I'm going to call bill Porter the city council transportation energy and utility committee meeting at five oh two move the adoption of the agenda as indicated. I would second. This version is 1026 version two to be exact. I think we have a second. Any discussion. I was in favor. I have an agenda motion on our 926 minutes. I will move the adoption of the minutes as written. I would second that. Any discussion. All those in favor. I choose this on the public forum. We have any members of the public. Andrea here in the room anybody else. I guess people start with, start with you. Do you want me to join the table? Certainly. Yeah. Of course the best place. I wish I knew that this were all the boots on the ground folks for the, for the city meeting. Thank you for being here. I have two things I want to make sure to say for public forum. One is about the birdbikes. I've been emailing with the city and as a bike advocate. Wanting desperately to support the birdbikes, but at the moment not feeling like I can. The way that the rollout has been without. Parking with the bikes and. I'm hoping to learn from that memo. More about what the plan is, but it feels like there's just some holes that haven't. Their advanced planning for this was inadequate to match what we need for the city to be supporting this or for me to be supporting it. So I'd love to see a concrete plan with the different partners. That's addressing parking. As well as blocking the places even just coming down here tonight. There's a, there's one blocking the hut from the bus stop. And so people can't, the wheelchairs or. Parks. Or a baby carriages. You can't get into those spaces. And so it's just. Makes me sad when I see that. So I know you're working on it. So thank you. And the other is this time of year, I always want there to be a clean sweep and operation clean sweep. I've asked for this many years. And I'm so glad that you're here because every time I ride over the greats Megan, I think of you in the way that it is like. In a good way. In a good way, which is I want these clear. So that. Our waterways are clear as well as the bike lanes. It's such an infrastructure thing. And I just really. It kind of is big head scratcher for why that hasn't been implemented. I know we've talked about this. Years and years. We've been talking about this. And I feel like the. Answer that I get maybe has been labor, but I don't know. But especially if the agenda is water. Quality and safety on the agenda tonight, then please consider working the budget to include street, sleeping with streets more regularly. I would personally like the streets to be swept the same way. The plows, plow the snow. That after a big snowstorm, just plows are plowing snow out of the way. And after the big rainstorms, which we know environmentally, we're into more giant rainstorms. That those are that the, the process is after the big rainstorm, the streets are swept to clear the, the waterways. So that's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about. The process is after the big rainstorm, the streets are swept to clear the silt and leaves and debris that land in our grates and on also on the roadway. So those are my two wishes. So thank you for the public forum. And for what you all are doing in the city. My birthday is next week. So perhaps we could do a speak for my birthday. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, just a quick update is we're going to be focusing on bird bites a lot next month. So feel free to come back. We'll be, bird will be here as we'll count. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Where's the memo going to be? Sorry. That that was online. I will send it to you right now. Thank you. So yes, it should be with the agenda. So you can get it as part of that. And if you want to sit over here. You can read it right here. Because it's like sitting right here. Thank you. Do we have any other members? Publicers who want to speak online. There's no one else online. Okay. Well, then. I'm going to go ahead and go with the public forum and leave to our deliberative agenda. The first item is. The tertiary treatment pilot. Waste. It's like a multiple. Right. That's our time that we have. Seven years. Seven years to deliver this. There's no times on the agenda. Oh, okay. How long do you need? Well, it's just a, how much detail you want. Us to go into particularly on the renewal and upgrades. We are, you know, trying to get the way of tops, but there is a lot of information. I know we've got the presentation to you a little late. I don't know if you had the chance to look at it or not. If that could inform. How much we cause on certain slides. This was the seven hundred and forty. Not so much that as the, we did send you, I think although it was one of the, this morning, the draft slide deck, which has a lot of material. Totally fine. If you haven't gone through it, I just wanted to know. Yeah. I mean, I think if we had, we could take 30 and 30 minutes. Yeah. And then it wasn't an official part of the presentation, but I was going to leave a little bit of time. If you have some visuals, if there's any questions about how things are going with the plan. So we're, second grade. You gave that, the step presentation.  Yeah. Were you on that? Oh, you were there. Okay. So you're. No, no, I'm good, but others might not be. Absolutely. And just, I got something from Maddie at nine fifty three today, the main tertiary pilot program. I do not see. There was a forward, maybe she ended up morning. I do not see any other communication from her. No, I don't see any other communication from her. No, I don't see any other communication from her. Nor do I see the link. She said it was part of the online packet. I think she put the. So, okay. So yeah, I, I. So I haven't. The long and the short. I would see that. I have not either. So, okay. No problem. So we're going to spend a little time talking about tertiary treatment, which is a portion of what ultimately. Martin will be talking to you about our overall larger. Yeah, facility, both renewal and upgrade. You know, this is really one of the chief components of the upgrade part of our project and not just putting the three plants back the way that they currently are. So just going back a little bit, you know, tertiary treatment is a process that targets phosphorous removal from wastewater or wastewater plants already do really, really well for the type of technology that they have, which is secondary treatment. But as we know, the lake, it has a lot of way too much phosphorus going into it. And then with climate change or. When the states were seeing these cyanobacteria. So in 2016, the state did a total maximum daily load of the lake and figured out exactly how much phosphorus for months needed to reduce in order to hopefully at least take care of the red part of that equation. There's not a ton that we can do about the little part, but you know, we got to focus on what we can do, which is how do we reduce the amount of nutrients going into the lake. And so I've given presentations, I know at least the market, the passage, I don't remember if you were there for the presentation we gave about our integrated water quality plan. Out of that team, DL Burlington had to look at getting phosphorus removal or phosphorus reductions on the storm water side, the separate storm water side and on the wastewater side. There's a process that the EPA has allowed for, which is to do integrated planning. They're starting to recognize that communities like ours have so many different regulatory obligations that we have to do. At the same time, that it doesn't make sense to just do this piece of paper and this piece of paper and this piece of paper. Let's put all the pieces of paper together and figure out what the best combination is. That will tackle the highest priority things in the right order. So as part of that process, we actually went through a whole big ginormous, many year alternatives analysis where we looked at the impacts of doing sort of enhanced phosphorus removal at the wastewater treatment plant and how much, how many pounds we could get from that and what it would cost. And that's the sort of sector, the first scenario versus on the far right side, the third scenario, which is, hey, is it even possible to get all of our phosphorus production via just storm water? You all know I love storm water or storm water management. There are a lot of benefits to doing storm water things. Is it possible? The answer is in theory, yes, it is feasible. Our target that we have to reduce overall, the city is about 1100 pounds. You can see that a phosphorus centric approach, sorry, a storm water centric approach, it is possible to get us above that 1100. The problem with that is that it is more expensive and certainly has longer term operation and maintenance costs. And a lot of the things that we were going to be leveraging are changes in human behavior, which we know is very, very hard to enforce and get compliance. Whereas on this, on the portfolio one side, we're really talking about capital investments, putting things at ends of pipes that we can measure and whatnot. So at the end of the day due to cost and also the fact that portfolio one gives us a much needed buffer. So that 1100, that target of 1100 pounds is an average annual target.  And so we actually need a bit of a buffer, more of a buffer than the storm water alternative could provide. So portfolio one, which is adding tertiary treatment, gives us that buffer. And it's also overall less costly. And the difference between one and one B, I mean, one and one B is really the major difference is how much we sort of turn the dial on additional storm water retrofit. So one is doing the sort of nothing bare minimum, but doing just the regulatory requirements of storm water. Whereas one B is doing some more things and we're still looking at those and still trying to figure out with the state how much of a buffer we need to make sure that we don't get into trouble at all with climate change and with the way that the. But this is sewage, this is wastewater and storm water. No, so this is just on this lower level is all separate storm water. And our obligations for combined sewer are in that red line. So we will have to, there's sort of no negotiating about what we have to do as far as our long-term control plan. We have a new 12 72 order, which lays out how much impervious we need to manage within the combined sewer system every single year for the next 10 years. The biggest project that we will be advancing in the near term is the Pine Street CSO storage tank, which we are planning on putting underneath Kellyanne Park. This CSO here is the most frequent CSO, the most voluminous, and so is the easiest place to go. The tank may be bigger than what we thought it was going to be in this scenario because of the flow development. So we are quickly recalculating, you know, making sure that we know how big that thing needs to be and what Hula needs to do in order to make sure it's not going to be exacerbating that CSO commission. So because we, when we implement, this is just the target that 11th and 3rd approximately count the target, and you can see with this, we would be meeting 235% of Burlington's annual average target. However, somebody would say, well, why are you, why are you going above and beyond that? You don't have to do that well. And the fact is we do have to do that well because of those wet weather variability. So the next stage, once we realize tertiary is sort of where we think Burlington needs to put its money, is that we work with our consultant to do a pilot sweep and to evaluate the ability of selecting technologies to go down to the limits of phosphorus removal technology, which is point water. Currently, main plant average phosphorus concentration discharge is about 0.28. So it's got to speed it pretty low. And then we wanted to evaluate those under a variety of conditions, not just when everything's happy and go lucky, which is what sort of the second state is, but hydraulic stress. So that's when the plant sees those excess flows and then also solid stress. And solid stress can happen when the process isn't quite so happy, right? There are times, days and times, same day dumped in our system where the symptom will release more solid than it's typical until we ran through all of those stairs. And you're doing it on the current load to the systems, but were they also projecting? I know that there's a lot of load to the breweries from the breweries that we got. Yeah, so that's all still there. We've been working and generally directionally telling them you're going to have to do more, but nobody's substantially done more. So we're at the peak of what we think organic looting would be. There's a whole separate study and program that are kind of developed for industrial free treatment, which would actually work with both existing high-strength dischargers as well as future high-strength dischargers to make sure that they are implementing best management practices to get their strength of their ways down as low as possible, which will free up capacity. The immigration with solid stress. It shouldn't help the number of times a year that we are having things like solid stress when they are due to high-strength waste. There are other reasons why we can have solid traverse. A secondary goal, so not required, but we're trying to make sure that we can find additional buffer if necessary, was to evaluate the ability of those technologies to potentially reduce phosphorous during wet weather flow. So tertiary is mostly targeting just the dry weather daily flow, but some technologies are also able to handle like this Randloff and this extra phosphorous that might hit during the wet weather event. So they went through a request for proposals. They found three different technologies, all of which had very different approaches. Cameron, Mark, were you able to do this? I did. I went down with Kirsten. Thank you. So three different technologies. Violia, yeah, it's hard to see, but Violia is the active balsam flocculation. So it gets the sand particles to stick to the sticky phosphorous particles and helps more of them settle out than usual. And then there's a whole process to sort of strip the sand off and then reuse it. And then there was nexum, which uses activated, sort of reactive filtration. So it kind of supercharges the sand particles, coats the outside of them with chemicals. So the sand particles instead of just physically filtering are actually endurbing phosphorous onto it and pulling on to more of it. And then they have a backwash process to kind of regenerate the sand. And then the simplest one on the far right is aqua-robics, which is really just a true, there is a chemical addition to get the particles to be bigger, but then it is a Mr. Coffee filter where it is just simply filtering things out. And then there is a backwash procedure to, it looks like shag carpet, maybe as a child of the 70s, that's why I like it, it's blue shag. And it frees up those filtration sites by going through a backwash cycle. So the cool thing is all three technologies met that goal of achieving a average of less than 0.1 milligrams per liter during dry weather. However, aqua-robics, Mr. Coffee, performed the best overall during the steady state, getting the lowest average. They were able to get down to 0.048 on average versus the other two. And it had the most consistent performance. It didn't do as well as I think the active flow during storm events, but it still did dang well. Like well enough that if we need to go in that direction, it can still do that. So the graph- The actual, you know, the ability to, during the storm events is on the, is it- It's not on this graph, it's on the next graph I believe. So on this graph, you're seeing the influence, total phosphorus, that purple. And then you're seeing the target at 0.1. And then the aqua-robics is in green. Feolia is in blue and nexum is in orange. And you can see, except for that first day when they were kind of optimizing, the disc filters were able to get down low and stay low. Right? So that means for most of the year, it's going to be taken back. If you look at, this is just aqua-robics. So stripping out the other ones. And you can see the different types of conditions, the steady state, the hydraulic stress, and then the steady state with that one peak, the vortex blend. So the influence is in blue with the solid circle and the effluent, that's all right. The influence TP is in green with the solid circle and then the effluent total phosphorus is with the open circle. And then you see that limit again. So that line down on the bottom, right? It dives down. It stays down below 0.1 even during the steady state, during the hydraulic stress. And it goes above during the vortex, which is totally fine because the conditions are different, but it is still reducing the difference from that top peak to that low peak. It's still knocking it down substantially to where it would be. They also happen to be the most cost-effective option. If you do wade through the reports, should you choose to do so? You'll see from both the capital costs as well as the lifecycle cost perspective, do note that in the cost proposal, those members are very preliminary and they don't include the potential costs. The other outside costs of pumping wastewater to the system, it's really just talking about the system itself. What would it cost to buy this thing and put it on site? And some of what Martin's working through with our other consultant is where are we putting it? How do we get water to it? All that fun stuff. Are there differences between the three in terms of those other inputs? The other inputs. I don't. The assumption is, well, the state's open water, which may get to the most expensive water, so I don't want to be kind of set that one aside, but when we compare the filter one to the only active flow of ballasted sand, we assume that both of them would need to have probably a pump that goes from the end of the process. That's when it needs to get the tertiary filter. There's a chance that it would be great by gravity if we go through without an extra pump station, but we're given existing conditions, so we need to assume at this point in time that we do need to talk to them. For both of them. For both, right? Same. It would be the same. Yeah, you'd be grabbing it after the secondary clarifiers. And before, it's not, it's before we just... Yeah. Because it'll help a little bit with this infection because it's gonna make the water damage cleaner. But yeah, we're assuming right now and certainly we'll be keeping an eye on that, making sure that those external costs would be roughly the same and so that we really can be looking at the cost of these things. So even though the number I think in the report is like nine million or something, the cost of pumping and pump stations can be significant. So right now we're using like a $20 million number as a conservative estimate for what this would cost. And so it will be part and I'm gonna hand over to Martin in a second. And one of the things that's important when we talk with the community, you know, this is going to enable us to meet our T and Gail obligation and meet it relatively quickly rather than taking 20 years, right? In the next five years. We did it. We took care of our phosphorus obligation. The challenge is the lake is a bathtub and phosphorus is still coming down the Winooski. As much phosphorus came down the Winooski and the flood as in all of 2022. And so it doesn't mean that we're not going to have cyanobacteria blues and we have to wrestle with that. Because I wish I could sell this by saying, hey, if you give me this much money, beaches are going to be open and that's just not a triple statement. So any questions on that piece? Then the numbers, they said with a 30% contingency, the cloth media one was 75, 79. Oh, so 7.5. Yeah. But then the additional cost of that's an older number with all the inflation. And then with the pumping, we hope it's going to be less than the 20 million, but that's sort of what we're holding as we go forward and talking about the big, big, big project. I guess the other question I had with, is there other money that's available for this through? I'd say that I have in the last, I don't know, however many years I continue and I will continue to put in congressional delegation requests or if they're not going to pay for the big thing, because a lot of times the amount of money that's available for renewing aging infrastructure, that's not as sexy as some of the other things that the money is going to, even from the Biden infrastructure bill, is a very small amount compared to the overall need in Vermont. But I'm hopeful that we may be able to sell this particular phosphorus piece money who wants to have their name on it. There's something under Lake Health, which was a big lady initiative. Yes, that's why I have sent it to him many, many times and I hope that new folks will be willing to listen, especially as we get more meat on the bones, right? Especially, I'm sorry. There used to be grant money available. In the 1990s, there was specific grants for phosphorus removal and they filled the way. But lake-wise, I think if I remember from the previous presentation on this, we're like 11% of the problem. Yes. Whereas the rest of the, you know, the agricultural sector and some of the other stressors on the lake are putting in a little bit of rest. So we're spending on nine or $20 million to do, take 11% out. Yeah. I mean, I think we have to do it by statute, right? Yeah, there's no, there's no getting out of it. And I think our other selling point is that this is something we can do, do soon and, you know, like get the process started, get the lake. Hopefully, cause it's going to take many, many years, even if the phosphorus faucet gets turned off, it's going to take a long, long time for the lake to rebalance. And, but the general funding mechanisms for these are bonding as revenue bonds and rates. And while in the rates, we have the capacity because they're revenue bonds. Correct. So it's not, it's not generally. We are not limited by the, the funds. Yeah, right. So, I don't know. So I mean, it's actually not directly related. So we can just take this, you know, just make a comment about it, but the heat that is generated at our plants and the methane that's generated, I will be very curious to know what we are doing with both of those sources of potential energy right now. And the, you know, any thinking that people have had about the future and its use in the big world that we've got around reducing the carbon. Yeah. So we participated with the ED and the district energy before early on and looked at few things at wastewater that we were really excited about, but unfortunately did not be out of the McNeil option, which would. I don't need you to like make a long presentation longer, but I do. I know you are. That's why I'm sorry to talk about that. And I am, I am. And I am geek. I am equally as good. I'm trying. This is a, this is a, I want to flag this as an essential conversation to have. And if we can have that and get information about that, even outside of a meeting, it would be in a sort that it would be even, even if it were a special session or it was something that staff did. Well, okay. Anyway, thank you. I'd be happy to talk about that. I would love it. Yes. I would love it. Okay. So. Given the timing of all the other stuff. You know, so the next part of the presentation is talking about this big renewal and upgrade project and, you know, what just refreshing everybody's memory is they're like, wait, I thought you got $30 million. I thought that's all you needed. Right. And I certainly tried throughout all that. This is not all that we're going to need. This is the first part. I think what we ultimately needed was probably even more than when I was saying those statements, because what happened is. And in late 2020, once we got the upgrade of those failed systems, the disinfection in the system under their way, under construction, Martin and his team started being like, okay, now let's go back to that list. Let's go back to how much money we have remaining in the clean water resiliency plan and make sure that those cost estimates were good, redo those cost estimates and then also make sure that the remaining money was truly spent on the higher priority items. And when we started looking at that and our engineer had kind of done a pretty simple risk calculation. Certainly in 2018, you can see we had systems that were already. Failed or about to fail. And after we spend the money, the money on those were obviously moving things out of the F category, but we still have a lot of stuff in the C and the D. And with every year that we go, more stuff that was in the A and the B moves further down into the lower categories. And so when we started to look at, well, even after we spent this money that the motors gave us in 2018, what is our risk score going to look like? And we're seeing, we still have a lot of stuff in CD and F. And so what we started to see is that the number of systems and their placement costs for the remaining higher systems was so much significantly higher than the remaining bond money. And we really were sort of had to come to this reckoning that we really needed to do this comprehensive process. We couldn't just do this piece and this piece and this piece. We needed to hit this pause button. We'll get a big picture and figure out the slide puzzle of everything moving. And ultimately, our message is that we believe that Burlington deserves both resilient wastewater treatment systems where the risks of failure are as minimized as possible. And then we need to make sure that these are modern systems. We need to make sure that we are doing the absolute best on environmental quality that they are resilient against flooding and other natural disasters that we are addressing potential capacity issues, especially now in this last year where the growth, the chains that were maybe holding back growth have been released, which is not something that we were necessarily thinking about before. There's a lot of safety issues. Our workers are in challenging work conditions. They're in places that are not adequately ventilated and the needed investment to make those safe is really hard. And then the last piece is, you know, the plant is not beautiful smelling. Where are the places that we could make some investments that would make it more consistent and more compatible with the things that are going on in the waterfront. And with that I will pass it on to Martin, my engineering manager. Thanks Megan for doing the beginning of the presentation. So the work that we currently have money for through our 2018 clean water resiliency bond is state zero. And we are in preliminary engineering for stages one and two. And then we also have stage three on the radar. So these are all what we see as important needs for our wastewater treatment facilities. And I'll just jump into the next slide, which stage one at a time. So it's stage zero. Again, we have funding for this is under this final design right now, which is 2023 to 2024. Construction is in 24 to 26. And the cost estimate is currently $12.8 million. And this is what we call the headworks upgrade. So the basically the reason for this improvement is doing work on facilities that need to get done no matter what the future, you know, whether we get bonding or what the future forecast is this equipment needs to get replaced. It's at the end of its useful life. It's at the beginning of the treatment training, solids, grease and big sediment from the wastewater stream, which protects downstream equipment and makes the process or efficient. So this is sorry that I was just pointing out the black boxes around the areas of the main plant where that's occurring. And then the other two plants. So this is at all three plants. The east plant is on the Riverside Ave. And that's what we are showing on the left. The yellow highlight is around the building where the headworks is there. And at the north plant at the end of North Ave. That's the building to those are facilities are actually very similar designs. So they have similar upgrades planted those two smaller plants. And so just kind of quick highlights of some of the falling apart infrastructure that would be touched for stage zero. We have some gates in the headworks building at main plant on the left in disrepair there in the middle. We have a screening equipment. The number of pictures actually are screened completely taken apart and being worked on. That was six months ago or so. And the bottom is just you can see half the dump strollers has been patched together with welded metal because it's all corroded. Similarly on the right just there's a lot of patches broken equipment that is going to be prepared as part of this project. And one one risk that we're facing right now is our Mr. P. Guy who is not a diver of these plants. It was retiring in the next six months to a year. So the advice that it will take us to come. Say hi to Steve. So stage one as well as stage two is what we would be planning to go to for bond in November 2024. Stage one is in preliminary engineering phase right now with design in 2024 to 2025. Construction would be planned in 2025. To 27. And this is the big cost one, the biggest cost one, I should say at one hundred twenty one million dollars. So this one is not just like a lot of the other ones replacing aging equipment, modernizing, making things safer and better, but it also includes significant upgrades at the plant. And the reason that we're doing upgrades is to increase capacity. There's a few reasons. And the biggest driver for increasing capacity is bringing these plants over to the main plant. So basically turning it into a pump station and bringing it over here that that saves over a 50 year lifespan looking at it that saves significant money. And the big driver for looking at that was the disrepair that was that is going on with equipment and infrastructure at the plant. And so there's a plan with no longer function as a waste water agreement. It would function as a pump station. So it would still go there and then it would get pumped to main plant over consolidating resources because it's really pretty small to have free plants and to have to upgrade free plants every 20 years at the long-term cost. I think the last time they did the upgrade our understanding is that they did look at this and for whatever reason we can't figure out exactly why it fell off the plate other than 1991. 1991 because it already was a 52 million dollar probably the greatest and largest to play out. So I think that's in the case because it is going to cost us now a little bit more money but if you look at it over time it will save the rate payers time and it will ultimately get better water quality because we're going to be investing tertiary treatment and better treatment here consolidating not consolidating staff. We think we'll probably need the same number of staff but we'll be able to have them focus on one plant instead of the two plants. And so we get we have another slide later. We want to talk more about that. Yeah. No, it's fine. Yeah, I think I think it's important to understand why we're increasing it is because we're bringing East Plant over. And so the other piece of that is that we have a permanent flow value at the main plant and then we would be adding on the permanent flow value from East Plant and at the main plant currently we're you know getting close to the limit of the permit. At East Plant we have more space maybe more than 50% of the flow there is still available with the permanent. So that value that's an important thing we're not going to throw that away. Bring flows here. We're never going to throw away what we have permitted because that's not only valuable it'll add the capacity here which brings it has flexibility to where growth will happen in the system and kind of tastes some of that fear away of like okay if someone's developing downtown or if they're in the East Plant watershed it's all going to the same place where the plant is now larger and able to move it. And the permits can be adjusted to increase without. They can be added. If we were going to go for an overall increase so if say we weren't doing this but we're like look there's going to be more growth in any plant we're going to build a better plant to increase capacity and then go through the process where we get our permanent limit increase that is that is challenging and that may happen to have to happen someday in the future when you know like really to this full of 15 story buildings but like we believe this combination is going to be appropriate for this next 20 year pattern. Does that make sense? And again we're already going to be getting a lot of phosphorus removal from the stuff that's coming to main plant by bringing the East Plant over then we're also going to be getting even more phosphorus pounds above and beyond sort of what we have to get. We're going to be getting better water quality. And so the big tanks kind of show there's two things in Terpinspear area. There's the circle of the upper portion that's a new fifth secondary clarifier and there's also tankage in the parking lot of Terpinspear in there which is aeration tanks a placeholder for what we would need there because we're also going to be adding equalization tanks and tertiary equipment. So the exact location of where all those new structures are going is kind of a black box that we're putting there. We just don't know exactly all the locations at this point. And so in the parking lot that would mean that you would reduce the size of the parking lot and increase the size of the wastewater. Yes. And interestingly, the Perkinspear you may recall this used to be what used to be wastewater land and when it was conveyed to parks think goodness somebody didn't MOU that we have a copy of that says if wastewater ever needed it back that technically we have rights. Obviously we are collaborating and coordinating with our partners at Park & Rec to see how the salt goes and make sure it's the minimal impact because it is a waterfront building. Do you know if this was anticipated in the Perkinspear master plan? It was. We were on the committee then. I don't remember the wastewater. They didn't put it on there but what they did is they made sure that they weren't programming buildings there. That the only thing they were going to program there was parking so that it would be talking about something like parking removal which is still going to be an issue for them and that's what they were going to do. I don't know. I don't know. I just want to thank parks for being a cooperative player. This is not an easy conversation. I feel for them and they have been good players in this conversation. And so the bike path which runs right now in between there to the sea. That would be it. If there's a tunnel right there. We're going to go underneath. It's like a plastic tunnel. It doesn't go through there. It doesn't go through there anymore. It's only on this outside. Part of the conversation with parks is to figure out with our plan how the more permanent reroute the bike path. Currently the reroute is temporary. They want to see what we need then we can work with them to figure out what the permanent path is. But the bulk of the path is staying the same and we're comfortable. And hopefully it's going to be slightly better selling because the... Before we move on the last improvement that is something that's not there currently is covers and order control on these primary tanks. The two ones that we have there that is probably the biggest source of order that's still remaining on site. We don't need elimination of order at our facility but significantly improved. Better than us just thritting the air to the current thing. So here some quick photos again of items that we'll be touching for stage one clarifier mechanism with the upper left. Those are corroded and need replacement. We have the electrical over the lower left corner. We're doing major electrical upgrades. The aeration tank here various photos of cracks and valves that have holes in it and then we have a pump on the right with holes in it there. That's a big influence on it. Stage two this is also what we're proposing for November bond code. This is the east plant pump station conversion project as well as highest priority items at the wastewater treatment facility. It's currently in the preliminary engineering phase design would be scheduled for 25 to 26 with construction starting in 26 to 28 and the cost estimate is $30 billion. So I think we covered most of the kind of reasons and benefits of bringing the east plant over but this shows you know we would be putting in a new pipe essentially from the east plant on Riverside Ave all the way down to Battery Street and the main plant. So it's a significant right-of-way project and that's where the cost is as well as with the new pump station equipment at the east plant. Whether you do it now or later the impact on travel we didn't have a paving of Riverside I can't remember really. It has probably been paving recently. We've done our absolute best to try to coordinate things with paving but they just don't line up sometimes and they don't line up. Riverside is a little better than others but honestly VTrans is paving on about an 11 year average of the city. And the route to get to Battery Street is what? Riverside to to the north. So we're digging up when you ski again. It looks like we're out of town. Sorry. One of the things that we're when and where we can one of the things we looked at because we have pipes that also need to be renewed is one method is to pump it up to the top of the gravity system and then let the gravity system take it but we want to make sure we're not causing problems with existing neighborhoods or we already have some constrictions so we don't know that we're going to be able to do that. We're hoping we can do that because then this project kind of tackles two issues with one with one project. It is possible we're going to have to do a force main all the way to main plants to make sure we're keeping capacity within the existing pipe. So that's there isn't benefit to having a force main go all the way there. I mean one of them is that we don't need to potentially impact the the challenged water like collection system that's at the bottom of the bottom of the battery. That's where there's a bottleneck where the bottleneck is because we don't want elevation strengths there. We have a leak and so we can obviously how to design that would be pretty complex potentially and then if we brought the force main the plant we could bypass the headworks initial built because the pump station also had that screening for it so that water that we're pumping doesn't have grit and big material so you put it right into this the next step and the treatment. Not double treating it. So we've already screened it. Why would it through the same system again and main plant which is what would happen if we did it put it to the gravity system. So they're looking at those. And you're aware of the scoping study for battery stream. Yes. Okay so the integration. Yeah. Thanks Doug. I've been really good about hey we're going to have this project going on like what are you going on in the next five to ten years and then trying to be able to hold the meeting in our department with the UDCO as well as our two different groups. Yeah. They are also there. So this is where the pump station would apply. Everything to the upper part of the screen would be obsolete and demolished. We would keep the clarifiers in the building for the pump station and that's just a kind of overview of what this plant would turn into. Next slide. So also we have our north plant which tends to do well except for the siphon. That plant does generally well but we can't forget about its aging infrastructure because it does have significant improvements that are needed. So just the highest priority ones for stage two is what we would be focusing on. Stage three this one should be pretty quick but so it's not in preliminary engineering that we don't have currently a bond schedule for it. We would be planning to do preliminary engineering in 2060, 2070 designed in 2070 and then construction in 2029 and the cost estimate is $80 to $1,000,000. Next slide. So we would be touching a lot of different spaces at the treatment plant. Basically this is a project where we would be knowing old infrastructure bringing up the code replacing obsolete equipment and one addition is another item in Perkins Pier. Again this is to be determined in the exact location but it's a colored sludge storage tank to help improve our biosolids handling versus gamertouch. Yeah and then so similarly in North Plant for our next slide it's touching all of the spaces there to do the remaining major pieces of equipment that we update. That's just some quick photos. These are the stage three items that we may aren't on the immediate future but they are not doing that creating the pipes and pumps on the left and the middle there that are corroded as well as eating equipment on the right. Just in case you didn't believe us that these are crazy. And then we haven't talked to you about all of the other things. Thank you Martin but we're obviously looking at our sewage pump station by pump station. We've upgraded two of those. There's I think seven to nine more that we need to tackle like a couple of them have come off the list because of some things we've been able to do in-house. We're continuing to look at our collection system so the system of sewer pipes we've got some more infrastructure improvements number of outfalls that are in vast need of repair and potentially affecting slurpsability as well as the combined sewer overflow mitigation that I mentioned. We can't forget drinking water. The drinking water plant was last upgraded in 1984. It doesn't have the same harsh condition that wastewater does but also needs investment and likely modernization. Something that's coming sooner than even that is the upgrade and replacement of the 1867 pump house up on Main Street. That's the pump it's the house that holds the pumps which takes the water from the reservoir to the elevated tanks which is what needs the water pressure at the hospital very critically important. There's also some improvements on the reservoir itself and it's in need of a new roof to make sure that water remains uncontaminated and then we need to continue chipping away at our system of very old water pipes and water valves in particular. Those are not included in the 241 billion that you find. No. Those numbers that we talked about are the wastewater plant but it doesn't include tertiary. At least we didn't bring that on the side. You know we've been talking about the last time as Jean noted the last upgrade in the 1990s was 52 million even just if you look at inflation and that number I probably need to update with last year's inflation you know it was about a hundred million dollars just for kind of replacements of things what we are doing these upgrades is interesting with this additional cost. I think as you know we're committed we know some of us live in Burlington that this is going to fall to the rate payers and that this is going to be a significant increase to the rate and so we actually had a meeting with PED today we are trying to flip over every walk about how we can do even better on our affordability program right we thought it started very incrementally with some of the lowest income folks and how can we potentially to our upper lower income or lower middle income because there is going to be some pitch points with that so just know that we are continuing that conversation and as we start to really talk with the community about these numbers and true numbers for bond votes we're going to hopefully have either some solution already figured out or at least solutions that we are working on that would be put in place before these rates would actually come into play I had questions about what you're like so I understand do you want to bring a bond in November 2020 that's currently what we're targeting is sort of when we think we would be ready and that also we can't really wait longer than that because some of the stuff really needs to happen soon when do you anticipate a couple of the council's work session that basically this is going to change that's to give a preview we're talking about some really giant numbers bigger than the high school that we did we're working at 121 is it 121 121 plus 30 we thought we could decide as a community to take multiple bytes we think that at least our initial cut of the proposal is to go from one and two at the same time because we're doing things in one that relate to what we would do and if we're somehow not going to do two then we could be thinking a little enchilada I think there's compelling reason to have that initial work session in my mind during prior to town meeting day so that the various folks who are discussing the future of Burlington and what so priority has have a full knowledge of this information because this is a major policy discussion and so our interest is to get this moving quickly to be discussed so what has been your conversations with C. N. O'Shea we've had high level conversations about this with her with the administration the mayor as well you know there were discussions about trying to get this on town meeting day 2023 2024 but that was that was a couple months ago and where we are now is realizing that the size of this frankly our ability to hit all the key stakeholders and have a robust community discussion really requires us to be home job effort and just to put it into context are you aware of competing other departmental needs and what departments those might we have been discussing primarily with the ED about some of their needs and interests but I don't know if you're referring to something specific no I'm not I don't know I just want to make sure I didn't know if there was this particular thing no I got nothing municipal solid waste collection will not be brought by me this coming time not right now we'll fight that battle and those are general funds anyway so this is it's different than the airport might be the water and wastewater are two different yes but it is possible what I can't convey with that other slide is that it is possible in November that we would be going for water and wastewater the water one would be much much much smaller but still not small it would be bigger than our $8 million one that we did because the reservoir alone I think is a camera being priced on that it's like 10-12 it would be it would be separate but it would be pitched as part of an overarching water our thought we're welcome to hear your thoughts it's on the same pair so I think that the great payers would prefer to understand package instead of us coming multiple different ways okay that's good to know yeah earlier it's better earlier even if we don't have I guess that's my tension I'd like to have everything figured out I'd like to not talk about it until I have the affordability program but I also think people need time to marinate in this I think definitely we're talking about even though it's revenue pays property tax and electric bills, water bills it's all about affordability so we just need to have that discussion I can echo that but I and I think actually the most important thing when you're in that stage is to be very clear about the problem statement to be very clear about the potential benefits and to have a little bit more in the affordability world to be able to talk to people about the way that people who are really stressed are going to be able to afford it and I won't go on a soapbox but you know my socialist self is not alone in the city in the way that the stratification is affecting you on the housing costs so very very important for that to be in fact more important than whether it is 121 or 130 I don't disagree I think it's hard because I haven't been working other than the goals of affordability being able to say exactly what the rate might be and therefore how much we have to do the affordability does tie into the cost so that's where it's a little bit iterative but I hear what you're saying and at least giving examples again one of the cool things that came out of the conversation with BET today is that they had talked about the power and PGS were using paying DCF to do their verification because one of the things is right now our current affordability program leverages existing federal programs so somebody shows us proof that they qualify for field assistance we give them a water discount but if we want to get into helping people who aren't on those programs who still need help how do we do that and you know I don't know if there's other city departments who are talking about affordability is there opportunity to partner with other city departments you and I have had that conversation before but if there's not I think you know we may just go ahead and leave the charge because we need to help people and then this is the retro piece it's structurally not we're not able to help them and there's one example that I know of where a community and it may be in a state where the electric utility is not regulated like ours is where basically the water water resources gives money to the electric utility to offset their electric bill in an amount that would be equivalent if they gave their water bill so it's sort of like this pass-through of helping the people directly versus giving money to the landlord and having them with just their rates so there are some creative ideas but they are few and far between there's that program and there's DC program and everybody else is struggling with the record thing yeah sure yes the more that you can involve people like CAO Shad that you can raise the problem so that we can get good minds to be thinking about its solution more that we can be reaching out to state agencies that may have good ideas and also folks like public assets institute yeah they are good they are good I'm not trying to rush us I'm trying to manage us how much time do you need for the sewer oh do you want me to we can just go to the last slide yeah no I'm good with continuing if I go sure I would love I love the idea that there's some fine savings of a payment project and the rerouting that I feel like as a great payer I'm getting a bonus a two per so if that messaging comes to us as well as an older offender really wanting to feel like we're giving you some attention to the things that have been neglected those are some messages I would love to hear thank you so much for your presentation the problem has stopped responding your comment Jean I'm good with wherever you want to go I only have three more items I'd like to get us out of here can I give you the verbal absolutely there's a pipe broken in the river we all know that we did a lot of really awesome things to build a temporary station and keep sewage from going in the river we are currently under construction and we're actually going back to the council board of finance and city council is coming because there is already a change order because things already got complicated but we are fixing the pipe at least temporarily banding in the river to get us through the winter because we don't want to run the temporary station through the winter we can but we do not want to separately we are and that's FEMA eligible at least that 75% hopefully at 90% that might be because Vermont has the threshold to reach the 90% separately we have STAN tech we are working with them to develop a scope of work inside a contract for the how do we get the pipe out of the bottom of the river option the two options being directionally drill actually two pipes to be modern in this section or potentially getting the whole thing out of the river building a permanent pump station and enforcing to two north plants yes also and one of the cool parts with our meetings with FEMA as it does seem like that would be FEMA eligible I wasn't sure early on if they would be willing to fund the right thing but everything we're hearing from them makes it sound like they would fund something because that would also be essential costs particularly the force main part and if we do the directionally drill it would handle the process but it doesn't handle that long section that's in cold chester that's why it's going to be a problem but it's in wetlands and forests and I don't really want to dig up what it's about so that's good and also if anybody wants a more detailed discussion of it there was one at the board force up at NPAOS which is recorded and available and they got called sewer woman sewer woman of the year which is in my hope now people think they can be able to go over grace and rain to other things thank you how many other questions from the committee before we close this no thank you very much it's exciting and daunting what's ahead of us thanks team water next our agenda is a engineering standards which I'm assuming so so as the engineer my first thing was the fact that we have so many streets that are unaccepted in a state that today we wouldn't accept in this whole condition because there are standards that we're holding people accountable to how a street should be built or even be dedicated and accepted and under the zoning process there was 1960s standards which no one was following and it didn't make any sense and I think in some step along the way zoning decided to open those standards of practice in some sort of things which were reasonable but as the entity cannot or they have a lack of standards in place that holds people accountable to these things because the experience has been being treated well understand this that the law will come to the street it'll be built to some standards practice no inspection and the very stakeholders that are prepared to take it over because it comes to the cost comes to the cost of the taxpayer comes to the cost that people are living on the street work hard to develop a process and are suffering from it so what I talked about stakeholder what works in the roadway what works sidewalk fire apartment in terms of fire access parks department in terms of their trees all the utilities that are normal to a street are water supply sewer store and all those things so we really want to get to a place where we have people accountable to develop a process even if they're anticipating to dedicate a street we know at some point in time because the streets built and people die and move on that street will likely be in our home some day later so we are wanting to hold them accountable to that and be clear about those standards so there's no argument of time for a developer to process that is the way I would also say to you that as a city working within the framework of state thorough government there's an expectation that we follow the standards of practices and in some form we're going to continue as a partner in developing these systems and we want to make sure that what they invest in makes sense and is a solid engine standard of practice so whether it be trans grants or whether it be FEMA we as a city are elected to adopt those standards of practice along with kind of over our chain what is our specific interests and needs that exceed that within our city so thankfully members of my team have worked very hard to kind of carve out a process of creating structure to that process in terms of how it's organized but also gathering up those details specific to that and Julia and Mary and Laura have been working very diligently to not just capture what is above ground on the street but working with some of our largest resource people we're going to pull it in when they are busy we're busy but this is a good starting point to what will be a framework of information that can be used to do what I was talking about and without a question can you expect that all those standards of practice established in this these specifications but I think it's a great start and Julia and Laura can kind of speak to it more detail but I'm going to enter it quickly once they're done with their presentation Yes, thanks Norm That was an excellent intro My name is Julia Sackey I'm the Works Engineer I've been working with many folks in this room to develop these standards and to talk about tonight we'll go over the history of standards in Burlington Norm had on that a little bit what, why of the standards we'll talk about a few different examples of both drawings and specifications and then finally we'll talk through this process we've outlined for actually adopting and updating engineering standards so the history largely started in 2011 when the city adopted the transportation master plan so this is the document that looked at our entire street network and kind of identified what kind of street technologies go on what streets so that was the high level view of what our street network looks like in 2012 the city had to adopt the VTRANS Town Road and Bridge Standards that's what Norm was mentioning that is what was required for the city to be able to accept grants and FEMA funding then in 2016 the city through our excavation permit started requiring that any work in the right of way happens to the VTRANS standard specifications for construction so this is a really long document that VTRANS uses every five to six years of construction practices in 2018 we adopted the Great Streets BTB Design Zedricks or Downtown this is a lot more focused on like materiality and what we want our Downtown to look like in allocation of space within the right of way but just for Downtown in 2020 we had to adopt an updated version of the VTRANS Town Road and Bridge Standards as part of that ongoing application to accept funds from VTRANS so that's our history coming back to the standards that we're bringing to you tonight in a very general sense what are they they're a set of drawings and written specifications for construction of features that we build in the right of way all the time so this is like a curve, sidewalk stuff like that the standards are based on best practices that we've learned over the years working on different water resources and transportation capital projects we do pull in some Great Streets components mainly around streets we call deans trees and making sure we are providing good conditions for our street trees all of our standards is the VTRANS standard specifications for construction document that's very holistic we are just making some modifications for procedures specific to Brownington because we're a whole lot more urban than the rest of the state we have some more specific requirements a lot of times so who created them engineers in public works that you're looking at right now Martin and his team provided some for the utilities that they own we worked with DPW traffic in the streets office of city attorney parks who's in charge of the trees and plantings and then we've also been working with the office of city planning and permitting and inspections for those kind of developer building something in the right of way and then we've also been working with some of the materials that no one was talking about and also interface access access so the standards will be applicable for anybody doing work in the right of way so we have contractors developers for city staff and also the city and the development so the big picture of why we have them the main thing is that things are built consistently throughout the right of way so that we are more prepared to maintain their assets throughout the city another benefit is that it makes developing our contract documents more straightforward and helps with making sure we're doing things properly across divisions of departments throughout the city which kind of makes a more predictable bidding experience for contractors because there's the same things over and are used to doing things the same way and then like I've been talking about we've worked with the office of city planning to reference engineering standards in our comprehensive development ordinance so that developers are able to do the same standards and several communities around Vermont most ones like most in Essex and Colchester have already adopted similar kind of municipal engineering standards just because of all of these benefits are working in the right of way alright so here is an example of an engineering standard drawing I'm not sure if you've ever wondered exactly how a sidewalk is built this is the drawing that explains it it starts with excavation and we have pay limits for that so if a contractor excavates outside of those pay limits it's kind of considered like strenuous and not required for construction so they won't get paid for it then it comes six inches of demonstrated crushed stone sub base that has certain like compaction requirements and then on top of that is the concrete panels that we actually walk on which is usually five inches thick you'll see in the notes over commercial driveways or residential driveways with dumpsters they're a little thicker eight inches so we'd stand that heavy traffic so this is just one example then I have the website I'm happy to go through some more but I think the point is they're very technical drawings that are things that we're already doing, are already in practice for a sidewalk reconstruction contract this is just formalizing it making it available online and also if there's like for some reason someone else is building a sidewalk it'll be built to the standard and we'll know that and it will last so the other piece of the standards is the written specifications and like I said they're primarily focused based on the V-trans standard specs written in a couple modifications to Burlington specific scenarios so for example in the sub-base section we've modified it to allow contractors to reuse sub-base if it's in good condition under the sidewalk I've been mentioning the trees section 656 is all about plantains we are requiring minimum soil volume based on tree species to make sure trees can thrive when they're healthy or when they're mature trees that's been a issue our others have multiple times and then another example in our traffic sign section our traffic crew has repeatedly requested that we only use square to signs so V-trans allows a couple different shapes they just want to be dealing with one by one and some additional examples of specification where we're kind of adding more Burlington specific provisions are like we added a section about how to close suits departing temporarily for construction what to do if you encounter hazardous materials on the construction site requirements for submitting record drawings and should get data for a lot of water waters or water wastewater structure and then so finally the process that we're proposing to adopt and update these standards is that we as the engineers in DPW will bring any new standards to the tooth and seek sponsorship to bring them to the city council to adopt what we're doing tonight any big large scale design policy updates we would also bring to the tooth for sponsorship to the city council to adopt and that would be as an example back to our sidewalk here if we decided instead of having a five foot minimum went we wanted to give it a six foot minimum that would be a big impact to our right of way and that would be like a larger discussion that we would come back to the tooth on the other hand for smaller kind of best practices for construction and safety updates to our standards we're proposing that the city engineer has the authority to update make those kinds of updates to the drawings and specifications so one example of that would be adding two inches of subbase so instead of requiring six inches of subbase we would ask for two inches of subbase so those kind of like smaller technical changes we would hopefully be a little more nimble to kind of keep up with the evolving engineering profession as best practices change for example so that is my presentation for y'all tonight happy that so one thing that I think is valuable for council members to see is that this is all available what traffic they threw hyperlinks and that's so people can it's intended to be a very alive, active evolving document detailed specifications that it doesn't just statically placed in a book it's electronically available and it's continued to be updated on a new two basis yep so this oops that's a little scary I think that's what was likely to pass right so instead of adopting one document that if we had to go and make a change to one detail on one drawing having to get the whole thing re-adopted we're going to hopefully just post revisions of specific drawings and specifications and track the dates that things have been updated and post them here on the city's website in a similar fashion to how we have to date our audiences is precision specific and not large-scale unless they are a large-scale and then necessarily which is also how V-Trans does it so contractors or anyone who's familiar with these drawings and needs to use them is already used to looking at an online site like this the extent being important for the purposes of any sort of design process so it's already underway how it relates to what we're expecting to look like it's like of course they're good for you and Hannah and do you have how much of questions I have I'm very supportive of this I always suffer in here when it comes to standards and conventions around things and having these a lot of sense to me one of the questions I have is you'll come across circumstances where you may not be able to execute some kind of standards is there a process by which you can get a variance or an exception to a standard like that like so built into a lot of our drawings and specifications are for as a defense engineer so if there's a situation like that where it's going to have support to build something a certain way they would have to confer with the city engineer public works and some technology there's situations that happen just not predict all certain circumstances but it's the right thing but you try to have a standard practice that is specified and if we see that there's something that's continuously inconsistently or asked to be modified or changed maybe the specification will change as well so this is a great learning tool for us in terms of what works or doesn't work and what needs to be modified or changed so if you don't have a point of reference I can even prove that that's trafficking the documentation of when those variances happen I'll just talk about how we're going to do that if we find things in the in the field and we're like ooh why in many cases there probably was a reason why it happened and if somebody can just write what that is down then we don't have to spend any time angsting over what happened in fact 15 years ago and we'll probably always have that but having a place where you could go and this will limit that hopefully limit that thank you that is a good answer my other question though is you made the case that some changes to specifications or introduction to specifications would require at least committee level sort of sign off when some would be up to the discretion of the city engineer and how what are the factors that determine whether or not are they of cost I would think that it ties back to trade-offs between different systems and how that impacts those systems of what is the vision of the city isn't it simply different than what these owners don't need sort of any guidance so one of the things that we've struggled with and have been through the great street standards is to what I mentioned during the question which I what are the variances that are working or not working additionally just as technology has these great leaps and bounds in its advancements and sometimes it goes really slow if we find ourselves in a time where we change a system or system changes dramatically MUTC signals and signs and striving comes out with a revision and goes you shouldn't be doing stop bars this way they need to be updated to the engineer to have the authority as a safety improvement to just say we're doing this right now so that's one of the reasons why we've listed safety and best practices these are really minor tweaks to bring our standards and implants relatively quickly doesn't mean that we can't come back to many and nearly and just kind of get a list of these updates that occurred that we talked about a lot as family just a general practice but it is a little bit of a good check in the fact that city engineer is appointed and is confirmed and that you guys would have a little faith in who you are selecting I think you think those good judgments would say and I agree with that just you know I'm not saying that everything should come through our committee I'm just wondering what the calculation would be when you were deciding whether well I think that that's sort of challenged until we kind of really experienced it and it's kind of something on our belt that may vary between among different city engineers their vision of how it should be and how it should be functioning but I think we want to be transparent to the enemy but also face a certain reality that we have certain obligations that require us to act and I put the standards of practice are really kind of out there and we're going to really depart from this practice. That's all I have but thank you for that. So some people in this building know that I had a major lawsuit over the church street marketplace reconstruction with the Don Weston $5 billion for three funds of gravel so I'm actually pretty familiar. You remember? I'm still pretty pissed off about that and we have gone through this with the acceptance of say the development on Stanford Road and the processes so I think that this is a very important thing as a general framework and for transparency say for everybody including Errol so that we do change orders it's our responsibility to document it because when you're asking a lawyer to go after the people for not building the thing the way it is because they've reached the contract and we're now holding $100, $200, $300 dollars from them and they sue you your lawyers need to have the documentation and that documentation is going to be based on regulation so I generally agree with this wholeheartedly. The link with zoning and the permitting conditions so if we act now the question I've got has to do with how seamless that process is and the timing of that because we want to do things between the building codes, the construction order and the permitting process so that we adopt this it's part of the permit conditions So zoning's re-write and effectuation of the ordinance actually happened this month is that right? So their effectuation and already active updates in the language came into effect in this part of the current comprehensive development ordinance in October it's already been it's had its 21 days okay this is the engineering staffers in this city council has adopted it okay that's one thing because we don't quite have the standards that's a reason to act quick now but we often are out of sync so that's good I think that this is great the explanation makes perfect sense it would make a lot of sense to have the listing and the rationales for the specific Burlington deviations from V-trans or from M-T-C really we're varying from V-trans to V-trans and so having so it's public facing this is why we do this I think it's really important and actually calling it out it's and believe me it is important for your attorneys to have an easy way and it's important for your communications with your attorneys that it's easy for them to find it so when they don't have to spend a lot of time in units that's a great point, good points from everybody and that the flexibility will be highlighting to contractors absolutely where the difference and the reasons for them because people want to know and so the last question relates to whether there has been a reaction to this by the development community and what the likelihood of there being increase in construction costs what the likelihood of my friends in the Champlain Housing Trust and Cathedral Square to start to scream about how this is making you know housing more unaffordable and here we are on the state level we've just missed our target all of a sudden you're doing these things and let me say that I I wholeheartedly support people building to standards I think there are lots of ways to various but I think it would be helpful for that community to understand what you're doing for them to buy that in and where there are there are going to be increased costs associated with front front and and private costs as opposed to the public costs because often what happens is the public ends up subsidizing that's what you were saying I've seen you know the shoddy construction right or the you know the cheaper construction is not shoddy it's more affordable however you want to characterize probably all of those less durable less durable so it breaks down instead of like your treatment plants it just breaks down that much quicker and then we have accepted it all of a sudden it's on our dime we've got to come up with it exactly that's what I mean by our dime so I was going to say that that would be at least terms of housing development that's I think one of the reasons why we've got a housing trust fund to make things more affordable so if there is a pushback from the house you know then the conversation with the with CEDO and Brian related to that so that if we are going to lessen the standards on the front end because they are going to it's going to make a project meet the affordability needs that we want then what we want to do it seems to me is on the front end be directly saying we are going to subsidize for that because that's where we're going to get it we're not going to let you do this on the slide underneath you know we're going to do it because just like we tax affordable housing differently because the statute says that's the way we do it then when we're going to do it for engineering standards we're going to figure out a process by which we're going to as a community say yeah we'll help you do that I'm all for that like still need the standard but give the money yeah yeah yeah so that we're not playing this game and nobody knows and we and the values get all mixed up and what ends up happening is the rich get richer and I will stop I'll jump off that little step well so this if I can speak to that quickly one of the things that it's been here since I've been with the city nine years is there are technical review committees for learning developments that are presenting off administrators post interdepartmentally and generally has these developments plans to determine what standards that they're constructing things through it so that's definitely something that's been helpful in the most recent years that we are already looking at their plans and their technical details and making suggestions for best practices so the incremental cost to go up to what is already a pretty minimal standard which is and we have some nuances for growing so they're not gold plated grant and so they're not really asking for a lot but they're asking for developers that are not used to doing this and maybe they're using their cousin to construct their sidewalk that they're not putting down a thin layer that looks like a great piece of sidewalk that breaks into years and that people are tripping over because it just wouldn't construct about we're going to struggle more with those types of smaller outfits that I think we are the large ones because we really already have conversations but you bring up a great point I don't think we have CEDA on our coordination list and so we can bring that to CEDA before bringing this to the council so we can have the forward vision. I'd say a lot of the CEDA departures don't be transit for highways that those are highly standard practice for urban environments who we have to have a lay staff that represents for urban villages. I'm totally supported. I don't think that the rationales they are a pain because there's their work to have to delay that amount but in the long run educated people is really living in a village so I think this is great. I would like for us to have this. So there's a function in the memo that so I would be willing to make the motion that is in the memo with the addition that staff also consult with CEDA related to the affordability question and that they make sure that the rural and specific populations are listed and rationales are provided somewhere in the framework. I would second that. You sufficiently okay is there any other discussion? I'll just say one thing about just to riff on something that Gene said is that if there is pushback then we can have a conversation about the standard or modify it or whatever or not so I think it will be a good mechanism to bring those things to the board. So any other discussion? All those in favor? That motion passes. I think it's fine I joined the city of and we were talking about it so it's been on our end. You don't have to go to the council you get the pushovers here. Hey, this is progress. Isn't it going on itself? I have to go. We have 10 minutes an item for our remaining items. Great. Thank you. Thank you for that. That was a good discussion. Next is our bike share update and I know we're going to have a full update next month. So this was requested last month to try to address some of the some of the issues that the community had brought or even Andrea who came to Spokane had brought to council. Sure. So I Katie was online I guess maybe not be anymore but as Chapin has mentioned we're planning to bring Bird and Katlin to the tube in November for a much more comprehensive presentation update about the current status of Bird. They did have some very preliminary results from kind of the first quarters of operation it was showing a lot of trips were under 10 minutes and about two miles long which we were interpreting as for purpose driven trips versus just kind of the legally recreation ones. So we see that as a positive and see the bike share system as functioning and serving a transportation. There's been so much discussion about where and how Bird bikes are parked and as a resident myself I see that and understand that issue. So Bird has and has always had a community mode in their app. If they don't know about the issue they really can't respond to it. So if bikes are not reported as parked incorrectly they won't know about it and they can't fix it. They have gotten 77 reports through their app all of which they've responded to within two hours of improperly parked bikes They also have a Vermont 301 at bird.co email that you can report bikes or anything to Bird that way and I don't think it's been as heavily used based on what we're hearing from Catmah but it's another channel that they can talk to. And then I think on a broader scale of educating and outreach for bird bike users Bird is really trying to do more and maybe outreach through the app through messaging about how to park bikes, how they're not supposed to be blocking the sidewalk. They're also looking into a program for kind of like repeat offenders so someone parks a bike incorrectly multiple times and it gets reported through the app they will first send a message to that person and kind of a warning like you can't park bike this way you can't use that bike shared if you're doing that and then eventually they will relinquish the membership of that person if it is a continuing issue So that's kind of a high level update from Bird and Catmah for this month and then I think next month will be a more in-depth presentation from them questions anything I was wondering do you have any new questions? I'm going to wait until next month after the more in-depth overview I'm not happy with relying on the complaint fix to relying on just people complaining on their app so the system that they've got I think is inadequate for them to know that at least one of them is heroes not that's a recipe for continued failure and as the snow flies you have to follow the sidewalks That's another update sorry I forgot we just heard that the winter plan is that bikes will leave the streets from late December to mid-March at least it won't be available in those people I would just like for that bigger report of more data on the users where they are they are the discount program it's relationship to the TDM requirements that we've got under our new zoning ordinance that we passed I had a question about this feedback mechanism so I'm not a bird bike user although I want to use one just so I know I haven't yet but if I was to get the app I could then use the app almost like C-Click fix and if I saw a bike I could go around and sort of identify by report the issue so that I agree that it's not obvious or send an email yeah you don't have the app but a lot of times you're driving along and you see a bike in a place where it's not that big and you want to I use C-Click fix like that all the time I drive in C-Click fix sometimes which is probably it's probably serious but I think that would be helpful because a lot of times you see it or upset it by it and then you forget about it because you're under the next step so to get that more widely known I think would be helpful but also the email is another but there's maybe a phone number or something that can be called as well yes all of those but I think they need to be out doing periodic driving around the city depending to it themselves actively looking for it not just waiting for me to complain about it it's totally not my place in something but I actually agree with that I sit on the accessibility committee for DPW's interest and they are talking about this every month and I honestly think well the bikes are heavy so some of them probably look like they're parked fine and so they're approved in the app as being parked and then a stronger human comes out and says I don't want this on my lawn or I don't want this on my green belt that I maintain and they shift it they shift it afoot just reasonable enough for able by the human and then all of a sudden it's parked wrong and so it's not birds fault it's not the user's fault it ends up being the neighbor's fault but there is some amount of transient as what's happening in that regard that if you're not actively patrolling it you're not seeing it observation is there any other discussion this month about and I guess are we going to try to communicate some of the discussion here to Katherine Verde for next month yeah cool so there is no objection we'll close that item we'll move on to our last item which is the vehicle for higher modernization and so I have been continuing to attempt the vehicle for higher meetings at their request and they're doing a great job they're doing a great job and as you may or may not have noticed they had a memo of recommendations that they was passed not the last council agenda but the one before that on consent and they started taking these up and last week they actually approved an update to the rate structure which is one of the recommendations in the memo so with some notice and some other gyrations at the city staff level rolled out over the next 60 to 100 days it's not clear to me exactly how long it will take but hopefully by the end of the year one of the recommendations however I wanted to bring up in this meeting and it's the one about modernization of the metering system they made a recommendation as a board that we explore new more modern ways to do taximeters than the mid-century electromechanical boxes that are in the cabs now that need to be updated by some guy that lives in Albany or something so it's like there's a number of reasons to do it but they're also just the main inability to do it and so the chair of that committee, Paul Heinz has talked with Scott Barker about this but what I would like our committee to do if people are inclined is to formalize a request to the innovation and technology department so that they can do that work and come back to us with some recommendations on how to move forward if it's more than 50,000 I think we need an RFP you know there may be I talked to Katherine Chad about it there may be budgetary considerations here we're going into budgeting season so I'd like to start that work and then have them bring recommendations back to our committee that then we could then further act on and bring a recommendation to the full city council so that's the the desire of this item so with that said I'll open it up for discussion or a motion and I sent a motion to the two committee members I have no discussion if Anna has any I'd love to hear it otherwise I move to approve your motion and I would second that and would be did I sent the motion to I believe I copy change I have I have the motion so I can put that in a minute very good is there any other discussion I guess seeing none all those favor the motion I that passes and we'll have that asked along to Scott Barker's department so that brings us to our next item which is director's report great I have two quick items given the hour I'm wanting to achieve the chair's goal of getting out by seven o'clock the first is I wanted to give you a heads up that staff are working on potential rate changes for parking predominantly in the first phase for off-street parking we have two different funds in on-street parking excuse me traffic funding that is funded largely from meters on street and then a parking facilities fund which is funded by garages and plots as folks may know we embarked on significant overhauls to our garages we've made millions of dollars to prepare of these aging facilities COVID hit took away our fund balance and frankly we are needing to ensure revenue that is sufficient to operate the facilities and to pay that service so we are looking at a suite of changes the rates in the garages and lots have not been changed for many years so we will make the commission probably in November starting that conversation there is a partner conversation about on-street adjustments especially as we are discussing main street, grade streets during the construction phase and how we are going to help balance traffic so while this discussion goes predominantly to the commission given the you know stakeholder interest in this issue we wanted to make sure we brought this topic to your attention happy to engage you in ways that you think are appropriate looking forward but likely a number of these recommendations will be hitting commission November 16th the meeting for November and the second thing is that we are working to bring forward a contract acceptance for main street grade streets for that project as you're familiar it's a tip, largely a tip funded project we are working to bring the revenues and expenses into alignment bits came in high and we are working to value engineer identify additional funding resources and bring you a project that we'll be seeking the council's approval hopefully board of finance on 13th and council approval on 20th those are the two updates Norm anything I forgot thank you next we have councilor updates not an update but I'm going to go over that we have a list of the items that are you know that have been asked for us to deal with whether we get to them or not but they'll just be part of the board the committee packet so that we can know what's out there what needs to be done and can be prioritized thank you we'll make sure that we have that along the next slide I can't find my huge list I know you do it's much easier for me to go it's another delivery that now is used to be called the two list but now it's just the gene list I'd be happy for Anna and Mark to add to that list but you know it's all good so I'll make sure we have that for next time Anna do you have any updates okay and I've done either I had one sidewalk in which I will take a long and not have as part of this meeting so with that I would enter in a motion to adjourn so moved second discussion all those in favor aye how about that pretty good good


Imagine a world where we have forgotten our past, our roots, our origins. Would we not be like a tree devoid of its roots, swaying with every gust of wind? This is the power and significance of history in our lives and more specifically in our education. Studying history in college provides students with a comprehensive understanding of the world and its complex dynamics. It offers a clear lens through which we can view and understand societal changes, political structures, economic trends and cultural shifts. It equips us with the ability to comprehend the present by analyzing the past and anticipating the future. The benefits of including history in college curricula are manifold. First and foremost, it enhances critical thinking skills. History is not just about memorizing dates and events, it's about analyzing and interpreting these events, understanding their causes and evaluating their effects. Secondly, history encourages empathy and global understanding. It allows us to step into the shoes of people from different times and places, helping us understand their perspectives and experiences. This in turn fosters tolerance and respect for diversity. Thirdly, history provides context. It helps us understand why certain structures exist in society and why some ideas persist over others. Without this context we may find ourselves in a state of confusion and misunderstanding. Now imagine a college curriculum without history. The drawbacks of such an exclusion are as stark as a moonless night. An absence of history in the curriculum would mean a lack of context and understanding. Students would struggle to comprehend the present societal structures, cultural norms and political systems leading to a lack of informed civic participation. Moreover, without history, students would lose an important tool for developing critical thinking skills. History encourages questioning, analysis and interpretation skills that are not only crucial for academic success but also for navigating the complexities of the world. Finally, without a historical perspective, we risk creating a generation that is disconnected from its past, unaware of its roots and unprepared for the future. This lack of historical knowledge could lead to a society that is more susceptible to misinformation and less resilient in the face of change. The stakes are high and the consequence is real. We cannot afford to exclude history from our college curricula. We cannot let our students step into the world without the necessary tools to understand it. We must take a stand, raise our voices and champion the cause for the inclusion of history in college curricula. We must ensure that our future generations are equipped with the knowledge and understanding that only a study of history can provide. So, as we move forward, let us not forget our past. Let us strive to incorporate history into our education system for it is through understanding our past that we can truly shape our future. Remember, a tree stands tall and firm not just because of its sturdy trunk and lush leaves but because of its deep strong roots. Let history be those roots for our students. The time to act is now. The future of our education system depends on it.


This is Jason Porter with the developers.redhat.com, the developers program, with Sonny Grinnovio. I was close, right? Yeah, all right. He works on a lot of the data stuff. Hibernate, Hibernate Search, Infinispan. Bit of Infinispan, yeah. My job is primarily to work on the Hibernate portfolio, but in Hibernate we are integrating several different kinds of platforms, not just relational databases. So yeah, I have a wider interest than just relational. I specialize myself in the integration with Lucene and search engines. So more recently we have been integrating Elasticsearch as an alternative integration on top of the one that we already had with Lucene. And we also have been integrating Lucene into Infinispan and extending Hibernate to be able to talk with NoSQL databases. Interesting. Very good. What's the... So you're talking about the Hibernate, NoSQL, or OGM projects, right? Yes. Okay. Which databases do we support? Okay, well, support is a big word. Which databases can I use this with? Yes, so each NoSQL database has some strong areas and some weaker points, so you cannot just support everything on each of them. So we have a varying amount of quality among some of these. So now we're actually in the process of splitting out the ones which are a bit more experimental in a separate repository to make it clearer for people which ones we consider stable and good enough to actually use and the ones which might need some more help from the community. So that would be another dependency I add? Yes. Okay. So at this point, among the pretty stable ones, we have an integration with MongoDB. That was because it was quite widely requested for the community. We also have integration with Neo4j, which is a surprisingly good fit for the model because you have Java objects which are related with connections, and this maps really well into a graph database. And so the Neo4j integration evolved into a quite robust one. Very good. And we obviously support the InfiniSpan integration quite well because I'm involved with the InfiniSpan team, so we have been collaborating very closely with InfiniSpan to make sure that this integration is pretty solid. Excellent. What about Couch or Cassandra? Yes, so we have a Couch base integration. This is working as far as I know, but we didn't have much feedback from the community, so I wouldn't know how far this is to be considered robust at this point. Okay, all right. It probably needs a bit more maintenance and a bit more testing before we can promote it further. We also have a work in progress for Cassandra integration, but that's also not really ready at this point. Okay, very good. With Hibernate Search, that works primarily with Hibernate ORM. Does it also work with OGM? Yes, absolutely. So Hibernate OGM is just a set of extensions for Hibernate ORM. So a very nice thing about using Hibernate OGM is that any other framework which is integrating with Hibernate ORM is automatically inheriting the capabilities for OGM because it's the same literally the same Java classes. Excellent. Very good. And what for you is the most exciting part about working with the data projects at Red Hat? So personally, I see it as a challenge to get the applications to make it easy to use these databases in all forms and still be relatively efficient and fast. I'm a bit of personally have a passion for concurrency and performance and it's quite challenging to translate these benefits into a framework by maintaining ease of use for the average developer and maintaining like a high level of productivity without everybody required to be a full expert in the low level details. Right. That's one of those things that I hear quite a bit. How well is Hibernate going to work for my particular use case versus rolling my own sequel kind of thing? Which is kind of that back and forth you get regardless of which mapping software you're using. There's always going to be that trade-off. Yeah, exactly. If there is an obstruction, you're always going to hide some details and these details might be important in some case. If you are an expert in Hibernate, you know we have extension points for pretty much anything so you can always, as soon as you are good enough to be able to identify what is your bottleneck and what you would like to behave differently, then you can for sure tune it to actually do like you want it. You need hinting and some of the other things. Very good. And what have you liked the most so far here at Summit? I'm sorry? What have you liked the most here at Summit? I know this is only day two, but what did you like about day one Summit? Okay, so the most interesting part for me is really to meet all the people who are using our projects so that we get like face-to-face conversations and debates. And like yesterday, I was at the experts bar pretending to be an expert. How old will that turn out? Two people from the same team are working on the same company. They came to me basically they had a fight among each other like I want to use EAP because of some benefits and the other wants to use the spring boot because of some other benefits and they were saying some people in the team want to use vertex and so like tell us what we should do. Okay, well of course each of these have some strong points so it depends what you want to do but then we dive into the benefits of each of these and you know these kind of conversations I really love those because I get to learn more about what people think and what they think are like weak points of some of the things we do or how we can improve our things. Oh, very good, very good. Alrighty, thank you Sonic. Thank you very much.