No, no, but I mean, from my history of knowing that core, it's a weird. All right, thank you. What's up, sorry. This is relations. Thank you everyone for joining the January meeting of the 40 neighborhood planning assembly. We'll begin quite briefly with introductions. And that's her all in the room who would like to participate, but as the sole ward aids member and ward aid steering committee member, I am Ryan Nick. My pronouns are he had. Hi, my name is Mila Grant. Happy to be here this evening. I am the central district. City council member. I am now in word two used to be word three and my pronouns are she here. Hi, my name is Karen long and I'm actually award one resident. I came to see what's happening here because we used to be a joined group. And I miss awarding. We have a lot of the same issues. So. Thanks. Appreciate you for coming. Thanks. Hi, I'm Fosca. I use she her pronouns. I work for the city of Burlington for CEDO and and pay public engagement specialist. So I'm at all these meetings and I live in word two. Thank you everyone, public forum public forum. Anyone, anyone, anyone. Seeing none, I think we can get to the main topic of our agenda, the public safety discussion. Councilor Grant. Sure, but you know, you do have some juicy things here about town meeting day. Oh, yes. Well, so I guess for the people viewing this meeting after the fact. Town meeting day is coming up on March 5th. The ballots will be nailed out on Valentine's Day, the 14th. You will have to request your presidential primary ballot. If you want to vote by mail, but you can always show up in person on the 5th. Also, so there are new wards. So please check your to see if you've been redistricting. Thank you for that. You're very welcome. That's really important because after 20 years, I'm going to be voting in a different place. And so a lot of people are. It's not only just a changing word. It's a change where you're actually going to vote. So it's worth it. But the, the 8 polling locations are still the same. You just got rewarded into 2, right? Correct. I think they were the same. I think it's still integrated arts and sustainability. Thank you. Cool. Yeah, please. I do have kind of a. You know, if I can, are you doing speak at now? Is that public comment? Yeah, please. Okay. So another reason that I did come is that I'm really interested in the MOU. Which affects Ward 1 and Ward 8. Really dramatically. And then I'm trying to learn more about the neighborhood code. The boundaries just, just that whole change. And so.  We all shared a lot of the same things, but I do think I went to the Fletcher library meeting and the whole sentiment of the group was that we need a stronger MOU. It needs to be longer than for 5 years. And that we are concerned about the housing, you know, housing should be designated for also upperclassmen, not just if, if they get zoning changes, it should not just be for freshmen and sophomore. And just mainly it's just we're all, which is maybe why you have a lower turnout when you are in a neighborhood and people are coming and going each year. Then they're not as committed into the community. And I really think we should protect our neighborhoods. No. Like that. So that, that is something that I think we should all really jump in on the MOU and the neighborhood code and try to. I mean, I've lived in my home for 40 years, and it's a great location for if when I retire and maybe don't feel that comfortable driving anymore, because I can still walk downtown. I walked to the meeting tonight. And I don't want to see my neighborhood outpriced because people are buying the houses and chopping them up. So it's just a really big issue that's been going on for, you know, a long time, but it's happening again right now. Housing has been impossible lately. Exactly. Anyway, thank you. Thank you. And actually just the curiosity question. Can the upperclassmen thing is like, is that within like, can the city put that in the MOU or like. Yes, we'll have a new conversation. Yeah, sorry. That was more just for my own personal curiosity. I wasn't present, but I was, I zoomed in on that meeting and then I went to board one and then we had an initial. If you have anything else to say, I can before we dive into public safety. No, I just think that. I think the issue about the upperclassmen is that. On the table was more housing for freshmen and that freshman class has really gotten huge. So in one year, those sophomores are going to need housing and in two years those brand new freshmen, if we keep increasing class size. Yeah, they got it somewhere. They have to go somewhere. There was some estimate of like 600 people. That's maybe 300 houses. You know what I mean? Like, if there's three in a house or a foreign house, whatever, but we are losing. I mean, it's really hard to buy houses in Burlington and compete and it's hard to rent and compete with the students that have their families in wealthier states. And to the parents, they can pay those rents, but if you're working in Burlington, you can't necessarily compete with those rents. So I think that's the big issue with providing more housing, keeping the numbers, you know, at bay and having some of the housing be for upperclassmen so that we are not just bringing in more freshmen and then into years those freshmen have to live somewhere. So it's already at zero. You can't really go down from there. So anyway, I think it's a big. Yeah, I agree. Thank you. Um, so there was the situation where the last time you with University of Vermont expired. There was no action for a while. Then, um, they wanted the zoning update on Trinity campus so they could have more drones. And then there was, this was right before my time on the council, but there was a meeting to discuss that. And then the bottom line was, since they were not willing to discuss a new MOU, why grant that housing and then you've been says, well, we're not going to build more housing if we don't can't have the zoning. And it became kind of at a standstill. You know, we're not going to do zoning if we can't have it. So then there was no discussions for a while. Then the discussion started up again. And there was a, there were meetings that city councilors were allowed to attend. And with the representatives of the University of Vermont. Um, and then there was all this other, I call it back room. I feel sometimes in the city, there's a lot of back room dealings. There's an idea that that I do understand initially that you don't necessarily want to be having the public negotiate for you. Right. But I do believe it would have been helpful to start. I feel like they've gone backwards. They've, we were able to have discussions behind closed doors. There were more discussions that didn't involve the city councilors, but between the mayor and the university and the representatives of the city. Then they come out with the MOU and they come out and they say, this is all you're going to get. I mean, that's what his press release said anybody can read his press release is like this, they're going as far as they can go. So, you know, we had a public meeting where people are seeing the MOU for the first time and they're like, yeah, this is all we want to do. And now you want to ask the public how they feel about it. It's backwards to me. You know, you should have asked first, you had a real understanding of how the public is feeling. They didn't do that. So now they're hearing how the public is feeling. The ward one in PA and then at that meeting last week, people are upset. I feel very strongly. I will not vote for anything that's just five years. For me, it has to be at least 10 years. And the reason for that is they're asking for a lot now because it's not just Trinity. Up by the Waterman area, by the rugby field, and I believe one, one more. So it's multiple properties, depending on how the buildings are set up and configured. It can be 1500 to 1800 groups. And that sounds great. Great. But it doesn't mean anything. If there isn't a promise to control the enrollment. Exactly. And. I want the definition of a new bed because it sounds great, you know. One point five new beds and like it's other. Now I want to know that a new bed is not another force triple. Oh, we won't do that. Well, then write it down. Right. Write it down. That's a problem for me. I was in not a UVM, but I was in a force triple my freshman year. It's a real treat. Yeah. I mean, some people want to be in triples. There's always been people willing to be in triples to save that money. Yeah. Right. But they 30%, 30% are in triples. And they don't sometimes they don't even get three sets of furniture. I've talked to young people living in this situation. They got the three beds, but only two desks and two wardrobes.  Not everybody's on the same schedule. Can you get sleep? It's, it's not a good thing. Flashbacks to my freshman. So that's what people spoke at that meeting the library meeting. It was intense. It was intense. Well, something else came out. We'll get to that in a minute. But when you think about, or do you think about the city code, the city code has requirements about how, how much space a person is supposed to have to live in housing. Yeah. Universities in relation to the code and apparently we just look the other way. So that's an issue, right? 30% you got young people in this situation. No wonder they can't wait to get off campus. Right. Now, the good ideas that they have is that they understand that the type of housing they need to build needs to be apartment style. They've got that. They know that that's what people are going to want to prefer to be in. They are already like, I think they had to do is to say Mike's housing for graduate students because the other part is people do want to know about upperclassmen and graduate students because you be a top tier research university. They have talked about this publicly. And in order to do that they're going to need to bring in graduate students. You know, it works for UVM. I know that they're going to be working on bringing in international students. You know, this is this is their goal. So I feel that they're the negotiator. He's not. He made a statement at a city council meeting that you know, something like 100 or so would be inconsequential. I mean, I said the fact that you would say that, and you don't understand given our market, it is consequential is a problem for me. I, I don't have any power to get them to change their negotiator, but I think it's someone who doesn't really understand what's going on in the city. But the five years, the last thing is two more things I'll say that the going back to the five years, given the number of changes that they want to make those buildings is going to take time to get them up. Yeah. So, and then we won't get anything like even the information that they're offering, they're actually offering to give us access to the same information they provide government with regards to the number of students they have, that's great. But then after five years, they'll stop doing that because they haven't been forthcoming with that, you know, they have a pattern of behavior that we really need to be concerned about. The other thing that came out was that the state's auditor is doing some research wants to do a report on the effects of the number of UVM students and how it's affecting the Burlington housing market. So we should certainly not be having any kind of vote until that's done. And when did the city know about it and why weren't city counselors told and shout out to Troy had very key but all all over this. And it's important because things are not being as transparent as they should be so that people should read the MOU. It's available under the city council minutes and we can talk quickly about how to get to those but I don't know if they can, but they're willing to change. I don't think they want to change it. I don't think that they like the feedback they're getting but then again they did the process backwards. They didn't come to the community versus say what are your biggest concerns and take that into consideration. But if we go to the city's website, could we do that just for a quick show and tell. So, the state auditor study do you have any idea what that would take her. If it started tomorrow. Oh, no, it's been going on. Yes. Yes. Very heated at the meeting because the on December 12. Our city person from maybe CEDO, I don't know, Brian Pine and Megan Tuttle where the city representatives and then Richard Kate. They got this information but I don't know when the council exactly got it but it was after the holidays. We used it so to be to be clear. The council has never been formally told. Okay, well, so this is. This information was not shared with the council. I mean, I had heard the excuses about the holidays and stuff from the city. Why, you know, why they hadn't done it, but I actually, I wrote Troy this morning and I asked him when did the council actually get notified. Because we, everybody in that meeting at the library felt that it would be ridiculous to have the council vote until that report is done. Yeah. You know, it's like it's in process and really on the 12th, it was when this city was asked to fill out their part. I mean, they were trying to collect the VVM had to collect there. So I did ask. I get all that but it just again that we really got our first MOU if you talk to air hard monkey over a zoning thing like that's our only power with UVM. So we can't give this away without getting something back we can't give away the zoning. And air hard has said before that the very first MOU was over some zoning thing that UVM wanted.  So if we just give it to them, then we'll get nothing. So on point. Council. Tower was like, they want everything and we get nothing. Right. Because the five years ago right by and then whatever little things they have negotiated for it. And respect to council authority but we were going at it at the word one NPA. He's like, you would turn down 15 to 1800 beds. I'm like, yes, I would if I don't know what the sooner woman is if I don't know how many. That students are going to be coming in. I don't look at this as being a good deal. We're getting so little for it. And God bless him. He's, he's a lawyer. If I had a client and my client asked me, wouldn't you be able to get any more will be with risk losing. Yeah, we would be where we are. Right. We really can't be much more off. Right. Then, then the situation and that's how I feel about it. But yeah, we've never been officially. Notify. I should email them to, but I mean, I understand the first person being notified after that request would be the mayor. I make sense to me order of operations. This is on December 12. Well, this is January 24. Yeah, no, they've had enough time. Certainly before the meeting last week. I just wanted to say something. And I don't know how many other people know with everything going on. I mean, we had like over I myself have like 450 emails just on the meeting. Yeah, sure. It's been really difficult. Any other questions about that? No, but I'm glad a good summary, but I think a lot of Braille and Tony, it's really need to be aware of what's going on. Yeah, really do because our market is so, so tight. Yeah, I guess my only question about the timeline was just that like, it seems these things to move at like this glacial pace, and that like, you know, I just study seems important to be good to know the impact of students, but also like, you know, if it's going to take a year, or like, is that we're just going to wait a year for this next step to happen? We've been four years without an MOU. No, I guess I just need a little bit longer. But like when the housing markets at zero, like, you know, is this going to, you know, we're going to build 1500 new beds that are going to be 1500 new people in the market in three years. More, but then, you know, let's build 1500 more houses in downtown Burlington. You know, that's not limit growth. Let's find a way to grow within the character of a neighborhood. Right. Right. Because, you know, part of the concern to with UVM and having the extra beds is they got to get away from that 30% troubles. Yeah, yeah. They need to do that. They've made that the norm. And they, someone told me that they're trying to get people to stop using that term. I'm like, it's, it is what it is. Yeah, you can call it by a different name, but it is what they do. So we have the city's website up. I just want to do a quick show and tell because there's been some market improvement on what's called City Clerk, which is the area that you go to find out information about city meetings. And all the different documents and such. The home page had the links, rental and property info, and then calendar. And that's always where you start is with calendar. Now, a big improvement that they have done is the calendar actually now looks like a real calendar. And that's something.  It was terrible. It was, it was, there were improvements over the previous software years, which was called board docs. But this is much better. So you can see at the top you were in January 24, you can go to the left and click on previous month to get to December. And then you kind of scroll down a little bit and you can see all the meetings that had occurred. And you would be able to, let's see if we can choose one. Let's see. Do we have one of the city council meetings in December? There's one on the 18th right there. Oh, in the 18th. Yes. Thank you. So city council meetings are usually Monday nights. Unless there's a holiday then they'll be on a Tuesday. And if you click on meeting overview. So the first thing that's great is when you click on the actual meeting, you were taken to the meeting. Before you had a search for the meeting and you would click on it, but you would end up in the area of the meeting and you still had to do more scrolling. It's much faster now much more efficient. And when you click on meeting overview, you get to see all the attachments related and this particular meeting and this is December 18. This has the UVM MOU presentation. So this has the documents attached. That were related to the MOU and then can you click on meeting media? Right under meeting overview. Okay. So one of the things we need to catch up on is that the meeting needs to be linked. And I've been working on that. So for some of the meetings, they are linked for some meetings. They're not, but that's one of the things they need to be catched up on. Otherwise you go to our friends at town meeting TV and you're able to search for the meeting. You can go to their YouTube page or you can go directly to town meeting TV's website to search for it. But as you scroll down, you see the schedule and the public forum. And this particular meeting didn't have a consent agenda. Oh, yes it did. There it is. The consent agenda is a very interesting place. It's not something that's talked about in meetings other than it being okay. It's part of the agenda. There's a motion to adopt the consent agenda. And if it's amended, adopt the consent agenda as it is amended. There's a second and everyone votes to accept the consent agenda. So you can miss a lot of information if you as a member of the public is not looking at this document since I became a city consular and look at all the stuff that's in the consent agenda. And I'm pretty much convinced that if we go back and look at ancient consent agendas, we could probably find some items on Burlington, Telecom, because if we're going to be spending money. It's going to be talked about in the Board of Finance, and there's a lot of things that go through the Board of Finance meetings, which is another great meeting to watch. Then the items get put on the consent agenda. There's a lot of things related to city contracts and city expenditures. There's things in the city that are controversial, but there's a lot of things in the city that do work. They do work. We can take our showers in the morning. We can flush our toilets. We can turn on the lights, turn on the traffic lights to work. There's a lot of things that work and there's a lot of contracts and work and money and all behind the scenes and all this stuff can be under the consent agenda as we can see. So that's the way you can get to a typical city council meeting, see all the documents, and I'm going to work on that. That's the next piece is get that meeting media in there so that you can just go to one piece. And then the meeting media can just link to the town meeting TV meeting. So I just want to make that known because I find very often that in our city people are just not informed and you do have to be an active resident. You have to be an active participant in government and that means that some way, somehow you have to make the time maybe you follow a commission that you're interested in. Maybe you follow committee that you're interested in. Maybe you don't watch an entire city council meeting but you take a stroll through the consent agenda. You look at the minutes of the city council meeting to see what was discussed, and then maybe you're like, okay, maybe I'll watch that part of the meeting. But I do have a grave concern that a lot of people are victim to, to misinformation, because they're not doing enough to, to make themselves aware of things. And that leads us to public safety, because there's a ton of misinformation about public safety. Where to start. So my background is after the use of force lawsuits or filed with the city, I became kind of active, activated I was very concerned, what happened to the Millie Brothers and Mr. Jack.  And I applied to be on the special committee to review policing policies and then I applied to be on the police commission, and then I ran for city council. So I've been living, breathing as a counselor I'm involved in a lot of things now but I've been living, breathing public safety for a few years now. So, what can I tell you the first thing I want to tell you is that we have to be very real and honest about what we can expect from our police department. And there are things that even if fully staffed people should not expect police to be involved in, or prevent. Now some examples are, as we all know we got came out of this pandemic, and we've seen crimes occurring at a volume that we've never seen before. And stolen cars, for example, you can have a fully staffed police department, they cannot be standing next to every unlocked car door. They cannot be standing next to every car that's left run with keys. For a variety of reasons people are stealing cars and they're stealing cars in record numbers, not just in Burlington, South Burlington, and in other towns.  Not supposed to have it idling but if it's cold out people are doing it. That's just the way it is.   So this concept of not locking your car door. The concept of not making sure like you don't leave your keys in it you don't leave valuables you don't leave wallets you don't leave important documents you don't leave computers. You don't leave guns in your car.  Um, there will be guns stolen out of cars that are then involved in crime where we're an owner. He didn't report it was registered to him so they came back to him like why are you report I was embarrassed I'm like people. This is and I know people feel like oh this is really intended. It's never been this way that's like, well, this is what we're going through right now. So we have to take some ownership and what we can do to help prevent. And it's always been this way of a car has been stolen. Then we would we hope that the police department can find that car. But in the past police departments, even before COVID I don't know for my remember a few years back up in South Burlington there was these guys, they were going to all the malls. All the shops in the parking lots, just opening doors and pulling stuff and they hit hundreds of vehicles. And it wasn't a massive crime wave per se was like three guys doing this.  We now have a very severe drug crisis. We have a very severe crisis around unhoused individuals. There is some overlap, but not every person who's unhoused is suffering from substance use disorder. We're starting to use the term SUD now substance use disorder sometimes you see Oh D opioid use disorder. So we do have some overlap because if you if you do suffer from SUD. You can't really disabilize your life. Right you can't hold a job. You can't pay your bills you and you end up on the street certainly but we have people if people are not following what's been going on with the Montel program, please do so because when they threw out the first group of people and that's what they did they threw onto the street. We had a meeting and myself and my fellow progressives were like we need a camping strategy. Because we already had camping in the city. If anyone going down the waterfront part as known for the last few years we've had camping in the city. We knew it was going to increase we knew this because Governor Scott he's talking about the fact that state agencies are giving out sleeping bags and tents. He knew this. He knew this why this guy is so popular I don't know, but he knew this. And they still throw these people and so the mayor got upset because he didn't want to talk about a camping strategy because that's kind of scary. You want a section campaign somewhere. So what we're trying to say is we have people camping in our parks. Residents are upset about this. Visitors are upset about this. People are using in our parks dealing in our parks we're saying we want to maintain our parks for residents and visitors. So we want it very clearly posted that people cannot camp there. And we want to enforce that. We need to be able to tell people where to go otherwise it's just whackable campy here they go someplace else campy here camping here you can't hear and that's that's what's been happening. The mayor said that we were trying to make camping a housing solution and nobody ever said that so there was this push back. And so we had a campaign policy with regards to having an area where we could say people could be on certain city lands, where we could have some type of control over sanitation. People having access to some type of bathrooms of the port of parties and services people going down services at work so as soon as they through the first group out. It was immediate disaster. It was immediately the increase of people on the street and then they realized, oh, we can't do that. And then they kind of walked it back, but they didn't do the best job in terms of going back and seeing if they could re qualify some individuals and there was definitely a lot of hardship I want to give a big shout out to Brenda Siegel she's an amazing person who's really been out there in these streets, helping people to the best of the ability. You know we don't have an address. It's hard to be like oh you fill out this state for. Well, I never got the state form because I didn't know what I could do and so there's a lot of talk now again about the, the program so that that really increased a lot so when we go back and we think about public safety. It is not comfortable to see people in this state. It is not comfortable to see people in our green spaces, battery street was a big issue. It is not comfortable, and people will get angry people get upset, but it's not something to necessarily think that police can take care of. It's other agencies and other resources, if these individuals aren't technically breaking the law, then we don't. We shouldn't have an expectation that police handle that so we really have to think about what police can and cannot do these alternative positions. We even want to you know they were calling them alternative positions but we shouldn't they are now part of our community safety plan. The CSL's the community support liaisons. They're fantastic. One of the things I heard as when I first started getting into public safety over and over and over again was that our officers were not prepared for the amount of mental health incidents. There is a lot of mental health issues and there is a lot. It's a lot. And there is also when you talk about the quote unquote repeat offender. The frequent. Yes, yes, so frequent fires. Yes, yes, so you have that. So to have the CSL's be able to be more engaged to have the training to work with these individuals. Not start from square one every time. Not start from square one every time like to know that if you get a call. Oh, it's, it's, you know, so and so again.  I know that was that was kind of controversial for some people who were very concerned about the budget of the department and and what would the control be like. I always felt that Lacey Smith who is the leader of that team. She's fantastic. And Chief Murad has a ton of respect for Lacey Smith and Lacey Smith's like I don't have a problem being based here in the department because in fact yeah they have desk, but they're out there out all the time. They need to be there. They need to do the paperwork. They might need to consult with officers about something. But they have a great deal of. Unlocked. If you, especially if you live in a building, like you're in a locked building, but you have a garage that people can get into. There's a lot of garages under a lot of buildings that there's access and garages are places where we see a lot of activity related to drugs. Also, people who sleep in garages that they offer. They offer shelter from the from the weather from bad weather. You can go in. You've had hotel guests that have found people sleeping in their cars or have had things taken out of their cars. So one of the most basic things you can do is just lock those doors if people are able to come into a particular garage and always be able to leave with something. They're going to keep coming back. But if all the tenants do what they need to do and keep everything locked, no, then they'll know that they. That they're not, you know, they'll go someplace else so that we do have to take. We have to take some responsibility and have an understanding of what police can and cannot do. And even before COVID, even with being fully staffed. These types, certain types of larcenies and break ins and package taking. These are not things police could prevent because it can't be next to every single one. You don't have that type of money to have that happen. It's a matter of, do you have a safe place for your packages to be left? Yeah, I don't get packages shipped to my home address anymore. Yeah, yeah, if you're not going to be there, you shouldn't. Yeah, you know, and I think too, we then go of all the people have porches, even they're enclosed porches. We leave stuff on our porches all the time. And people are getting bolder as they look for stuff, stuff that they could possibly sell or wear. It does worry me a little bit that that sort of line of reasoning is a little bit blaming the victim in some ways. I, you know, I understand that people say that, but it doesn't change the fact. No, I guess I just like that. Yeah, I don't ship packages to my house, but it is something people have to think about someone emailed me about a. They had emailed, they forwarded an email they had received from their building management team that was just outlining all these things and they were furious. Yeah, they were furious and it's, this is what you have to do because this is a situation. Well, it's rules for me, but not for me. But we're in, this is what we're in right now. No, yeah. And I, you know, I've lived here for 40 years, but when I first got up here, I was like, you know, leave your doors open. I came from New York City. I couldn't imagine, like, what are you talking about? So in some ways there's things that have been happening in other places. No, I know. It's just sitting here now and it's, it's sitting different. It's just being aware of what we can do to help the police department and the fire department do because we were part of our own community safety. So we need the police department is well funded right now. They had the increase in salary. Yeah, it's just the reset and going well. Like are we getting people out of the academy? Can we expect to get back up to our officer count anytime soon or? Not soon. Yeah, soon in the relative sense. FY 26. Okay. If the city of Burlington, that's the light speed. Yeah, so if we go into the meeting overview for the public safety committee last night, and if we scroll down, we should see the chiefs report and the police click on, click on December 23. Although I strongly recommend this is a very good meeting. I'm sorry. Police. Thank you. This is an excellent meeting. It was about 3 hours long. We talked about a lot of things. We, and also because it was the, the end of the year, we were talking about what happened in 2023. So there's a lot of data. And if you can scroll down. You'll reach a page. It talks about where we are with staffing for the police. Oh, there you go. No, right before. No, no, that's okay. So this is kind of the, the sworn officer head count looking at 2015 through 23. And as you can see on the right after going all the way down, we are starting to come back. Regretfully, we just lost a lateral transfer. And that was disappointing. What I found interesting was he lived on the Plattsburg side and I asked was that because he couldn't find housing in Burlington and the chief believe that that was, that was an issue. We only have one person going into the next Academy class. And that was a bit of a disappointed we expected to have more. But it really isn't for the expectation and reality here. Or is it just sort of, you know, the chief did talk about that a little bit. I think that would be like good to kind of watch that. But the one positive is that the field training officers do need a little bit of a break. Our last graduating class was good. And they are once you get out of the Academy, you can't be by yourself for a while to have that field training. And so we've got a good crew that is going through that right now. And then that'll give a little break to the field training officers and then hopefully we can get more people into the next one. And if you go to the next page, this gives you the breakdown once you take out anyone who's injured on military or on some sort of leave the number of supervisors detectives the officers at the airport, special assignments, and then marketplace officers and then this leads to what's left. We do have we've since hired a six CSL so we now are fully staffed there. I would love to see a couple of more because it would be really helpful to have more hours of the day. Sometimes there's just certain things that happen with people who are known to the CSLs but they, you know, they'll happen in the middle. This is what confused me when I first saw this number. It's 21 to cover all hours of the week it is not 21 at one time. That's correct. Yeah, that's correct. So it's like four on each shift. And then that once the more recent Academy officers that have graduated from the Academy are on their own. That was a lot of little bit short but that's a real interesting part of the conversation so for people to really understand those details. This is a meeting to watch. Yeah, these are the reports to take a look at. If you click on the what is six CSLs of 11. We are budgeted to 11. And what is the CSL again. The community service officers. So they're not sworn officers but they help patrol. Okay, they do actually can you go up to the prior we need the priority response. Land. Sometimes it's at the top but this being. Okay, you can keep going down. It's not. Oh, there we go. Yeah. The revised priority response plan so this particular page kind of teeny on the screen, but it's very interesting if you've never looked at it before. So this is telling you all the different types of incidents. And what their particular priority is by are they white the light blue or the dark blue so the priority ones are the highest. And then two and three can get stacked so it tells you what you can expect to get stacked maybe that it will be answered when officers available to answer so it has the information on the left and then we have these where you can see these highlighted it'll say CSO or CSL. These are the types of incidents that can be responded to by of these positions. I'd like to have more specific data about the incidents just responded to by those positions. I know they've been increasing as they've been hiring the positions CSOs, because they've been going to the Academy that that's why they're not fully staffed yet but hopefully that'll continue. So as you scroll down this gives selected incident reports it gives you an idea of where we're at year to date how it compares to other years everything related to drug crime has shot up and actually if you can go does this total incident volume. And if you could keep going down. Yeah, so Valkor selected Valkor instance Valkor is essentially the software that is used to track incidents. When we look at overdoses like look at that 54 55 93 139 237 423. We look at stolen vehicles of 24 in 2018 to 299 in 2023. We look at larcenies. These type of things are drug related. And so if we can get the drug situation under control. That's going to be a big thing. So all I'll say is that this is great for to look at the fire chiefs report fire chief chief Lachance and the fire department are out there in ways that our public doesn't understand and fully appreciate it. January 23 through October 23 they answered about 40% of the overdose calls on their own. They put a community response team in place where they have a truck with everything they need to go on these type of calls also wound care because people who are taking drugs mixed with zylozine and about zylozine the zombie drug it causes open wounds. And people don't always get the medical care they need and they can get infections and things like that but they're out there giving wound care kits out as well. So the fire department has been doing amazing work. So I do recommend this meeting. I just a great deal because it is almost three hours but this is a meeting where I think all Berlin Tony and should watch the full three hours because we're looking we're talking about the past year. We're getting a lot of data from the fire department and from the police department we're hearing from both chiefs. And in a way that you just don't get to do on an on an average day and that's why these these reports are so important and it's like data data data because people don't know and here's where you can get some I always want more data. But here's where you go heat maps to achieve the chance of the fire department uses heat maps and those are really important in terms of staffing that community response team, because it's being staffed with overtime voluntary overtime. So they use the heat maps to make any surprises on the heat map or is it kind of where you would expect them to be. I think it's kind of where you expect them to be. And the times that you would expect them to be just like anybody else people with as you do they do have a routine. Yeah, you know it peaks during certain times of the day. It peaks and it happens in certain areas we know where where things are going on. Another meeting that's really important was the October 10th meeting that was a presentation from the drug, the drug unit, the police department's drug unit you know we don't have a street crimes unit. That was amazing because that just explained everything. You don't have a street crimes unit because you don't have the staffing in the street crimes unit would be the officers who would be taking care of all the open dealing that we have especially seeing around the city, a park area there was a big bust. In the last two weeks. House near King Street King Street yeah it's been causing a lot of businesses in that area grief. The church street house. No no was on church street. It was on I want to say St. Paul Street, but it was right next to the youth center. It's near the youth center. Yeah, it's not what well there's a couple of areas. Yeah, yeah, no I had a business shy guys to talk about it. He's like yeah just all day every day I just look at my window with down got some gelato and hung out for a while. Yeah, and him. I recommend that people still, you know if you see something use the when you go to cities website click on departments police department, and there's an online tip area for drug tips should use it you should use. Yeah, say what you're seeing. If you're seeing the same type of cars or different cars and you can take license plates safely. It's still important to report one of the things about the cases with regards to the drug cases and they have been making very significant arrest relating to the dealing that's going on like really high volume dealing is they can't tell you what they're working on. Short. They can. Yeah. Compromise a case but one of the things I did ask for was to get more information after the fact I think it'd be great to have a page to say, you're today. Here are the completed. Here are the arrests they may not be completed because they're going through the judicial system got this backlog all the time.  The the long term. So that's interesting. So file online incident report only for certain things and then the submit tip on the drug line is a little bit below that. Yes. There are so the online incident report. They're changing what is being submitted like retail theft was going in there. Yeah. And it was kind of going into the black hole of nowhere. Yeah. And I took a look at that and they just realized that that's not the best way to handle it that there were things that they weren't able to get to. And a lot of people don't bother anymore, which is and that is sad. And that is that is a problem they don't bother anymore or they will put any things in bulk. Achieve me or add that. He found that frustrating. I certainly understand why that's frustrating. But the reason it was happening. It was because they weren't getting any response and if they needed to have it on record. Yeah. And if you've just had a retail theft, you're probably not in a great mood. The last thing you want to do is sit at your laptop and write up a little summary of how it happened. Yeah. And and some of the bigger stores like the stores on Shelburne Road, they, you know, if they have to write it off for write offs, you know, they still cared about what was happening. I personally met with three loss prevention officers from TJ Maxx Home Goods and Sarah Clothing. They came here. They were like, what's going on? Yeah. Why don't we get a response? We're told to put these online and no one's responding to us. We've got they had the same issue. But Ben and Jerry's this year had to close their bathroom to the public. Same thing. We've got all the people coming out here using in our bathrooms, using these and the same concerns. So they definitely cared about what happening. I mean, Hannah Fertz on North Avenue is has this pain for the sheriff department to come in. So, yeah, we're dealing with that. And we are dealing with things that were being reported, but they weren't coming out of that system. So if they weren't coming out of that system, then there's no affidavit with supporting evidence, and that's not getting to the state's attorney's office. And I just started really digging into a lot of this because I had a lot of businesses, people in the community coming to me and like, what's happening? I don't hear anything. And we know who did it. And they should Well, again, what 50 people, 75 people, like, and like, they're all fairly well known. They're, they're well known. And that's it for some of these things. They are well known because previously trespass. Well, the trespass means nothing. Well, it means nothing. But, but if you're a business who's had a problem with an individual, and you've previously trespassed them, you can identify them. So if you submit an online report, saying it's this individual, we saw them, we know who they are because they were previously trespassed. While you're trespassing them, you got to get their name and their birthday. And like, you know, if you're trespassing someone, they're not inclined to give you that information. That is true in some cases, but in some cases, people are known. They are known because they're doing other things, but they can be. One of the frustrations is that you can know who did something, but the incident may sit before it actually gets to the state's attorney. Right. I've seen significant delays between when something was submitted online versus when the affidavit was sent. So that was valid. The police department has heard that feedback and they are working on making changes that they need to make, to try to improve that. Now, with the SA, Sarah George, who gets blamed for everything, we have a constitution and we have laws in our state. Yeah, that's a process. There's a process. There's this little thing called assumption of innocence. And if you have retail theft and you have a delay in something getting to the SA office, I guess, well, that person, it's like, Hey, I just did this. Nobody's coming to get me. I'm going to do it again. Yeah, might as well. And I'm going to do it again because nothing initially is getting the SA. Then it gets to the SA. Then the SA files charges. She's routinely around 3000 cases. Yeah, which is an insane number. And it's far, and I've been looking at the data that the court system. Can we support staff? Can we get a more like, you know, Well, in terms of what is currently allowed, her department. And I realized that she doesn't beat the stage. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. And, and, and, and, I mean, and court time too is really hard. Like, like she would say now I've got a murder case that's going to take care of all my court time. Yeah. And that's going to reduce what we're able to close because we're not going to be able to get as many things in the court.  But so you have this delay that you have people going out doing the same thing. And then that's why people don't think anything's being done because even when she gets the case shoplifting case, larceny case, these are nonviolent. Yeah. And our, the way our system works is people aren't held for that. Drugs are considered nonviolent. Drug use and drug distribution or distribution. It's not, it's not considered. So it's very interesting. And I had a question about, well, can we push everything to the US attorney because I think it's attorney level. They can do some things that are different. Like they can pull people in a way that you can't pull them at a state level. Sure. You know, there's definitely some of the frustration she had submitted. It's like if you arrest someone, and they have a gun. We know we've had a lot of gunfire incidents. So the past few years related to drugs. So having a gun is a nexus to violence. But if you didn't use a gun, but you had a gun still nonviolent. Yeah. And then how long can you hold somebody? That was the guy that assaulted a police officer in the parking lot of the police department. And I was like, they're committing crimes before they even hit the sidewalk. Recently, as part of my really trying to understand all of this, I attended a legislative hearing. I zoomed in sometimes you can beat it by the chance you're what you can zoom in. And the Orleans County, I think it was Orleans County. So Orleans County down south. There I say, she had a guy seven open cases, violent, threatening officers, threatening. I think he threatened the, the officer's daughter because this guy's daughter when she saved school, the author's daughter, threatening to rape people. So the way the state currently does things is there's a higher priority placed on if someone is likely to flee, not necessarily the public safety of people is someone likes that. Now this guy, he would hang out in his community and terrorize people. It was really insane. It was, and that's when I, the gentleman who manages the, for the local Hannah for it's here and he was talking about like, I think $10,000 a month on our service department. Yeah, why do we have to be expected to hold these and then I'm like listening to some of this stuff around why people can be held and why they can't be held and. So that's an issue with Montalier though. It's an issue with with our statutes and stuff and then I sit in there and I'm like, this is crazy. And then everybody laughs because supposedly just like you should be running wild, but it was this was all very interesting to me and because you can't. And even if you do hold somebody on bail, I understand like eliminating cash bail because cash bail just holds poor people. And when you give bail to a major person who's dealing with each quantities of drugs, they're the ones with the catch. They got the money. So, so you just want to be able to hold them, but the judges determine like the conditions and some of the essays run into that. You know, we had an essay I think up in Grand Isle, you know, he was trying to get someone. But wait, but the judge was like, well, they're they're in this program now. And so the judge was looking to say that this this person may be getting over this, but they had done significant arm in the community. So there was that disagreement and essay was was overall. So there's these the type of things that are going on. You know, we don't have you can't charge someone for actually stealing a car. We it's insane debate. It's insane. Yeah. And that was one of the things. So those two community forms that occurred in December, people need to watch them. There's a lot of information in there. And I want to work on a third one that's going to concentrate more on harm reduction and also on the things the fire department is doing. I guess we're kind of coming to the issue. Well, so, but I guess my question to grab this up is like what's within the city's power to do. You know, like, I realize a lot of the issues probably reside in Montpelier and with the state legislature. But like, you know, what can we actually accomplish? I believe our voices are really important. And I think that people, people complain online, they'll post, but they won't email people. There should be emailing Governor Scott's office. We can have enforcement, but we must have harm reduction resources, and we don't have anywhere near enough harm reduction resources. We do not have recovery on demand. We don't have detox beds should be some of the simplest things you can offer someone. There's someone who's an act. Remember, alcoholics remember used to be concerned about alcoholics, alcoholics are still out there, and they have a high percentage of, you know, getting them into recovery.  And that is a huge problem. We are not keeping up with what is happening. And this in the community, and in our government, one of my biggest problems with governor, our governor is that he doesn't really want to try anything new. He wants to only do things that are proven. What we're facing now with fentanyl and xylazine and all this other stuff is different. It's different. So back in the day when Governor Shumlin did his state of the state address. Remember that it was all about the opioid epidemic. This is the biggest thing facing the state. We have to be focused on it. We have to do things differently because what we did before did work. Governor Scott doesn't think that way. And that is a problem for us. But we are getting millions of dollars in opioid settlement funds that money needs to be released faster. You can't even plan to get our programs if you don't have that money. So that needs to be replaced faster. The city has been doing we do have people that are lobbying for us. We did have a legislative luncheon yesterday. I use my PTO and I wouldn't tell about failure, but we're trying to get our legislators on the same page because we need facilities we need it like staff we need like it's going to be expensive. It's going to be expensive and we're getting millions and millions of dollars from the opioid settlement fund and that committee is not moving that money fast enough. The facility and personnel millions of dollars evaporates quickly. Yeah, we need an overdose prevention center. When Ben and Jerry's closed their bathrooms, part of their press release related to that was to say Burlington needs this. We need this. And if the legislator makes the necessary changes so that they can be opened, and we're not the first ones to open it, I will be just crying in the streets, you know, because Brattle Girl wants one. I think Rutland wants one. We need it. And people have these outdated notions that it's enabling that it's permissive. Right. We're in this permissive society. Permission. Let's get permission. Are you? Are you? Are you? Are you? Are you? Like if someone walked up to you and said, can I just give permission to the city? No one is given permission. No one is enabling people think needle exchange programs are enabling. I just it drives me crazy. We've known since HIV that people who share needles or reuse dirty needles. That's a high risk factor for HIV and now hepatitis B and C. It adds a whole nother issue to our already overburdened health system. It's crazy up at the medical center. Crazy up in the ER. They are overwhelmed. Is the prevention center go up at the hospital or would it be? It has become a de facto primary care for a lot of individuals. I guess, you know, in this hypothetical, is the safe injection site or whatever term or using it? Is it going to go up in the hospital? Is it going to be? I would rather have it. It needs to be in your city. That's a good question. Right. We have to we have to get the laws changed so we can have it. Yeah. And then we need the funding and then we can properly plan for it. But what these there was an excellent presentation from a woman who runs on point, which is overdose prevention center in New York City. I also heard from people who work with the one in Vancouver and they have been collecting data, data, data. What was great about on point was she talked about how they work with their local law enforcement technically they're operating illegally right because the laws haven't come up. Their DA knows they're there. The police in the area know they're there, but the police understand that what they're doing is helping. Exactly. So they had examples of interactions they have with their law enforcement and how they work together and if law enforcement picks someone up that they know is associated with the center. And just the idea of controlling with some people politely call syringe litter, you know the needles that are everywhere if you can get someone to come in, then you're controlling where needles are being left. You're forming a relationship with them. Everyone is someone going to come in on the first time have a great experience and be like, I want recovery. It's not going to happen that way. Yeah, it's going to take a lot of interactions. It's going to take trust. It's going to take treating people like they're they're humans again. We've got to give them an off ramp. You've got to give them off ramp. You've got to let them know in order to get someone back into the community to be a functional member of our community. They have to know that someone cares about them. Just, you know, I don't give people money, but like after a meeting, I might go into the pizza shop on Main Street. Someone sitting there, they want money. I might come out with the exercise and pizza. That's what I do. I don't give money because I don't know where that money is going to spend. Yeah, but I'll give somebody some food. But just and then there was, oh, thank you so much, you know, people just some basic kindness. I think we're losing our people so burnt out over what's happening. We're forgetting to be kind. We're forgetting thereby the grace of God that could, you know, that could be me that could be a family someone at our meeting last night talked about an issue that they're having with a family member that they love. And a lot of people are in that situation, but we need to overdoes prevention center. People need to really rally for that. And people really need to eliminate any just old fashioned. These ideas that is permissive. This idea that it's going to increase crime. It can do so much for us. And we are in that point. And if you don't have anything else, then the why are you against it. So we really have to so you can call me you can email me and if you want to sit down and have tea and talk about it. I will but I really think that is really important shout out to Joe McGee.  He's trying to, he's been trying to bring people back to the harm reduction side, because we can't stop people from using. We will always have people coming to sell to them. Period. Full stop harm reduction has to be part of the picture. It has to be. Um, very quick. I'm happy to continue this, but I think we should, but for very con city staff, maybe. Oh, thank you. Yeah. So watch the meetings. You can get to the meetings. You can watch the meetings. It's so much information in the meetings. And that's one of the complaints. I get a lot. People don't know what's going on. You have those reports that you can look at and listen to those conversations. And thank you for having me. Thank you very much for coming and for that presentation. Thank you for coming. And we hope to join word one again someday soon. Good. And thank you to city staff. Thank you. Meeting is adjourned.


in the Missouri Militia and I am the Community Preparedness Chairman for the Boatkeepers of Greater St. Louis. So thank you for coming out this morning. This is we host this clinic annually and what this clinic really is is a basic preparedness clinic on what we feel is some of the the key important factors if there was any type of disaster or an emergency that we feel you your family and your community should be looking to contribute to make sure that you are prepared. So a little background is Oathkeepers and Militia started doing training together several years ago because we felt a lot of our ideals were aligned with what was going on in our country, what's been taking place in society, and some of the key factors that the Oathkeepers bring up with does everybody know what the Oathkeepers are? We'll step back a little bit. Okay so Oathkeepers were established by a gentleman by the name of Stuart Rhodes. He started the Oathkeepers to ensure that men and women who have taken the oath such as our military, our police officers, our emergency response are holding to that oath which is to serve and protect the Constitution, not the orders given to them by what is an elected authority or given instructions that are deemed unconstitutional such as disarming the American public which is against our constitutional right. So this organization was developed to ensure that the members of Oathkeepers are to ensure that these people who have taken their oath, our military, police officers, our emergency response team are upholding to their oath and not infringing on the American people's rights. The Missouri militia has been around since the adoption of the State of Missouri. It's actually in our statutes that you are the militia no different than our United States Constitution. The militia and the Oathkeepers have been joining together to ensure that our training is aligned to have one single purpose and that is to withhold our Constitution and make sure that we are following it to the guideline and nobody of authority or appointed authority is abusing the power that has been bestowed upon them. So jumping back to what we feel is our key factors, we're going to go through who our host speakers are and what we think is some of the key things that we want ourselves, our families, and our communities to be prepared on. So let me jump out of here and kind of walk through what our agenda looks like today. So again this is our family preparedness seminar. There's a lot of things that we could go in-depth on but we're going to kind of touch briefly on three key factors that we think are the most valuable that you could have in a disaster situation, in a grid down situation, or just in general. I mean it's always a good idea to have some of these extra things on hand. So we'll do some introductions on the host speakers. Again my name is Michael Herf and I've been doing this now for about four years with both organizations and this is really what I do in my spare time. We all work for a living but when I have free time this is what I spend my time doing is understanding and researching how better how to better myself, how to better my fellow officers, how to better my fellow organizations and my community. Dr. Dwayne Weed, he's a former president of our Oath Keepers chapter here in Greater St. Louis. He's a gentleman right here. He's also an officer in our Missouri militia as well. He's going to be covering some medical training so we'll go through what the agenda looks like here. Kevin Pauble, which is sitting over here, he's also an officer in our Missouri militia and he is an active Oath Keeper member with us. He's going to be going through some basic food preservation information with us today. John Bear, he will be right back. He had to run and grab some tools but this is all his fun equipment over here. He's our const chairman for the Oath Keepers of Greater St. Louis. He's extremely experienced with ham radio communications and he has done an excellent job getting us all up to speed on how to communicate with each other without the use of cell phones, without the use of the internet, all using radio frequencies, which he's elevated us up to a level to communicate with each other, all using ham radio. So he'll get into some of the basics of doing that and then Michael Hamilton. He's in the back here. He is the vice president of Oath Keepers of St. Louis and he is also our senior officer in the Missouri militia. So our agenda today, obviously introductions and we're going through, Dr. Weed is going to go through medical combat lifesaver training, which he's actually hosted for us. Are you on your third round now? We just finished the second round. So we'll be starting our third round and this is, he was trained. We actually went to another seminar that I participated in at another organization. He's compiled the information. Now he's training all of our members on combat lifesaver and then basic or down nutritional information. Again, food preparedness is going to be done by Kevin this morning, basic ham radio and then any closing remarks and questions. So before I turn it over to Dr. Weed, does anybody have any questions for me about the organization? Anything that I can provide information for you? None? All right, you guys are easy. All right. On that, let Dr. Weed take over and we'll get into that.


I'm going to speak about using WordPress to test and validate ideas. So I have revived a website of mine called W Possible, which is essentially about WordPress for makers. I've been, over the last year, getting more and more into this whole make this space, the idea of quickly validating. And I'll go through some of the, what I, why I think that's useful. So this is what I decided to do. I decided to do four projects, seven days, hopefully to come into you guys and tell you great, everything worked out well. It was like eight days ago. It's been pretty interesting. Those are the four projects. First is W Possible, which is WordPress for makers. So what I found yesterday, speaking to people, is that there's guys who are just starting on WordPress, and there's guys who are developing, and there's a whole group of people in between. People who are, who are, who know enough to be dangerous, who are able to compete on plugins, etc. I think that's also, that's kind of the audience that I'm looking for. People are thinking, kind of get things done affordably and quickly. The second one is called Writing Visible. I mentioned that I was studying. I was having great difficulty actually just writing. So I created this section to be a writing environment. It's actually quite cool. Think Workers, which is a lead service for indie analysts and school companies. Again, solving my own problem is an independent public policy analyst that chooses not to do any government work for fairly obvious reasons around how tenders are educated, etc. I needed to broaden my way of actually getting, getting work. And it's up in here, which, which is really my, my baby. And I mean, it's a, what do you essentially want to do? You just want to try to take a marketplace from these tools. I don't know what that means. I actually don't know what that means. So I'm happy for people to come up to me and say I've got a good idea. We've got a couple of people, beta people involved in this, testing out a couple of things, etc. So it's quite, it's quite, I'm finding it quite exciting. So let's deal with entrepreneurship first, right? Because one of the things I'm really worried about when I speak about entrepreneurship in the South African context is that I'm not going to go into all of the data, but it's very, very difficult in South Africa, even in a comparative perspective to other countries. If you look at the, the GEMS data, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data. And the primary reason for this is a very concentrated economy. Now you can, you can worry about the very concentrated economy. It's very important to do that. But you also need to think about how we actually begin to grow this economy and make it more equal. This is in case you guys are interested. I have a whole thesis on this. If you have some of these interests that I'm happy to, I'm happy to share this here. Secondly, hardship is glamorized. So if you go into it, if you use the hashtags, grinding, hustle, you know, I'll sleep when, I'll sleep when I die, et cetera. It's obvious, right? It's obvious. Thanks, guys. There's always not a successful outcome. So you need to know this here, the dream that you're thinking of. You've got to play most of the contingency that it's not going to be successful. That'll stay if you're a parent, which I am, because you've got to worry about your kids, et cetera. Right? So use everything I say with caution. This is no manual. This is no great way of reading. It's not the answer. I'm not telling you guys anything. All right? So if you spend enough time and spend enough money on the internet to recognize the yellow background of the red border. This is a psychological place. If you speak to internet marketing groups, this thing sells like crazy. All you need to do is put a buy button and a PS at the bottom and you're going to get tons of sales. Okay, so this is me in 24. I decided it's time to actually do something with work. I'm using WordPress since before Kubrick was the default thing. It was actually called, I think it was called WP, classic or something like that. Anyway, that's me in 2014. I said, let me start doing something. I need to transition from being a freelancer into actually developing products. So I put together a bit of money. I had lots of time. It was me after about six or seven months. I ended up, and I was running proposal desk. Having spent all the money I put in there, all the time, not a successful outcome. I did have sales. I was not able to scale this thing. But it's not a linear process. So it's not like you're just doing one thing. So you start out by like checking out 20 themes. You buy the really expensive theme because it's going to like sort out your schema. It's going to integrate with the slide. And if you have your, I need to have a copy of it. So you need to check out plugins. Then you're going to have so much choice in the world because you made a spreadsheet, a lot of spreadsheets. Well, I can merge categories across the thing. And obviously to get the plugin, you need to put some more money. So you buy plugins. And at the end of the process, you end up with no money, no product, and lots of wasted time. FML. Because I'm trying to sound like a man. But I mean, that's the reality of all time. That's the reality of a lot of people. And I say this with experience because I mean, in South Africa, I hate this experience of gauging or talking to you. So it might not be worth as much as something else. Maybe you're buying meaningless, right? Maybe you're putting down money for training. It's obscene when people train, charge for training. You're developing this system, that system. All right. So not a trade smidge. A ton of things. Because learning that ahead is not really good at CSS now. Really, really good at CSS, right? And it's actually very helpful. Not so bad. I wasn't... I had an affordable loss. I had an X amount of money. I didn't put it a little bit more in there, but I didn't like it with my shirt on. I mean, I wasn't like completely in the stuff. So these are key learnings. I'm not going to really go through this except to highlight the last... maybe the last three points, right? One is to focus on people's stuff. That's what I learned. To focus on what's in your control. Your time, your money. Then I think it's more important focusing on the outcome. The spreadsheet that you have calculating monthly return in revenue is enough.  But you have your control as much as you can do in every day. And your resources. Secondly, I suggest many ideas. I know this... what I mean is that the speed of this page is really quick once, but you need to test it quickly. You can't spend like six months on this idea. It would be like week. But I mean, if you're going to... onto this very interesting site called Twitch, we spoke to them. Over the last four weeks, there have been people like everybody who can do it for our startups. Very, very interesting to us as I told them. One of them, I'll come to a little bit later, but one of them, which I might not listen, is called Identity WordPress. Which actually uses your Google Docs to actually create a blog. That's amazing. Except the guy's main website, which is called Stars Store, is actually lots of WordPress. But I mean, it's like 24 hours a day. 24 hours a day. I think that's pretty amazing. Secondly, it's really less lonely. You need to join a group, some sort of group. I'm really trying to work this... so I take a Slack group day. I do something called Work Check. It's called Working Progress. It's made up of all people that are makers of bootstraps, etc.  I'm not afraid to do that. I'm like, they're all in no way to do this. I'm learning a hell of a lot. I mean, it's exponential learning over a period of time. What about others? I mean, today with my friend, we work together on a lot of stuff, about ideas of him. And your family and friends, amazing what resources you actually have. So that's my story. Let's just bring it up in a little bit more context, a little bit higher level. So this WordPress, in around 2003, that's a very scooping team, a people team. When at that point in time, we were thinking about, if you had a magazine theme, it was like totally cool. But for me, I spent endless hours working with something called Morning After. Early day, I was the only one who knows the theme called Morning After. Okay, so it's like the most awesome team you have is not only on WordPress.com, and I was hacking this thing. It was a guy in Germany who was a tutu-tutu-tutu for two big weekends. There's no around. Around 2008, there was a feature of a theme called the Gum Lord Special. Now that you can see the theme at the time. But what it was actually was about getting magazine-type themes into the space. Also about the time that you had companies like Woodleam, Studio Press coming up, Gravity Forms, etc. Now we are here in 2018. We have a customizer. We're able to sell products. We're able to do lots of stuff, causes, etc. Not sure what Gutenberg means in all of this going forward. I tied it out. I kind of like it, not like it, etc. But it's a way that's going. But there is a big question around the direction of WordPress going forward that I want to raise. So the second slide says, in the startup world, why is this happening in WordPress? What's happening actually in the startup world? In the beginning, just a little bit before 2003, before the dot-com power, it would say if you build it, they will come. And I just had to get some presentation. But that was the only matter. It was, let's scale this thing. Let's go. This internet is going to be huge and definitely crash. Once it crashed, people started to think about and think about what can we do better. And what they came up with was something called the lean stack. So I actually used that lean stack as a very proposal.  And basically what it said is that you need to first sort out your market, sort out what your market wants, understand their problems, et cetera. Once you understand that, you actually build the product. The idea being is that you wouldn't waste your time building something that nobody wanted and that's fit. So I think that's great for some organizations. But if you're a solo entrepreneur, in my experience, maybe somebody else implemented, maybe a better implemented, you might have a better outcome. I think you're going to end up losing both your money and wasting your time. That's my own opinion. Actually, if you look at the sort of the lean stack, the main book, at that time, called Four Steps of Perfidy, it goes through like about... I don't even know. It's more like 67 big steps, each of those steps are smaller steps. It was simply not acceptable in a lot of ways. And I lost support. I think I did it reasonably okay. And now I've discovered this thing called make, which is like a different sort of approach to doing things. Much less complicated, a lot more risky, you also need to be a lot more a lot more adventurous. And that's what I kind of want to speak to about here. But first we need to deal with one of the biggest issues that people have. That's what falls in your own ideas. So I have a huge problem. I didn't think about ideas like this earlier. You guys might be thinking four ideas is crazy. That's actually a short list of... I don't know how many. And it kind of looks something like this. I mean, there's like a whole lot of stuff going on, the criteria that you want to use. So here's your pain point. Can I get you a curtain? Is there a market? Can I blow the plug? Is there a passion for it? The expertise is a competition in the market. So we do things like Ethereum must be took a total addressable market, et cetera. That's way too complicated. So I think for me, you need to look at three things. One is that is there a customer? Are you solving something that's real? Do you have the skills on your own in my opinion? There's people all the same. So with a great perspective, designers and intelligence in the room, if you have a budget, let's say on the top, in some of you who work like 30,000, you don't have the mind to hire a good developer or a designer. You also don't want to take the risk of using market cases, et cetera, because you need to spend a lot of time. So this is my skill. And the third thing is are you having fun? There's a project that I ran which is essentially focused on getting tenders, electronic people. It sounds like a great market. And I wasn't having fun in this because I personally was not involved in that space, right? So that's just a way of summarizing it so that we can get a picture. You can point four here.  That's what you want to do. Point three, if you're having fun and you have customers, this is like a marketer's delight. So I've seen a lot of people who are really good at marketing able to scale this thing through pre-orders and then be able to actually outsource the development. So that might be an option. If you're having skill and customers, you might as well be working someplace. Because I mean, without being disparaging into people who are working full-time or whatever, I work full-time in the trade unions. I enjoy it up to a point and then just like, no, this thing isn't for me. And if you're having skill and you're having fun doing it, it's a hobby and that's great. And I mean, maybe that's all you need to do. This is about filtering your ideas. So I'm not saying you can use this. But what I am saying is that reduce the complexity of the criteria used to select the idea. That's the important thing. For me, it's this. I mean, for you, it might be something else.  So for everyone you add in there, it just increases exponentially. The number of possible iterations there are here. Step two is to bulk quickly. All right? Okay. So this word came. I love word presser. Getting hold of word presser is not the only option. There's whole platforms and hacks of plenty. We go through a couple of them. So I have seen in a lot of stuff people are linking up something called card, which is awesome. An air table. You can actually run a mini membership website on that. It's actually awesome. And it's almost free. Almost free. You can actually do it like really cheaply. If you do your courses, there's things like teachable, a rare thing to think. Also, most platforms, products, obviously Shopify is huge in South Africa as well. Blog, you have things like ghost and there's a whole lot of other stuff here. So it's not only word pressing. You need to find a mix of stuff that you're going to do. But I think word press, even if I look at all these options because I've done them, I think word press has something to offer that's probably better than all of these. First thing is your platform. Your name, your company name before that. If you don't come, get it in teachable, etc. What you find out that a lot of people have a word press blog and around the causes of teachable. Totally understand it because learning management system plugins, I believe in word press space are completely outpriced, in my opinion. They're outpriced, but also I think they do too much. There's a wide range of well-supported solutions. It might be a bit more expensive in the beginning, but for instance, if you want to do a job board, there's something called WP jobs manager. Also planning, also support for the company that owns word press uses that. There's tons of them. I've been paid memberships to pro. Also, I want to mention because it has some integration with pay fast, but there's other options. The third point I think enables a range of user experiences. So if you want one of these whole supply platforms pretty much stuck into how they do things, which might not be the best thing for you. Might not be the best thing for your students. There's a wide range of integrations, right? And you use what works.  It's totally, it's like a rabbit hole. You might not ever return. The most important thing I think is that it allows to take platforms. You can go from a block to a membership site. They're using some evidence so you're able to stack it up over a period of time. The final point is it allows you to build your own. There's a huge amount of confidence in seeing this thing work, seeing it out in the world, right? Okay, so now we get time for the acronym. This thing got a bit funny being there, it was done. This is a boot-framing work, right? So, I don't know where to summarize this thing because it's just like, you can go all over the place. And I think this last night, so this, this is called a boot-framing work, right? So it leads for the course. Why are you doing this thing? Always for regionality, putting it in inverted commas because we don't want to get too hung up on innovation, et cetera. So for example, if you're doing a low-cost segmentation of something that exists, so I'm thinking like maybe a learning management system plug-in. If you go in there and do a, if you develop, and you do a cheaper learning management system plug-in, I'd probably be interested in buying one. So this is yesterday a regular mention of DOS. DOS is great, and I've used it for the premium version, et cetera, but it's got something called SEO press. It's like $39 a year for unlimited websites. I bought the thing, I'm giving the thing a go. It seems to be working. So what that guy's done is awesome. He's given you unlimited plug-ins. At a low-cost price, it's essentially what people call a low-cost segmentation strategy. So I mean, there's lots of things that you do in terms of regionality. But the important thing is the solutions. You need to be actually solving something. You need to be actually solving something. And you need to have the product done. So that's really, really key. What I'm finding that you cannot be getting on an additional feature, an additional day, an additional brand. You just get the product done, see if people are going to send it out. What's interesting is people are extremely, extremely helpful. And whether you're making mistakes, in the nicest possible way, tell me your estimate. It's absolutely brilliant. No matter your context, you should really know there's something that's very not perfect. Obviously, it can't be perfect. There's something that's easily reported. People are in support here. Operations, critical. So yesterday we had this talk. We found it very interesting around how you automate your business using some CIM. It's very important to get a funnel, funnel going in your business and finances. Absolutely critical. So basically what you're doing is moving from the idea side to the operations.  And then the final one is about scale. So what's important here is you're not selling to hundreds of people. You're maybe not even doing Facebook ads. You're basically selling to a very small group of people trying to get, trying to see whether people will buy it, what pain points they saw. And the scale, there's different types of scale. It's an area that I'm incredibly interested in both as I'm talking here, but also as somebody who's interested in public policy, how do you actually take a good project and actually scale. And then ultimately you need to make a decision. So like I said, I mean, it's about getting through this. I think you can get through this entire loop if you have most of the product done in about seven days. You're going to work long hours. I was going to use another word, but you're going to work longer hours. So let's get back to WordPress. What does this all mean? Number one, use managed hosting. That would be hosting. It's very expensive. Right? Thank you with a range of issues for me. Security, caching, and at least for the ones I use, the hosting stuff often ends long time ago about what you need to do with the platform and people. And I also don't have a guess I think this way. I use it tremendously. I mean I think the support for me, I'm probably like, any of the guys who asks lots of questions, I'm probably that guy. I use them extensively and they've been very, very helpful. Use the default theme and default plugin settings. Right? So I believe all of us start here on PDCC. People on PDCC. Because the minute I go into that theme shop and I start at WordPress and I end up at elegant themes and newcomers and studio press, I'm going to go completely nuts because everything is so great. So I mean, I'm just bullying it on 2016. Do not reinvent the wheel. Incidentally, the 2016 thing is not my thing. It's actually a site that's shared with me. What's on that page? Again, for you, it's the totally weirdest dude you've ever met in the WordPress community. He believes in not spending any money on any plugins. And he sells a little notebooks around how you don't need to spend money on plugins. Totally fascinating. Create a reusable stack of plugins and themes. So if you're going to do many projects, try many things, you just need to have a stack of stuff. I know those plugins fairly well and hopefully they keep you in good state. Double bonuses if you can get a lifetime membership because you don't want recurring costs recurring costs going forward. Build a funnel. That's absolutely critical. So you need a way of automating this thing to some extent. As a solo person, you ain't going to be able to run around and customize service. I want to do that. I'm sure all of you guys want to do that. But you need some level of automation. Link it with your operating system. So things like email marketing, invoicing, etc. Very importantly, use a local install. So I have broken stuff. Like the day I needed to be needed to launch.  So I've learned that you need a local install. I mean, that's about using WordPress effectively. What are the shades of green? WordPress has changed this. I spent roughly, five minutes left. I spent roughly days upon days, actually, looking for the right color of green, because it just needed to construct the right way. Don't be, I want to be fun geek, because there's another thing that I want to do, is that I want to put in Google fonts, etc. Let's go with the default stuff. You're going to get out of this there.  Don't actually, in my personal opinion, how many, I don't understand the security plugins. It's beyond my level of comprehension. Those settings, etc. I mean, I, for instance, have been locked out of my website. So, I mean, I also see the hosting guys, they sort it out, and they're doing a fairly good thing. The other thing which I see people now doing is now anything. I mean, speaking to people, everyone will often, it's not like, I have this thing and they're like, okay, do you know much of the action talk? And they have no, I just want to figure it out. That's a great stuff to get caught. Don't, don't actually do that. So, forget, tell you, forget customized on your website. What you need to be doing is you need to be tailoring your product, your service to your customer. It's a key, it's a key mind, it's a key mindset. Now we come to whether you can scale this thing or not. I was supposed to be done by yesterday. I was going to present this great thing. So I did four projects seven days.  But I will be because I'm going to block this whole thing and people can people can follow on. So, this is like a three, three quick things. One is that I think is very important to sort out your ideas and to sequence them. So what I find with a lot of people solo-premiers, particularly if you can consult team or building a product, you're like wearing two hats and you have like two projects on there. You need to sort out exactly what it is you can do. Secondly, go for the sale. I'm a very, very reluctant sales person. That's part of the reason why I didn't make so much money on it. I did it for six months on a pizza, etc. I had like hundreds of users, but I wasn't actually making any money of this thing. And then the final thing is I hope you guys actually reach a point where you're able to scale it. But if you don't really scale it, you wouldn't have spent a year doing this thing and you wouldn't have spent tens of thousands of lands doing this thing. You might have spent like a few thousand then and it's a month, it's an excellent learning experience and you get paid for the next month. That's kind of like the make up philosophy. So if you guys want you can go to WC WPossible.com slash yet another WordPress newsletter. Sign up. Promote anything. I'll put in a code there saying WordPress WordCamp James Berg if you guys are interested in any of the products. And yeah, thank you so much for the invitation and thank you for listening.