FEMA related costs that are in the FEMA reimbursement fund. Great. The expenditures on that site. Thanks. All right. Now we're up to item 8 which is the fiscal 2025 budget and where we are right now is where we ask the the city administration to please basically develop a budget that that has a target of the rate of inflation and there's a number of ways we can approach it from this point and one of the things we can do is we can just go through and add some track things and see what where we come out but I'd be interested in seeing if now now the we've had a chance to digest the budget a little bit if what kind of target do we have in mind are people happy with the target of maintaining taxes at the rate of inflation are people interested in going lower than that are people interested in being at being higher because they think our priorities or our needs are are greater than that and so I'd like to like it if we can at least have that discussion I don't know if we're going to come to agreement on that Tim. Yeah Jack maybe for process because we listened a lot we listened to Bill's presentation and to folks certainly since the last meeting there's been a lot of comments but I love to hear what city council members are thinking in the process we just kind of go around the table and get impressions before we dive into choosing a percentage increase well sure that's kind of what I felt we were doing but but yeah uh-huh yeah no so do you want to start by saying what your process is you want me to start I well okay I don't want to put you on the spot if you're I'm glad to I think um looking at this trying to figure out how to get it to be a discussion about um the process I mean I know there's been a process that's been in place that's worked in the past but I'm not sure it feels like it's working to me um I think our priorities which this survey just emphasized are the key areas our primary mission is you know police and fire you know ambulance public works and those are our primary mission and then it feels like the other departments and things we do are kind of extracurricular secondary you know rec parks senior center and social justice so it feels a little to me like the old classic mild wide and an HD you know we're just like cutting a little from everything and not necessarily looking is are we doing it right and as I listened last time especially the one on the fire department presentation really got me and so I'd like to know more about basically the primary mission items first and we should look at those departments and determine are we doing this right you know why why are we looking at a 1.2 to 1.5 million dollar piece of equipment coming up that we've known was coming up for 25 years but we have no reserves we lost another fire truck in a tragic fire recently haven't heard anything about it other than a brief mention from the fire chief at the last meeting that we're waiting for insurance on what we lost for equipment on it because there's really been nothing about the truck it makes me wonder do we really need it you know you look at cutting staff and the way this is working is we're this proposal for the budget would be cutting people that aren't working for us right now it's open positions right so it would be like not we're taking somebody at the service end of the ladder but then if we don't hire them we're going to be paying overtime to people that are further up the ladder it's I just would like to know more about the whole overtime things it sounds like you know for cutting someone at this level and we're paying two or three times that to fill overtime that just doesn't feel like a good move maybe we're not doing that but it seems like so that that was one example but I feel like we also need to look at police public works feels like we're always behind the eight ball and I'd rather invest in those key areas of service that we're supposed to be providing and then the other things we do are good things but if we have to look at adjustments maybe they need to be in those areas so that's my first impression of having kind of listened through and trying to piece this together on my first city council budget when you talk about public works you're encompassing capital within that absolutely water lines sewer line streets yes I guess I agree with a lot of that I mean one of the things that jumped out at me is that the I mean the open positions are easy to easy to to cut but they I think we can be more strategic about I mean they're fundamental services that the city provides right I mean the infrastructure police fire EMS and we're we're not we're leaving those positions short-handed and we're we're adding overtime almost $280,000 in overtime so it it doesn't seem to be as strategic as it as it can be it seems like it it gets us to a number but I'm not sure it gets us there in an ideal way okay so one of the things that really struck me about the survey results that we just got that lines up with what I've definitely been hearing from people contacting me is people don't want to see cuts to public works they don't want to see cuts to public safety and so I and I and I agree that those are core services of the city provides so so I'm uncomfortable with staff cuts to those departments I would prefer to if we need to make cuts that we find them somewhere else I'm also I'll just let you all know that I'm I'm not going to be opposed to a higher tax increase than it's in the current budget proposal I'm not necessarily saying I'm going to argue for that just I'm open to that because I think preserving our ability to provide these core services is it's it's what we're here for it's the whole point of city government so I would like to look at I have a zillion notes here in this giant book many of which are probably just not necessarily going to have a huge impact but I think we should talk about some of those little things that we can save like for instance the city council budget is up like 10% or something like that and I think in a year when we're trying to to to restrain ourselves it's not a lot of money that the city council budget includes but we should try to find ways to cut that and and then if we have to anyway so I guess we'll stop there but just say that I want to try to preserve those public works and public safety and capital improvement okay investments thanks Donna do you have a sure I likewise don't have a percentage in mind and but I and I agree with the the core services however I have the advantage of having spent a lot of time hearing from all the departments and I feel even with those recordings it's not perhaps not the same I really feel for members who've come on the last two years and between the pandemic and the flood we haven't had that indulgence because I have such a solid respect and understanding of how those departments run that I don't need to disassemble them and if they say they can do without a position I trust their judgment likewise over time is an issue I brought it up I think for anybody else but by the same token I know that $280,000 is what one or two positions with all the benefits so sometimes over time is a cheaper way but I do also feel like those are not our only core I do think the rec department and the parks there's a balance there because they're a part of our quality of life and for young people and younger adults the survey strikes me of just how many are over 35 40 over 50 and likewise the senior centers are in there they don't want to be forgotten so I I'm not opposed to making some severe cuts but I don't feel just supporting public works Lauren so I mean just higher level to start I mean I I think I'm more like Carrie and Donna I don't have a percent in mind I just I know we're all wrestling with this tension of how do we provide the best services and keep taxes reasonable for people and so I don't know what that number is but I would be comfortable potentially with a little more if it's going to provide the kinds of services that the community needs right now what I'm concerned about is decisions that might be pennywise and pound foolish things that are in a few years even going to cost us more or if it's cutting staff positions that cost more in overtime or things like that so I think that kind of analysis of you know what are the cuts we're making things that are not going to end up setting us back or projects that are going to cost double in five years and that kind of thing that seemed like not great decisions to make a few I was just scanning before this meeting for just the the community impact input that I'm sure we've all been getting lots of emails and it's just another data point in addition to the survey which is great so like the things that you know fire and police there were some great stories and things of just how critical for people's lives and safety and and some great I think stories and just sharing how valuable those services are for folks roads of course definitely heard from a number of people saying holding off on a new rec center given the budget pressures in this immediate fiscal year a lot of people supporting the bridge as a communication tool so those are just some of the the things that I saw from community outreach in the last couple weeks I mean for the staffing I mean I really agree with what Kerry had said I mean we had done for the police review committee a really detailed analysis of staffing levels and this was a group that I would say a number of folks came into that thinking we're probably over staffed in our police department and we probably have room to cut that's a big part of our budget and this seems outsized and we did a really deep analysis of looking at that budget staffing levels how do you maintain basically like really just basic number of people on staff for all the hours of the day that we need and they were like the number that we have is the right number and so to me cutting that seems problematic like I again it's convenient to say you know people who aren't there right now but it it seems like the kind of thing where that's like where we've landed I think is a good number of staffing so I would like to see that restored if we are able to I haven't seen the same analysis for the fire department DPW I know a couple years ago we talked about last time we cut staff and then we had to bring people back because it was not providing services and we see in all these survey surveys and so many conversations that public works is where people want us to be focusing even more time so cutting staff there seems tricky so you know and and then if you try to put those numbers in it's it's hard to do that so I recognize this this big tension that we have I think you know one idea I was thinking about that I was just kind of brainstorming last week but I could see us putting in some pot of money for our committee city committees that are basically zeroed out across the board that is smaller than the collective of what we normally put in but that would allow projects to go forward I think there's you know in any given year opportunities grant programs and things where you do need a little city match a little city contribution in order to access much bigger money that could benefit the community and allow these committees to continue doing work so I might put a little more thought into what that might look like and come forward with an idea so just just naming that I know my ride is zeroed out zeroed out I want to talk to Senator Perchlich on the transportation committee and see if there's possibility for this state to subsidize that this year given our budget crunch you know other things like lobbying I understand cutting that and it's a year where we need state money more than ever so you know I mean I'll commit with and then maybe Bill and Jack will but they're working on their fiscal year 25 budget too so it's the same we would have the person for this legislative session oh we paid for that in this oh good okay that gives me that gives me some comfort I was just going to say that like I do feel like Jack and you and I'm happy to do it too and carries there all the time like committing to being up there a lot this year because I think we need it that's good that's good we do do like we need them to really support us so um so anyway I I I know that what I've just said adds up to adding a lot more into the budget so I'm interested in looking at are there other places to to potentially um cut to keep taxes reasonable um and you know it's just this again just back to like this really challenging moment we're in of how do we provide services that we want and keep taxes as a reasonable rate for our community I forgot my ride I'm so glad you brought it up because it is unfair to cut that we spend millions on the roads and the only thing that gives a lot of our residents access to those roads is public transportation and I think my ride is very important and so I wouldn't like to see that cut thank you for bringing that up so I agree most of the things other city councillors mentioned and I know that having important all our city initiatives to make Montpelier what it is but after the flood and also before that COVID things have changed so we have so many cores but some core services are more important than others that's why I really want to see no cut in public safety I'm in police fire and also um public works if there is no public safety then we cannot talk about other things right so we need to have a safe town to build other things on top of it I think as a city and city council we need to find other items to cut if we need a cut and for tax increase again I think we should ask residents how much increase they can pay like can they pay 5% increase they can pay 10% percent and there's the question it shows the reality right some people said increase the tax also make the cut so they are ready to commit right the city's vision but also they need to see some cuts so there will be a balance and since Lauren mentioned bridge it is another thing I know that Time Argos is asking for less money but if we think the how much bridge reaches out to residents Montpelier residents I think it is more important to use that specific budget really to inform our residents so we should consider that item too but again everything we do I believe that we should do but at least for next three years we have to choose what are the most important services for us and our main services as a city is the public safety fire and public works okay thanks I thought this was a very interesting survey survey results were great you know for for as long as I've been on the council and and even before what what I've said a lot is you know people in Montpelier really value the services they get from their city government and that's reflected in the fact that year after year they come out and they support the budget but it's also just demonstrated by the fact that what all of us find when we when we talk to our neighbors and if we look at this survey what I was struck by is that there is very you know people said well a good chunk of people said raise revenue by raising taxes and cutting services and a good charge chunk said cut services and programs but on the other then we look at well what do people want to do with our services and right down the line it's pretty much maintain them or increase them and and I think that people are telling us they want the services that the the city is giving them and we don't do any we don't provide any services the city doesn't do anything without getting money from the taxpayers and and spending that money on those services so it's when we're we're faced with the two questions of one how much money should we be spending and two what should we be spending it on well I mean people are mostly telling us keep spending the money on the things we're spending it on and there are probably some adjustments to be made there but I think it's very clear from the emails we're getting you know we we hear way more about about public works than anything else you know we got a big outcry about the about the bridge but over the course of the you know that's and I don't discount that just because a lot of people came out to say that that's that's valid expression of people's wishes but over the course of the whole year we all know we hear about the public works and the roads and and that's a very very important factor and and the idea of not not maintaining or increasing that is really hard to picture in we've had years in the past where part of the budget process has been to get department heads in to talk to us about here here's what we what we want and here's the here's how we arrived at these at these proposals and we didn't set that up to to happen tonight but we could certainly bring the department heads in to to do that at our next meeting if people are interested in hearing that because some of us have been on the council for a long time heard that more than once some of you who have not been on the council haven't haven't had that had the benefit of that that kind of presentation and I think there's a real value to that so I'd like to just get a thumbs up kind of thing is that something you'd be interested in having having us do at our next meeting having the department heads you know come in and say here's our needs and here's what is how we arrived at that I remember there were videos last year and there are videos being prepared is that what those videos are doing so yes and I think I'm not trying to sway you one way the other but just historic perspective so what's typically happened is at least in the larger well we've sometimes had everybody but certainly with the larger departments is your opportunity to ask the kind of questions so you can see the video and just say you know here's how many people we have here's what's up here's what's down here's where our needs are but then it's a chance to ask you know can you get you know what does this mean what's the impact so if you want to have all or some of the folks in to talk about the impact of these presentations it you know it has been a good opportunity it's been a number of years since it's been done so the questions that people have raised like well if we cut what does that do to overtime and and how do you manage overtime in light of reduced staffing that kind of question have a conversation with the people who are actually going to have to manage that okay Carrie and then Ellen so I think there might be some departments that I might have benefit from being able to ask those questions you not all of them I don't I don't I would rather not take the time to have every single department make a presentation to us and hear about it I think that with the videos and the information in here there's a lot of information in here very detailed I do have some specific questions I imagine that Bill can probably answer most of my questions but also things like overtime I mean I did a little bit of the math in there and so you can you can do that math if you want to and you can see where cutting a position saves this much money and adds this much in overtime and I kind of trust that they've done that math but if we have specific questions it'd be great to hear those answers so I'm wondering about the idea that public public works might say we can do without somebody and I don't I don't know that that's the message that we've gotten I think we've gotten from the city staff overall here's something we've worked out that we can all live with not public works to saying we don't really need that person yeah so I just want to be really clear about that palin and then Tim yeah I would just say that maybe paperwork just like an executive summary from each department if we are talking about this then if we need to ask questions we can have them instead of having all the presentation I think we need to hear more from public during I know we have two specific public hearings but let's use that time to discuss us discussing things so if we want to hear from departments my suggestion would be like a executive summary paperwork or document then if we want to ask specific department's questions then we can invite them that's kind of what we have in our book yeah that's what yeah but but still there are there are big departments some of the big departments where where a lot of money is they those might we might want to have those department heads coming in I don't know Tim yeah I guess there's something how to get to the questions I mean this is kind of layered and nuanced and I think for us to understand it and people have elected us to do that I think we need to get our arms around this and our minds around this before just opening it up because it's I don't think questions like trying to determine and I don't know but I so I think if I heard from departments I would want to start with you know police fire public works and just get a sense of questions like administratively are we a little heavy you know in places I mean because it happens I mean we have senior departments and people have been in a long time and it can get out of balance and it's like how do we discuss that and assess it and understand that we have people at all the right levels to make this work correctly I don't think it's necessarily a group decision coming up from the departments when you get to that level so I think those are really kind of pieces we need to find a way to get to to really have a good discussion and understand the budgets and then and also we've really got to look at our capital budgets and in terms of you know water lines and sewer lines but also purchasing equipment because we're we just somehow falling behind the A fall in that in a big way both in fire for sure and in public works I'm not sure I'm fully spent we can look at that but I think we need to have those worked out before we open to the next level of departments that's my preference I just sort of want to remind everybody that this budget was this 3.1 that we were at came from a reduction that came from all the department heads through city manager and and so that were that was like an eight if we didn't do these cuts where was the percentage at almost 13 almost 13 13 percent okay so business as usual would have been 13 percent we're now here at 3.1 so I just I just okay I just I just want to remind us where the numbers came from that we have in the book started there worked out and took maybe small stuff but it was significant in the bottom line and the other aspect is that there's a lot of like public opinion right now on the bridge part of me wants to say we can't afford multi newspapers in a time when newspapers are failing we all need to support Times Argus the regional paper it's a time for us to be a regional focus and that maybe we can encourage the good writing that's happening in the bridge go to the Times Argus at the time the Argus we have to have it for ads we have to put public notices and something that publishes on a regular basis so we need that paper and it's the one that's committed to getting people out there to do articles and pictures for schools and lots of events and so I know that's very unpopular to say but that's the kind of response I have is okay we got 12 letters or emails from people supporting the bridge that's very good but to me that's not the whole pause of the community not only that it's not necessarily good business to to do that and I think that's true for some of the other decisions we have to make back to bigger budget issues so I think the piece of the percentage is interesting because it's easy to throw those percentage numbers around last year was an eight and a half percent budget for our properties resulted in roughly a 17.9 percent increase so the numbers you throw out at the table if people think they're getting a 3.2 percent increase it's not necessarily that and we also don't have any handle on the school side of this so when the taxpayers are paying their taxes they get a bill and it's the city and the schools and we have to be cognizant of that it's going to be a bad year for the schools based on education and there are other budget items yeah right so yeah throwing out 3.2 it probably isn't 3.2 percent and we shouldn't create that illusion for people because you know right now we everybody also wants affordability that was the biggest word I heard in in March on the election piece and you know you can't have everything and just keep piling it on and have affordability I mean just the increase in property taxes on one property we've got necessitates and I didn't do it at least a $60 a month increase in their rent just for the property taxes that doesn't include the increases in insurance and fuel or anything else or it floods the hips where you know we are really causing or charged with trying to not cause things to be worse for people and and I just think throwing a number like 3.2 out and creating any illusion that that's what people's taxes it's wrong the comparison where the numbers were what has been cut so far guys all I was trying to do with what this budget this budget is not without its cuts that's all I was trying to make too but it's just a baseline yes because there's so many things on the ballot it's way out of our control but we should be clear and what we're talking about is an increase in the tax rate of 3.2 percent and obviously of of all the people in the city all the property owners in the city went through the reassessment process this year a bunch of people their valuation went up to the point where they had an increase in taxes a bunch of other people and we're not we're not hearing complaints from them but a bunch of and and we have not seen those people come to the board of civil authority of course because a bunch of other people their valuation went up but but not as much and their taxes might have even gone down or not up very much and so it's it's the grand list as a whole and the property as a whole that that we're talking about here but obviously it hits someone who already who just had a big increase in their uh evaluation it's going to hit them harder there's no question about that bill that's a perfect time we do have a couple updates we wanted to provide you is in uh it's not probably not going to help your uh decision making any but uh we sarah I want to have sarah just give you we have some updated information since we last met we now know the amount of the library petition because it's been received and she's got a calculation of the impact of the decisions the board of civil authority has made to date uh and so what that affects the budget so just so to make a bad situation worse um but we throw that in there and then I've got a couple of the comments in general not to argue for anything okay um so I from the assessor got the board of civil authority reductions so far they're approximately 7.5 million dollars shaved off of that grand list so what that equates to is instead of a 3.2 percent tax increase it would be a 3.79 percent tax increase which is roughly if you were to try to trim that down that's about 67 thousand dollars that would have to come off to get to the 3.2 percent tax increase based on the revenue increase um that doesn't account for any abatements any flood loss or any new builds so those are potential increases or reductions to the list and it also doesn't account for um the big national life question about whether they will get reduced down to what they're asking and if they do get reduced down another 18.7 million um that would equate to a 5.27 percent tax rate increase um and in addition to that 67 thousand I mentioned before that would be about 167 thousand in additional we would need to cut to keep tax revenue at the CPI of um 3.2 percent and then we did receive the petition for the library and that adjustment took them from 411,774 dollars to 444,070 dollars which is a 32,296 dollar increase or 7.84 percent if that's added on to the tax rate just so people know if that is added on to the tax rate outside of our budget but it's still part of the municipal tax rate that is approximately a 0.002 cent increase um which would equate to about 10 dollars for the average home value of 370,000 so for people who are not as intimately familiar with this as some of us um with the with the board of civil authority what Sarah is talking about is that people have uh who are dissatisfied with their assessment could come to the board of civil authority appeal their assessment and uh get and try to convince the board of civil authority to reduce that assessment and the total 7 6.7 million uh we've reduced it 7.5 million of all the property taxpayers who come to the board of civil authority it's reduced in it's resulted in a reduction of that 7.5 million dollars and that pushes our taxes up yep yeah inherently increases the rate because our because our budget is already set it was set by the voters in March well no it would be the projected budget for this over next year that's what we're talking about so if nothing else changed say you point approve the budget as it was presented to you but it was this grand list it would be a 3.8 tax rate increase instead of 3.2 based on those so it's a $67,000 sort of additional cost in the budget and the national life reduction if it happens would be a future year right we would we would probably won't be settled if it isn't settled it would go into a future that increase would apply to a future year now we got all of it it would get a refund which we would have to budget in a future year right yeah but but yeah if the board of civil authority voted to affirm the decision of the assessor on on national life yes and did not reduce national life's assessment they have the ability to to go to court and to challenge that and if they're successful then whatever they pay in fiscal year 2025 will have to be adjusted with interest yeah with interest so one other comment thank you sir one other comment in general just I know I've said this before but when you look at the items in the budget for example someone mentioned an increase in 280,000 those don't necessarily so we have done the math and tried to figure out what it would take to do the work but it doesn't necessarily reflect the impact of a particular position understanding that it reflects newer wage rates but also the probably the most important thing we did other than fully fund capital was to I would say right size our expenses get the correct number in so we had been under budgeting over time under budgeting some supply so you know we were able to do other things but then we would end up spending it and you know we say this is the year we think we can manage it better so what we did was make a real effort to put in the correct numbers from the start for based on our spending trends so that we wouldn't get caught in that trap and that means that we had more reductions to make around the edges or all around but we also want to be realistic about what it really costs to run the city so just we don't we don't want to be in a position of right we're getting halfway through the year and realize we're spending under budget yeah over right the show budget is and I'd like to throw another another point into this whole mix just to be part of the discussion which is that a couple of years ago the cjac the social and economic justice advisory committee came up with this instrument that I shared with everyone by email the other day maybe just last night which is to look at everything we do in our budget with an eye towards towards social and economic justice and social and economic equity and the basic idea is as we're discussing what we're doing in our budget what impact does that have on on people who are who stand to be hurt the most and the questions that were it's not a policy that we've adopted in the city but it is something that people have considered to be a valuable factor to keep in mind and and so they came up with three three questions one what are the social economic and racial justice impacts of this budget decision on marginalized populations in our community two who will benefit from or be burdened by this particular budget decision and three what strategies are there to mitigate any unintended consequences of this budget decision and if those strategies exist how will you create them and one of the things that that donna pointed out that was has been in my mind is that that I suspect that my ride if we if we have the information would we would find that most of the people who use my ride are people who who don't have cars many of them aren't don't have a social and economic status to afford a car and so if if we cut that resource out some people who don't have any alternatives are going to be stranded and so that's that's one factor that I think of as I as I evaluate what where we're going with the budget carry along those lines I'm also thinking about the impact on people's tax bills and most people saw their tax bills go up and in the reassessment process some people saw their tax bills go down and so that's a huge equity difference and if your your tax bill went down this year because of how your property was reassessed then it's a much smaller impact on you if your taxes go up next year but for people whose taxes already went up because the reassessment than to go even farther but I'm also wondering about you know at the state level we have income sensitivity for property taxisms we have a means to protect some people at the lower end of the income scale I don't do we have any sense of what that what that impact is to people in Montpelier like do we have any sense of do most people in Montpelier qualify for some kind of income sensitivity okay because that because that helps me to know like if we raise taxes the people who are who are getting the property tax rebates from the state may not actually affect that personally so it may be but if that's if that's a lot of people that that's different than if it's just a few people you know so I'm not sure how to give you that school taxes yeah it's so much harder except for school taxes right right yeah exactly yeah interesting answer piece to that that it's kind of fascinating is not fascinating but looking at kind of being wonky and looking at this whole new assessment is certain categories incurred greater increases and some had the decreases condos for example and a lot of condo neighborhoods actually went down you know very hills and freedom drives a lot of those areas but somehow multifamily properties which is a category which people who own those don't get rebates those went up at much higher rates the assessments went up a lot more and so basically the taxes are being raised more on a more affordable rental properties in the current formula the way it's working out so if you were starting to say something um no not really I mean it's um you know everybody wants to go to heaven and nobody wants to die really so that's where we are you know I mean it would you know uh this is my first time in a in the budget I I've gone through it in some detail I've got you know I just I there's some things I just need to have explained you know the overtime thing for example popped out so I mean I'm I come from a an industry where you know overtime was was uh a no-no um it's it's it's the cost of doing business in in uh municipality um but the you know the numbers are pretty eye-popping so I just want to understand how that works and and it'd be helpful to hear from the people who are actually going to have to manage right I was going to suggest that would be uh you go through a great detail with those folks like in general in the elevator speech about that is that um with DPW overtime is almost always call out so when they're out all night plowing snow water main breaks those kinds of things uh it's it's all it's rarely scheduled unless there's something like they're doing line painting overnight you know where it's just it's a more efficient time to get work done so that there's a user response uh police and fire are similar in that they do come out for specific events if they get called a major incident a fire itself if there's an ambulance call someone might get called in but because they're 24 operations it's also replacing one another when they're away if someone's out sick or whatever or if there's a vacant position you know if someone's not on their shift that someone else gets called in from a day off to fill that shift so they're getting overtime and that is to provide the service that's not a necessarily inefficiency it then becomes the point of is that you know there's always a balance of should we hire another person full-time pay versus in often I mean we're at the balance where we are we're still less expensive to fill in but then you know one of the things we saw a couple years ago was our numbers got down so low that um it was it was dangerous for the staff because they're having to be called in so much that's one of the reasons why we cut back the overnight police coverage and we and we had to readjust pay and everything to fill the position so there's definitely a fine line but that's the short version of how overtime is used otherwise in our other departments it's very little overtime yeah again crisis only right one of the things that lauren and then palin yeah just one other lens that i've been thinking about is you know like what are things knowing that we're in this particular crisis year and like what are projects contracts things that we could put off for one year that it's okay like we we don't want to and it does all pile up into the next year and then the next year you're playing catch up yet again which is kind of the way it's been since the pandemic um and so you know that's like adding to the pressure here um but if part of what i'm thinking about is you know having that priority list so if we are able to advocate with our state delegation to have some you know uh relief for communities that were flood impacted and some grants or things like what would the go to projects be and what are those things that might be we could put on hold and would be top of our list if we do that that if funding comes in and i think that would also help us make the case to legislators of this is the urgent need that we have this is if you give us funding you know we can do these things so i think that exercise could be valuable and i assume probably bill could rattle off some of the things that were cut that are really high pressing needs and when you said there's a lot of bad decisions last time like probably part of those i mean another thought just around the staffing issue you know we could for example think about like holding the positions open maybe hold them open for six months and then we're paying half of a year salary but we're not eliminating them maybe we assess and realize oh it's been okay without it in some departments but not in others but i think we could also try to think a little creatively of is there a way to save some money but not eliminate these positions assess is it working or not if not you know know that the intention is to rehire as soon as resources allow or partway through the year to save some money just a few ideas so do you have a response i just wanted to offer a couple comments on that but i don't want to cut palin off okay well what go ahead palin so i came um on board last year kind of a late stage of the budgeting process so that's why i'm asking this question will there be any proposed budget based on our feedback or this is the only one we are getting okay thank you i'll answer those and two so actually i'll do palin's first um the way this works according to the charter and the law anything is that the the city manager presents a budget to the city council which has happened as of the date you said it's now the city council's budget to decide what goes to the voters so we so so at this point it's up to you to make whatever decisions you want to make with it we will present you whatever you want if you want more information if you say show us x will provide you models but at this point we are not going to normally you would just talk and add subtract multiply divide do whatever you want to do with the budget you've had um because it's yours now um but we're here to help where you know where your staff or your support so if you want to see information we'll provide i hope that answers the question to lauren's point um about delaying projects and i i know you know this but i'm saying it for everyone else that listen we did have over three million dollars worth of requests for projects and equipment for the capital plan that did not make it into the 2.4 million so we certainly have the backup list already and i would remind the council and the public that in the fiscal year we're in right now we have already reduced the approved budget by over million dollars so we are already operating on um and some of that included delaying some of these things and that was due to loss of revenues from the flood related revenues so you know i think not to put the cart too far before the horse if we were to get flood relief money from the feds i mean from the state i think we just have a question of would we actually use it to make sure we were whole this year or do we see what we can put off till next year and with regard to positions you know many of them are being held vacant right now um because of of these i'd also add um without going into great detail that not every position that was targeted for cut is unfilled some of them are filled um and would have impact on people uh and some are still to be determined uh so there's and i agree that just cutting vacant positions is not strategic and i'd also agree with the comment that was made earlier that um that there is i think every department could articulate and and i've asked them to be prepared to do so not to talk you out of what they propose so that the council can be clear what reduction in service you might expect as a result of these reductions so that people aren't led blindly because no one is saying we can do exactly what we do now with less people and what they're saying is we can provide some services but it will be different and everyone should have their eyes wide open about that to follow up on what you said about the potential for getting money from the state the process you describe of trying to fill up the budget that we missed out on in fiscal 2024 is essentially what we did with a lot of the COVID money when we had huge cuts in our budget and then got uh COVID relief money from the federal government and most of what we did with that money is uh restore uh restore capital expenditures that we had to defer right um rose bath you've had your uh hand up for a long time and i really appreciate it i want to uh want to call on you and give you a chance to say what you're going to say thanks for being here and being patient oh yeah no problem um i wasn't sure this is my first city council meeting so i wasn't sure is there is a more set time so i just raised the item so sorry about that no no apology necessary um so i am rose bath i live up on george street and i um am the commission i'm the chair for the month my failure conservation commission so i'm excited to be here first time i've gone to a city council meeting um primarily because we typically have our um commission meeting on the city council meeting date that is going to be changing with the new year um so that's very exciting so hopefully you guys get to know me a little bit better and so i'm just here today um i've been recommended by alex that you know coming to these and and advocating for the things that are important to us like is an important part of this process so i'm here today to ask you all to prioritize funding the conservation fund and the conservation commission some of the benefits of funding the conservation commission is that like lauren had said earlier um these small funds even though we're only asking for 35 hundred for the commission they can be used for in kind to get grants which is like a huge thing that we try to do and it's very difficult to get grants without some in kind our volunteer time like is at separate generally so it's at like usually 24 out $24 an hour that is not necessarily the salary that we all get paid and so that's where um you know it is volunteer time and in kind contributions of the hours can only go so far um so even though it's a small amount of money it does it does pay dividends um and so the commission also helps to inform the community about flooding and our flood infrastructure one of those being the flood infrastructure walking tour brochures that we put out every year um and we are hoping to do more flood infrastructure and flood flooding resilience type activities but some of that requires again in kind contributions to really compete for these grants and ultimately especially the conservation fund um which we requested $5,000 for and and that request has been put in the past years but we haven't had anyone like available to come to these um that conservation fund we did um give a grant this year of $5,000 and so we requested this year to basically re-institute that $5,000 that we spent so that fund can continue to grow and so you know ultimately the conservation commission um which runs the conservation fund we asked for that $5,000 of replenishment for the conservation fund and $3,500 for the commission which is what we've gotten annually in the last two or three years at least since I've been on and so both of those things were not um not in the city manager budget and so I'm just requesting them to be put back in and um as someone who's very familiar working in this space of um of government and these municipalities I understand that with every cost you have you have to have a solution right what you're cutting and so my proposal um is that you know we are currently planning in this new budget to up the technology professional service contractors by $13,000 if we were to not use that $13,000 we could fund the tree board the Montpiler Conservation Commission and the um and the fund the conservation fund so um I think that's my three minutes but I do really suggest that you guys get input from commissioners and give us the opportunity just like you do departments to to to make our case um you know we're not engaged at the same level as departments and I I really hope that you guys at least take that feedback so thank you great thanks I appreciate your coming in this is this is a good time to get more public input and I see a hand raised I'm sorry and why does she come on up and speak I'm Barbara Floresh I'm the vice president of the Friends of the Bridge I'm here with Nancy who is vice president of the bridge board of directors and Larry Floresh who's a member of the board of directors I am responding to the proposal to cut the bridge the city page that is running the bridge it's been run for many years and to retain the recently initiated page in the Times Argus for us the city page I want to be clear that the bridge board of directors the bridge staff and the Friends of the Bridge board of directors has the highest respect for the Times Argus our colleague journalist and nothing that we say is in men in any way to disrespect the Times Argus the bridge is a non-profit Montpelier centric newspaper that connects the community by providing equitable access to information so my husband and I were walking down to Sarduchis the other day and we were sort of approached by a man who was experiencing homelessness and he said or to my husband who writes a column for the bridge he said are you the man who writes that column and my husband said yes and he smiled and he said out of that column and so the point of this is equality of access to information um we provide the bridge free to every single resident of Montpelier and that engages everyone the Times Argus circulation is two thousand six hundred and sixty seven and not all of those people live in Montpelier some do obviously but not all of them and the cost for an annual subscription is over four hundred dollars we have a circulation of ten thousand five hundred three thousand eight hundred and sixty one Montpelier residents get our newspaper every time it is published we deliver it we mail it to their homes we deliver to Montpelier businesses and we put distribution points in Montpelier free for pickup free for all and our cost is zero it's free so by providing information to all the residents through the Montpelier bridge city page Montpelier also discourages misinformation that can be what happens when public discussion forums or social media is the only way that people are getting information and it seems that dropping that extreme broad okay so anyway we are we are reducing our requests from fourteen thousand four hundred to nine thousand six hundred a thirty three percent decrease and we ask that you support us because we really get out there and do it and I brought a handout for all the city council members they showed the reach that we have great thanks for coming out George George you you raised your hands conservation group I just wanted to tell you this is anecdotal but my wife called and my wife Jean Wilson called and she heard about this I think from maybe through the bridge I'm not sure and they showed up a person a woman showed up and talked about mitigating water from our property live on 25 River Street we get a lot of flow and through our driveway went to the sewer right off the driveway and a lot of stuff did and she gave us suggestions on how to divert that to land with with plants and so forth we planted more plants and so on and so forth and I I thought that was a great suggestion they they weren't in in favor of gutters a lot but a lot of the water that flows off the house now ends up on land rather than in the sewer and I thought that was a great suggestion and and it was free so I know this is an opportunity cost so you're talking about opportunity costs all the time now what's the best next solution for you have for you know you can decide to do public services stuff but you may not be able to do that if you decide to build a rec center that sort of thing so you opportunity costs are important things I know this is a small one but I really think you should support that yeah yeah I'm going to throw it open to any other members of the public who are present in the room who are online so I'm not seeing any hands up and need to get one online participants but I see Mr. Whitaker is is here and looking to be to be heard on the on the budget issues yeah I I'm grateful what I know is three of the priorities that if you look at the increase and maintain you can to a degree you can add those two together and those who want to maintain it where it is and those who might want to increase it so public restrooms combined are total are near 80 percent as a priority but there's no department who's an advocate for that so we need to address the fact the things that have been neglected so long that aren't represented by a department interests need to be factored in here homeless services close to 75 percent between 40 percent to maintain and 35 percent to increase so what I in a nutshell the takeaways I take from the survey are there's a real priority a real emphasis rightly so on public restrooms public works public safety and homelessness services and that we've neglected those for a long time public works including the paving and the sidewalks and snow removal so how are we going to finesse that those we we it's not as simple as adding or padding in a few tens of thousands I understand public works could benefit from another project engineer you know that's well and good I think we need to be damn well ready when some more of this federal money starts to move we need to have shovel ready projects and instead we've been shelving projects so but we also need a a reorientation of that department that has engagement with the public on triage of what what gets prioritized in this kind of invisible process where public works gets triaged based on who who complains the loudest and we finally fill a pothole that pothole behind you know positive pie in that parking lot is deep and it's been there for a long time and it's those they're simple things to fix and we don't have a system to fix them right so we need a triage a rapid response that and a lot of deep planning to have shovel ready projects so we need to reconsider how we're I think we're top heavy in our administration with a city manager assistant city manager communications director and the new enter what was supposed to be an energy coordinator you know that's over a hundred thousand dollars in you know maybe we can reuse mr lumber in a different capacity but I don't see that we're getting our best bang for the buck we need to rethink how we're administering to get to those first core four priorities that I spoke to you're just grabbing your thing you got sorry thanks it folks I'd like to see if there are any any other people out on the zoom would like to be to be called on I assure you that this is not going to be your only opportunity to talk to us about the budget because we've got public hearing scheduled right after the turn of the year but as we're as we're moving forward if there's anything you want us to hear I can guarantee you that we want to hear it I'll pause for a little bit more okay well this is uh this brings us up to 820 which is the time for a 10 minute break so we'll we'll probably be back in here at 840 all right all right it's up to you guys we're back in session and it is very clear that we don't have any decisions made tonight we didn't expect to have any decisions made tonight um I'm going to suggest as a way to go forward that there's been a lot of support on the council for to put some to maintain our focus on on the core functions of public safety and public works and and so what I suggest we do is at our next meeting one of the things we we work on is talk about well if we were to restore some cuts in public service and public works what would that do to the to the rest of the budget have asked the department heads and the and the manager to to be prepared to talk about those items in particular because those are that's where the money is really that's those are big parts of the budget there there are other things that there's support for it's unclear how much support there is for it and I know from talking to council members that that there's a whole bunch of questions out there and over the over the last couple of weeks I've just been sending bill multiple emails a day with different questions well what if we do this what impact does that have how uh and and I know other people might say well it's unfair to send bill all these emails uh of course of a day maybe what I should do is absolutely maybe what I should do is save up all my questions and so instead of sending them 100 emails I'll send them one email with a thousand questions and I think either one works but but this is really the time our next meeting is a budget workshop that's all we're doing next meeting and so we we really need to be making progress to getting to a final budget that that we're going to put before the voters and uh and so that's what I suggest as uh as a way forward and I'm interested if uh if any members of the council have comments on on that there are a couple of other budget elements of water and when we get when we get that the budgets are are in the budget book uh yeah so just to repeat that question for those that didn't you may not have heard the question and or the answer about the water and sewer budgets those are in your budget books we typically spend most of our time um in this time of year uh on the general fund portion because that's the tax appropriation that the voters vote on in March so it's the part that has to be done in a timely way to go to the voters you can work on the water and sewer budgets I mean I think it's when you have DPW and you're talking that's a good time to talk about water projects and those kinds of things very important and we need to let people know but you don't really need to approve those budgets until May I think and you set the rates for those and you know so I remember we did that right so it's not uh you know it's good to look at them all in sync and there's certainly a relationship between the two because many positions are funded you know between multiple funds you know Kurtz for example is you know but other DPW workers and police are sometimes shifted between parking and other things so they are they do relate but really that basically due to legal necessity we focus mostly on the general fund portion this time what about you know special say flood related projects like I remember you talked about the the waste treatment you know how close that is doing the flood and doing something to protect that where is that where is that project how is it budgeted Mike Miller planning director so the the idea of elevating dog river road to protect the wastewater plant so if anyone doesn't know this just by the way the road is and not having any culverts under it it acts as a levee to protect the wastewater plant so the wastewater plant is actually at a much lower level and would flood if it wasn't for the road being there but it's not as high as it could be or not as high as it should be if we want it to go and really have it as almost a levy it really should have a certain amount one foot two foot more so we're working right now with Vermont emergency management VEM we're gonna be putting in a brick application these are actually put in by the state on our behalf and that'll be going in in January or February Josh has the exact date on that for us mere mortals could you explain what brick means I cannot tell you the abbreviation for brick it is an acronym for building resilience and infrastructure BRIC I don't know we'll have to guess on the sea yeah basically it's and they changed the name so this is like one of the first or second years it's been called brick so before that I had a different name so yeah it's just the funding program that FEMA has they have different programs for different pots of funds brick is generally used for scoping studies so basically that that first level you know how would we protect the wastewater treatment plant by elevating the road once we get the results from that army core and other folks doing the research on that then we would go back and apply for the HMGP funding which would be the funding that would actually build it and so we would it's just as kind of as this chain of projects so it is a project we're working on hopefully we get funding in 24 and we can get some results and start getting the next level so we can start moving to engineering construction it takes time so I mean if we were building in 25 I'd be happy but probably a 26 project good great thanks Tony and I know we really haven't had this discussion but I've been a layperson googling mitigation floods and I've been definitely interested in these dam removals that have been going on so I have two questions for DPW and maybe Mike and that is have has the staff talked about some simple things to mitigate water impact on the stores whether there's big tubes you feel with water or different porous concrete barriers you can put up and two have you all discussed the dams on runuski and the north branch the north branch is still pretty high I was amazed driving down elm street the backyards leveled with their yard and that was today like at two o'clock so dams and permeated substance that will mitigate working a little bit backwards so the reason why the north branch is still really high is because if you were to go up to the rightsville reservoir it was really really full a lot of water got backed up behind the rightsville um I think it went up 30 feet in the last couple of hours and then it starts to basically slowly go back down so north branch will be high for a while just because it's still draining out the rightsville reservoir um we do have some grant money that the Vermont River Conservancy has and we've got some grant money to explore removing some of the dams so we are looking at those as options and opportunities and um oh stores um back to brick oh right um the state is also looking at that and the commission the my public commission on resiliency and recovery is working with the state as they look all their watersheds dam removals on their priorities so it wouldn't be a local thing because it's not just us it's absolutely but when I talked to two commissioners they hadn't been part of that discussion but so and that was just at the parks event that they presented on Saturday but so good that's good that's great and mitigation mitigation mitigation this goes back to that scoping thing I was talking about you got the brick for the scoping and the HMGP for the implementation um so we have three projects that are going into the brick grant cycle the first one we're talking about dog river road the the second one is for scoping for downtown buildings as to how what options homeowners or business owners would have to floodproof their buildings is it floodgates is it um you know what is it so they're going to go through um if we got funded there would be an analysis of all the downtown buildings or a certain number of downtown buildings obviously we'd need the approval of whatever property owners are there they have to participate um but they would come in and do an assessment of the building to be able to offer the property owner here is our recommended strategy to floodproof your building we could put gates on the front we could brick up this lower thing here we could put a backflow preventer those types of things they would look at all of your options to floodproof the buildings and so I love studies they're they're great and I've always learned and they've always made a better end project but meanwhile it can start raining tomorrow and so I'm back to is there any kind of work any idea of putting together some expertise and offering workshops for business owners as well as you have the building owners and you have the business owners so that they could actually put something around their doors yeah I mean I guess if they're if they're those types of options for quick things if we want to get funding we've got to follow FEMA's little thing so if if in a lot of these things would cost a lot of money to um think about some of these downtown block buildings it may cost two or three hundred thousand dollars to floodproof them to have for a single building um and obviously we're not going to turn and just expect that the building owners are just going to be able to afford that so by by following the FEMA procedures we could qualify for hazard mitigation grants that we could use to help pay for those assuming we can get through all the steps and the options are there and the property owners you know have options they're willing to accept somebody may not be willing to accept a certain recommendation so I and I don't know how these will look we're just going to have to wait but at this point it's federal money um and this these are the types of procedures that VEM Vermont emergency management says this is when we talk to them about you know we really want to floodproof downtown buildings they said this is how to do it get the get the break funding followed up with HMG. So no short term they're not recommending any or short term. We're we're we're working on some I know Kurt was going to talk about backflow banners probably sir yeah. Kurt Modica public works director um so the most recent flood just this week um was a lot of basements got filled with water and that was because the river elevation came up higher than the outfall pipes the storm pipes the sewer got inundated from the sewer overflow point actually was coming back into the sewer mains so the sewer and the storm were completely plugged and then that started coming in through penetrations and buildings basements and so the easiest quickest fix is to put either cap a penetration that's no longer in service or to put what's called a back check valve or backflow preventer on those pipes that's right so buildings would need to turn off the water or tell the occupants not to use any toilets or sinks during a flood event but if that were done then we could prevent a lot of what was what happened in this most recent incident just by preventing that water from coming in so the idea is the city works with a contracted plumber to do a lot of the city facility work is to basically have that plumber available with dpw expertise and where the pipes are and how they might be prevent what could be installed to prevent those backflow events so we would go out with the plumber assess situation and then the building owner could hire that plumber directly to do the work or their own it's just an option because we just workshops on this as well as I know you're probably sending out information but no I'm not necessarily planning workshops that it's going to be more working with Evelyn to get the word out we've already I've already emailed Katie with Montpelier live to get out to the business community this is available here's contact if you're interested in having a meeting to look at this we'll work with you but not necessarily workshops because it's pretty straightforward if you want to do this and invest in your property we'll meet with you and we'll help you make it happen and so to follow up on that more detail than maybe people want is is the process that you you go to whatever the point in the building is that connects to the public sewer line and go in there and possibly jackhammer the cellar floor to to do it and then install one of these backflow preventers there may be instances where that's required the hope is that you can we can do it on the on a pipe that's exiting a wall that you can put this valve in the in the piping that's exposed and how much is one of those cost varies right yeah it really does I don't I hate to put a number on it hundreds thousands probably low high hundreds low thousands somewhere in that range I guess we did one I think it was in the 902 thousand range from hardware then you had to put it on less less less than the damage you're a good value yes did you have anything for the flood to see they worked we did it on our house when we renovated seven years ago and it worked absolutely thank you thank you so because we'd already gotten through that much we've gone through two of the three so brick building resilience and infrastructure and communities so that was brick so those we're currently looking at three brick applications we've now talked about two of them just to get the last one out so people know about it the third one is the Berlin pond dam not the Berlin pond dam but the one that's down below it which has a small dicky dam so dicky dam has been having issues as a result of the flood and so it should be examined and determined whether or not it needs to be removed and obviously in town of Berlin we'll have to have conversations about that but that is our third scoping study what to do about the dicky dam we have one hazard mitigation grant program hmgp and that proposal is the one that's already been working for a while it's the effluent pipe from the sewer plant that we turn on in the winter to help melt the snow from Bailey so currently there's an over-the-ground pipe that then discharges the effluent from the sewer plant to Bailey bridge and it keeps the water warm so ice dams don't build up and we did it as a pilot program and it worked and it worked so good we want to permanently put in the pipe that and A&R really doesn't like us running this pipe over the ground so it's all already had its scoping done it's already had its pilot done so now it just needs construction money so we're going to be looking at the hmgp first round to get money for that project so those are the projects that we have currently in the pipeline for FEMA that Josh is mostly working on so thanks for yeah thanks Mike um that last you know just as a point I mean not to waiting for the locusts right it's a good reminder that up until you know 10 years ago or so our our top focus was on ice jam flooding and you know that one of the top floods that people in my bill are still remembers 92 and that had nothing to do with the rainfall or these other things had to do with ice jamming so that is still a flood mitigation uh issue that we have to keep in our forefront and and keep working on because that could happen too but we're not keeping the wrecking ball parked down but no we're not the way we used to putting a hose that sucks out water no uh the hazard report that we got it in our bank I think it's for today was that paid for was that done by the state because it had all the dams all the big dams no we we did all of that work so that hazard mitigation plan that you approved in the consent agenda item um we're required to that every five years we did it a year and a half ago after a federal disaster we are required to go through and evaluate our work plan which was that table on page 78 that I highlighted um and so all the staff uh and leadership team went through all the items in there and looked at what ones we've done um what was the status of them and in light of the flood what are all the new ones that we should be looking at and adding to the list and those when we apply for FEMA money they like to see that the project is in your hazard mitigation plan so we try to put as stuff as many things that we think are good ideas into the plan so that way in case something comes up we can say yeah it is in our plan it's right there so that was you have the regional dance not just right so you had airy and you had water very and one other I can't remember yeah we we so we did the work um along with the regional planning commission so they did some of the work for us I just wondered because it seemed regional in some sections yeah oh and the it was fully written by the regional planning commission with us two years ago we didn't make any edits to the other 78 pages just just the one table we changed for this one for the FEMA requirement thank you thanks Lauren I believe in addition but Mike correct me if I'm wrong part at the commission for recovery and resilience one of the members is works at Vermont emergency management in the flood resilient communities and she was talking about what I believe is a complimentary kind of analysis that they are doing that might be one of those same programs but is looking I think a little more regionally at like what are those projects that can have the biggest impact for reducing flood levels she was mentioning for example like the curve around 89 near dog river like that's a real pinch point apparently but it's also really challenging to address but but anyway they're doing that analysis and she said there's going to be a list of projects and the timeline she estimated was by the fall of 2024 there would be projects and that we would you know identify some priorities and that's again federal money that can help with some of those so we should just be aware and keep an eye on what's happening there and if if there's advocacy just also on the dams to know that there is going to be I know that there's I think it'll be an active conversation in the state house about increased funding for dam removals for those dams that actually exacerbate flooding like some of the ones we have locally and increased kind of inspection and maintenance for dams like rightsville that are meant for flood control so we might want to share the Montpelier story again as part of that conversation and I mean certainly that it would be much it would be a competitive statewide so you know I was trying to get in that queue so folks we've it feels like we've gone covered a lot of territory we've gone a little bit far afield but I think you know I laid out a suggestion for where we go next time and I'm not hearing anyone say no that's not how we should be doing it so I'll work with Bill to develop well you know who do we want to really have come in to be prepared to make presentations or to be prepared to answer questions I encourage everybody to get Bill your questions no matter how many there are or how many or how small or busy they are down to whether they're going to be pickleball lines on the tennis courts that are going to be resurfaced the answer is yes I really have to fill that they all add up that's right but and but this is you know I I'm all kidding aside I mean I did ask you for that so we the more prepared we can be for these conversations of something or if we can answer a question for you offline that you know typically we'll send it to everybody so that I did not send the pickleball answer to everybody typically we try to send the answers to everybody so that you're all getting the same information and we want to be as responsive as can be whether it's then or come prepared to this meeting with the right people and all that kind of thing I you know a couple things I wrote down specifically other than police fire public works whereas the data on the state income sensitivity from up your who you know how the numbers how many people get it what's the total payment what's the average payment all that kind of thing we that is available from the state we it's certainly available for 2022 it may not yet be available for 2023 but we can get the most recent information so alright any other follow up we're happy to do that okay at that we can we can move on to the next item which is other business and to my knowledge we don't have any other business so now we can move to council reports starting at your end Donna sure however you spend the next few days holidays and new years may you all enjoy yourselves I'm going to no report I have no report our our city staff what's the schedule for city staff I send a big wad of questions over well of course we're 24 7 so yeah city hall is open is closed on Monday and then the following Monday for the official holidays you know I'll we're Kelly and I just send them to Kelly and I email and we'll get them to the right people and people will respond as they can and certainly be prepared for that spot yeah that's fine I mean you might not get an answer on the 25th please do not answer emails on I got a pretty lengthy one last year from a resident on the 25th with a lot of complaints a lot of things nice Tim we don't have a meeting next week no okay so we have one on the third we have one on the budget worksheet yeah the 10th is an x regular but yeah so we're here or we're somewhere I'll get somewhere yeah Tim your quick things and I'd like to thank Sarah and your staff for putting this notebook together because it is a great job and it's really helpful thank you and to it's been another crazy week in Montpelier and I want to thank city staff I think folks that came out and tried to gauge what was going to happen with this big storm and then the follow through I I thought was spectacular so thank you yeah I don't have anything to report I wish everyone happy holidays it will be happy for my family because my daughter just got into Smith so she will be in Northampton next year and although she tells me do not come and bother me I am planning to go actually I asked her like can I announce this she said yes to that part but second part was like kind of yeah I also just wanted to thank the city staff like getting the volunteer tent up so quickly all the community members that showed up and were making sandbags and putting stuff out I mean it was great to see everyone just coming together once again and trying to help and so glad that we averted another disaster worst-case scenario people I had several people like stopped me on the street to be like the communications were really good people really liked the right so you know again like a lesson learned and great to see the the right consistent and very clear and communication so great job and just yeah happy holidays tall yeah I have very little to say I want to pile on and say great job to our city staff and our community at responding to the to the danger of the flood we didn't know it was going to stop rising and start receding at nine o'clock and and the the quick response by city staff very very great it's it it shows you know what what we're paying for as people say well they value I say people value the city services we have really good professionals that in all of our departments and that's that's what we get for it and the the community the spontaneous volunteer effort from community members very inspiring I people love our community um and again the communication was great it it started early kept it was regular it's frequent and it kept people updated with the with information they needed and I've since then I've during the course of the week people have said to me well were you were you up real late uh Monday night worrying about it and I said no because we knew exactly what was going on and it it stopped stopped raining and started going down early so much better than last time and everybody have a great time with your with your families and friends and I have a great holiday and that's it for me next up we have city clerks report and you have uncloaked no nothing to say gotcha very good okay and city managers report thank you Mr. Mayor thank you all I I want to call out our team this week um you know and and the downtown community you know people were out there lifting stuff in their stores and really taking it you know seriously I think for all of us when we saw the projected that gauge with the projected height go from 9.7 to 16.8 in one hour um I can several people use the term PTSD and I know we were all I know building owners and shop owners and our staff were all like oh my god that's not what we signed up for um and so certainly jumped into gear I've actually been quite sick this week I didn't work today I was not going to work on Monday and so I really want you know to have off the Kelly who really led the efforts on Monday I came in but I wasn't good for much of anything so people know that we do have people you know you can someone can be away and we still have folks that can get the job done but really the whole team that got things and we certainly didn't try to learn lessons from last time but we also did a lot of what we did last time and I just found it interesting that it was received differently this time maybe because the event was is catastrophic but like you said none of us none of us knew where it was going to go and we certainly had some hairy moments as we watched that gauge creep up but yeah thanks everybody secondly much less exciting but still pretty interesting it looks as though we will be able to go back to City Hall cleared all the ADA hurdles the only thing left is we want to make sure we test the audio system and all that because that is the reasonable accommodation hasn't been used since before the July flood so I think for now we will plan on having that third workshop at City Hall if that changes we will let you know but and then we will be be able to meet there after that but but certainly obviously having the access and then the other question I have is do you have a preference for this room in the school okay because if it's if it's not if it's not there then we should you know maybe have a more regular place I don't know the seniors I don't know what the senior is going to be mad at us George if we take their room okay just check it right there's plenty of time right yeah so I think okay that's kind of my take too actually I think we can hear better and all that stuff but okay I don't do it am I forgetting something because I probably what oh yeah the FEMA at country club road oh well I mean you already know the update yeah in the midst of everything on Monday actually started with the mayor and I got a call from vt digger saying FEMA is pulling out what's your comment and we said well that's interesting news to us news to us but we did in all fairness they had scheduled a meeting with our team at like 10 or something to talk about plan change potential changes in plan so it wasn't like they were avoiding us we just somehow it got out ahead of time but we did talk with them and they are making their change of plan which means that really good news really that people will get are getting housing like now instead of in months so the whole if we wind up clock all the way back the whole point of this was to get people who had lost their homes into homes and that's happening faster and more efficiently so yay for that they have agreed in fact in lightning speed that you see how slow it worked today I assigned a lease amendment which basically says they will prepay the first five hundred and fourteen thousand dollars for twelve months guaranteed rent and it got e signed back and we've already invoiced them and so they said they said we should have payment in two or three days so even if it's two or three weeks that's five hundred and fourteen thousand dollars for being willing to support something there we'll have on your updated agenda in January the regular meaning you know some suggested uses for that fund for those funds there's a lot of you know it could be setting it aside for development of that property it could be investing in water lines now knowing that we have to invest in that water line later if we go forward it could be putting it in the general fund to replenish our fund bounty or there's a lot of uses there's flood resiliency I mean there's many there's a there's a good use for for it what we should not use it for as a budget plug because it's one time windfall and it needs to be identified for the specific project so but it's a good situation to be in I mean you know and to that extent our heads off to Mike and to Josh Jerome who's not here for negotiating that lease in first place that got us in this position and for and for demanding the guaranteed time so yeah so is that it for you that's it for me all right so at 919 we are adjourned