He sent me a text earlier telling me to get started. So get started, we will. Happy new year, happy first board of finance of the new year to everyone. Sorry for the confusion, especially in these COVID days, we have been adjusting the time of this meeting based on what we have before city council and how much we have to do at this meeting. So it is confusing and we should perhaps better draw attention to it when it's not 5.30. But thanks for rolling with it everyone. So I'm officially calling the board of finance to order at 5.12. A motion to adopt the agenda is in order. I would like to suggest, if I can do that as the board chair temporarily, that we amend that. I did notice the draft minutes that were linked are the sort of very first minutes that just record board motions, not the discussion. I have the better draft, the more thorough draft in my inbox. And it just was delayed because of the holidays. So I would suggest we don't adopt the consent agenda this evening. Otherwise I will look for a motion on the agenda. And I'm not sure if there's any other amendments, but I don't believe so. Councilor Paul. Thank you. So I'll make a motion to adopt the agenda with a following change that we remove on item three. Well, there is only one item on the consent agenda that we remove item three, 3.01, 3.02. And put those on for our next agenda. We have posted draft minutes, so we've met the open meeting law. We just simply haven't voted on them. So with that change, I'll make a motion to move the agenda. Excellent. Is there a second? Then thank you, Councillor Zheng. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Great. And with that, I am pleased to turn it over to perhaps Dr. Spencer, well, maybe, Director Spencer and Assistant Director Megan Moore, who are going to give us a presentation regarding water resources and the rate restructuring that was put on hold after COVID. I also want to acknowledge there was a little bit of a last minute snafu regarding whether we were going to be able to proceed with this. And I just want to thank you and hopefully our consultant who's hopefully on the line for flexibility regarding that. And with that, I will turn it over to Team DPW for that presentation. Just have a quick point of order. Just wanted to say the public forum. I skipped the public forum. I'm so sorry because you told me. I always want to do that anyway, President Tracy. No, no, it's totally fine. So I just wanted to clarify that I did check the public forum inbox and did not see anyone in the public forum inbox now that we're actually in the meeting. So it's fine that we didn't go clear that there was no one who had signed up who was waiting. Thank you. I'm just always getting ahead of myself. Yes, Councillor Paul. This is another point of order. When I did make the motion to adopt the agenda, it appears as though item 5.04, even though there are items on there, it says that it would be on the 119 agenda, but we are voting on this now. I mean, I just want to make sure that- Yes. And what exactly is going on. Was it supposed to be concurrent? No, so this is just confusing. We've been doing so many things concurrent. That's become sort of our normal operation. And because this was just something we thought may need a little bit more time, we didn't make this one concurrent. So this was just a note from Lori of we're doing this here tonight, but you aren't going to see it on the city council agenda tonight. And so that's what the asterisk is, but it is a little confusing. Thanks for asking, Councillor. Give the interruption. I'll let you get onto item 4. No, no problem. Anybody else? I am moving fast as I do. Okay, good. Thank you, Megan. That's right. I'm going to just calm down and learn about the water restructuring and really turn it over to you now. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you, Team Water. We're going to turn it over to the women of water. We've got a great team today and our consultant from Rough Tells. Presentation one. So it looks like the presentation. Okay, awesome. Presentation mode. Okay, then let me try a different one. If not, we'll just make that one work. I think it's this one then. How's that? That's perfect, Megan. And your voice is a little quiet, so make sure to speak up. Can you hear me now? Yeah. Okay. Let me know. I'll look up and you can give me a thumbs up if I'm or thumbs down, if I'm not speaking loudly enough. So yes, as Catherine said, we are coming back to you to hopefully launch the continuation of the postpone project. I believe most of you were there almost 10 months ago, March 9th, 2020, when we all knew about a thing called COVID, but it hadn't quite fully hit us. That happened the next week. And we had come to you with our initial proposals based on the open house and stakeholder involvement that we had done in fall of 2019. And based on all the work that Raftelis had done to come up with a number of rate proposals, which we're trying to meet some of the goals given to us by the council, as well as some of our internal goals. We had developed rate fees and assistant program recommendations and had presented those to you from what I recall, they were well received. And then we COVID hit and we did end up postponing the project due to the sort of uncertainties associated with COVID as well as because we were able to muster a very tight FY21 budget without a rate increase. So tonight, we'll just super quick overview. I know we don't have a lot of time talking about again who we are and why we're doing this. Dave will get into Dave Fox from Raftelis. We'll get into the rate and policy recommendations and our affordability program recommendations, including what's changed and what hasn't changed because we have made a few tweaks. And then we'll look at a couple of customer impact examples as well as talk to you about what our next steps are to try to get this project back on track. One of the things, because we don't have a lot of time, we're certainly welcome any questions with the time that we do have, but we strongly encourage you to reach out to me or chape in with any specific questions you have because the devil is sort of in the details and we wanna have the ability in the time to talk to you about those specific details because there's a lot of data involved and it really depends on which customer you're talking about and how their usage may have changed over the course of since last time we looked at the data. So I think you all know this, like BED, water resources, the water resources utility, water waste, water and storm water are three separate enterprise funds being that each fund is independently responsible for the recovery of their annual revenue requirements. So if we're collecting money from the water on the water part of the bill, we can't be shifting that over to storm water or wastewater unless they're legitimate cost allocations. Most importantly, there is no reliance on property taxes. Our programs are entirely funded by the ratepayers and we have a total budget of approximately just over 17 million. So this all started in, I believe, April 2019 when the council has been really great about supporting some of the rate increases that we've brought forward in order to reinvest in our infrastructure, our aging infrastructure and they charged the water resources division with coming up with some rate strategies and affordability programs to make sure that we really maintain access to clean water. Married with that from our perspective, it's there's a little bit of attention, right? Maintaining access to clean water in order to have clean water, we ultimately have to have enough money to reinvest in our infrastructure and to provide all of the services that we provide. And that isn't a little bit of tension or can be in tension with the affordability of those services. We wanna make sure, though, that all of our customers have the ability to maintain that access to that essential life water that enables them to cook, clean and bathe themselves and their children. And so with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Dave who's gonna talk a little bit about why it is we're here, what our financial needs are and then we'll get into the wave tops of where our proposal is now. And Dave, just let me know when you want me to advance the slides. Thanks. Can you let me know, you can hear me okay? Not or something great. Thank you. Good evening, everybody.  Unfortunately, virtually, it's interesting.  So here we are almost a year later.  Like Megan said, this is a great segue into this slide here. Unfortunately, it costs money to run the water sewer and stormwater utilities of Burlington, Vermont. And as such, we need to raise funds to be able to pay for ongoing operating expenses, future operating expenses, capital reinvestment, infrastructure needs such that the city can continue to provide good, clean, safe service to its customers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, not just today, but well into the future. So we're constantly going through a robust financial planning analysis to understand exactly how much money needs to be generated on annual basis to support those needs. Again, operating costs annually and into the future. Financial policies like maintaining debt service coverage and having enough money and reserves for a rainy day fund if a pandemic hits and consumption declines. Hopefully this is the only one we're gonna deal with in our lifetime, but things happen, capital infrastructure, capital needs pop up that we were not planning for. And as such, a rainy day fund is good. It also looks favorably to rating agencies, getting a better bond rating, better interest rates on debt to be able to pay for those capital infrastructure needs. So there's some, all this goes into our robust financial planning. Megan and I are working through right now financial planning model and thinking about budgeting for fiscal year 2022 and what the across-the-board revenue needs are gonna be for each of the three utilities. Right now, we're looking at about 6%, 7 and 5 for water, wastewater and stormwater, respectively. And those are early on projections and they're absolutely the kind of the upper bound of what we think is going to be necessary for fiscal year 2022. And if you remember in fiscal year 2021, we had a level budget, no increase in revenues. And now we're talking about these revenue needs again to support our financial policies going forward. We'll talk about how we're looking to mitigate some of those impacts on additional slides. Go to the next one, Megan, please. One thing I will mention before while she's changing that, if we did nothing in terms of rate structural or rate changes, rate design changes, the typical customer would see about a 6.4% increase in their combined water, wastewater and stormwater bill. And you'll see how that compares to a typical customer under our proposed new rate structure. So we have all those costs that need to be generated on an annual basis. They're incurred for various reasons. And let's just focus on the water side as a good example. If you only needed to provide base level demand, just a normal level of water, your system could be sized very small or smaller than it is designed for, both the piping, the pumping, your electrical needs, all that could be sized there. But if we look at all the other needs of the system where customers are peaking, customers are using water at the same time at seven o'clock in the morning and seven o'clock at night when they're washing dishes at the same time. And giving their kids baths and showering and cooking, you're peaking at different times. Even seasonal peaking can take, we have to take that in consideration for sizing your system. Irrigation providing the capacity necessary to provide irrigation consumption. And then if we expand that a little bit further, fire protection is absolutely critical for the city, for the livelihood and the safety of the city. And in order to provide that level of service and be able to have that readiness to serve and the capacity to be able to provide fire protection, it shouldn't be necessary in a fire event, that infrastructure needs to be sized even further. So there's additional costs that are associated with coming outside of that ring there of that base level demand for irrigation purposes, from peaking, providing peak level demand for different customer classes. And of course, for providing that fire protection. And we've tried to reflect that as best as we possibly could while attempting to achieve some of our other pricing objectives, some of which council set us out to do with this race structure that we're gonna talk about. And Dave, I'm realizing that the next slide, I think does have animations in it. So I'm gonna quickly try to get through them so that they're all showing. Perfect. There we go, boom, boom. That's great, thanks. So I'm gonna quickly go over, this is not the first time you've heard this. I know we're short on time. So I'm going to just at a high level touch on all these different rate proposals and really focus on what has changed since last March when we talked last. So we had kind of six different rate proposals. The one is to establish a fixed charge by meter size. This is a charge that is not going to change based on a customer's usage. It's gonna be contingent upon their meter size. They're going to pay this charge monthly, whether they use water or not. It's an industry best practice. It reflects the capacity and the costs associated with having the readiness to serve those customers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It also is great from a revenue stability standpoint as consumption decreases, or potentially decreases as volatility in consumption. Your revenues aren't gonna change as much by having some of your revenues coming from fixed charges. It's encouraged by your bond rating agencies. Again, for that revenue stability purposes, bond rating agencies love stable revenue streams. One thing that has changed since the last time we came to you is we've done a little tinkering of that fixed charge by changing the percentage of revenues coming from fixed charges. And also the differentials between the different meter sizes to try to alleviate some of the concerns. Really just, all these are, when we talked in March, we knew that COVID was around, but we didn't know the impact that it was going to have on everyone. Residential customers and businesses alike. And since that point, we've kind of come back to the drawing board and said, are there some changes we need to make to maybe smooth out some of the impacts to not have as much gone on businesses and maybe smooth that out a little bit, provide a little bit more relief to low volume customers or that lowest volume customer. And this is where all these kind of additional changes or modifications from last March came from. One thing that has not changed is the lifeline rate. Right now, your customers pay just a uniform rate, no matter how much they're using. They pay the same rate per 100 cubic feet and 100 cubic feet is about 748 gallons. This proposal, it will provide essential level of water consumption to single family residential homes at a lower per unit rate. All single family residential customers for the first 400 cubic feet are going to pay a lower volumetric rate. And then once they get above that for every 100 cubic foot above that 400 threshold, they would pay a higher per unit rate. This is going to give us again, that essential level of usage at a low, very economical rate and costs. And also in incentivizes the efficient use of water was something that was important to the city as well is recognizing that, you know, by sending that pricing signal, customers can have that incentive to cut back and not be as wasteful with water usage. Building on the volumetric rates, we're also proposing having different class-based rates. It doesn't make sense to have a single family residential customer have that same rate structure as say a commercial customers. It doesn't make sense for two reasons. One, those different customers place different demands on the system. Like I talked about on the prior slide about that the cost of service of different costs and providing service to customers. It also doesn't make sense because many of your commercial customers would automatically fall into that tier two just by the amount of water they're using. And it does not make sense. It would be unfairly penalizing them, putting them in that highest tier when that really is not applicable to them. So we're gonna have class-based or we're proposing to have class-based rates. We'll talk about that in a few slides where we actually look at the rates. But to note, I mean, just sorry, something changed my PC there, there we go, sorry. One notable change that we had from when we came back, when we were with you in March and where we are now, we actually had commercial customers broken out differently from multi-family residential customers. And one of the things we tried to do along the way, recognizing that commercial customers and some businesses were being negatively affected, maybe more so the residential customers over the course of the pandemic, we said, let's maybe back off of that a little bit. And now we're kind of smoothing out those rates and having commercial properties charged the same as multi-family residential properties. Again, just having your single-family residential and then non-single-family residential and irrigation rates, which is a nice segue into our other rate proposal, having a separate higher volumetric rate for customers using water for irrigation purposes or putting good, clean, safe drinking water on dirt. We recognize that there are some customers like the community guarding initiatives where they will be exempt from this higher irrigation rate. This higher irrigation rate is going to, again, send a good pricing signal, pricing incentive to use the city's resources wisely and also reflect the additional cost, like I talked about on the prior slide, that additional cost associated with providing those customers with the peaking and additional level of service. Fire protection charges. The city does not currently assess fire protection charges. It's a very common practice in the water industry. There's absolutely a cost associated with having the ability to provide fire protection to private customers and businesses and having the ability to address if there is a fire event. And as such, we're proposing to have a standalone fixed monthly charge for fire protection. This is going to be based on the size of the connection. One thing we talked about back in March, we were going to go to the full cost of service. So we go through a robust analysis to determine all those revenue requirements that we talked about earlier, how many of them are associated with providing fire protection and specifically private fire protection. Our proposal back in March was to recover 100% of the cost associated with the private fire protection because that resulted in some significant impacts for commercial customers and recognizing again some of the negative impacts associated with COVID-19 to businesses. We decided to, with our proposal to smooth those impacts out and to phase in. We still think that we are absolutely justified in proposing private fire protection charges and justified charging them with the 100% of cost of service. But we decided trying to limit the rate shock associated with that, especially now when a lot of businesses are struggling, we're deciding to phase that in over five years and you'll see the impacts of that in the next couple of slides. And then one thing I'm super excited about is the customer assistance program, which the Water Ladies as Chapin put it, came up with the RAP program. I think it's great, it's a wonderful name. We're gonna wrap up those customers as economically disadvantaged customers that need it most and provide assistance to them. So right now, that program is going to, if adopted would provide under the system that we have, it would provide a waving of the fixed monthly charge for both the water and the wastewater bill for customers at 185% or lower of the federal quality level. And we have an entire slide dedicated to this. So I'm gonna just leave it at that for now and we can talk about that in the next couple of slides. Dave, I'm just gonna give you a time check. We are at 22 minutes. So we'll probably need to go a little faster. I don't know what the total amount of time allotted for us is, but probably have to get through the other ones. And again, any questions on any of the material on this or the memo, please just contact us and we'll set up a whole meeting for you. Yeah, could we wrap this up in the next, to how many slides do we have left here? I think, I mean, I think the data sort of speaks to itself. Can we wrap this up in the next two minutes, Megan? Dave? I'll wrap up quick. Okay. Here are the, you've seen these before, the structure is no different. We've made some modifications since last March. The structure is exactly the same, the rates are just different based on the changes that we've made since March. Go to the next slide, Megan, please. Our customer assistance program that we're proposing, we've expanded this to also include non-profit affordable and senior housing, not just single-family residential customers. I think that's the biggest change. You've heard all this before, it's gonna be a great program that provides relief to those customers that absolutely need it most. Who are gonna see lower bills? Customers who are using less water are gonna see lower bills. Customers who can serve are going to see lower bills. Customers right about that median level. And here we go. So we look at that, that third row down, the median volume for CCF customer. That's your typical single-family residential customer. They're going to see almost no change to their bill at all between what they're paying now and what they would be paying now, paying in fiscal year 2022 with all these changes, recognizing that we're getting about 6.4% total more revenue and that customer's not gonna see any change to their bill. And if that customer were to be eligible for the RAP program, the customer assistance program, that customer's actually gonna see close to a 16% decrease in their bill. You can look up at that low-volume customer, two CCF, you don't have many of those customers. I know that 15.2% sounds scary, but if you look at that, that's a $52 change over the course of an entire year. It's pretty negligible. And for those low-volume customers that really are economically disadvantaged and can take advantage of the great RAP program, that customer's gonna see a reduction of $44 in their total water and sewer storm water bill. And if you look down to some of the multifamily residential, both of those low-income housing example and a senior housing example are either negative or below or across the board, 6.4% increase. Some of those commercial and institutional are gonna see above that 6.4%, but it's because they're paying for fire protection for the first time. They have not been historically paying for fire protection. And now they are, we're trying to remedy that and get back to some semblance of cost of service. Here, it's just a distribution of, if we ran a distribution based on calendar year 2019 data, the impacts, you can see the vast majority of the customers are going to see between a zero and a 10% change in their bill, where the vast majority of those that's 6,200 are going to see between a zero and 5%. So those are gonna be your typical residential customers, the folks that you asked us when you set us out on this journey to try to provide relief to, we're doing that year in this proposal. And I think this last slide, we were gonna have Jenna who's running our outreach go over this last slide, but I think it speaks for itself and it's in the memo. So with that, maybe we have time for like one, two questions. Okay, thank you. If anybody has any initial questions, yeah. Does Max run the reflection of the people raising their hands, I assume? Nope, sorry, it is me and I cannot find my unmute. Yes, counselor Tracy, a president Tracy, excuse me. I appreciate that. And thank you for this presentation. Really appreciate all your hard work. The outreach was incredible that we got to see. Just, I saw you at numerous different places on church street, at our MPA. So really appreciate you doing all that stakeholder outreach that's been really exciting to see. One thing that I just wanted to clarify is that one issue that we had had was what this will mean for renters. Cause I'm not, I know you broke down different categories, but I didn't see necessarily in the presentation like the renters called out explicitly and we had identified a split, a kind of cost split cause most landlords will cover that, that water piece. And so how do you create that balance there? Cause a lot of times those costs just end up getting passed on to tenants. And then there's also the conservation issue as well that plays in there. So I just wanted to understand how renters fit into this whole puzzle. I think, and David speak to this, but the renters are still the tricky wicket across the entire nation when it comes to affordability programs because it's hard to ensure. And I think when our response is largely what it was when we spoke to you last time, which is it is still on our radar. And I think some of the tweaks we've made certainly with trying to decrease the overall bill for affordable multifamily units. We've, we're kind of cracking into how we may be able to get some of those costs to pass on to renters. But I don't think we or Raftelis or anybody in the country actually has a specific answer unless you're going to get into rent control type situations. I think New York is the only one who may be going in that direction. Maybe Dave can just validate. Validate it. Yeah, you hit the nail on the other. Yeah. It's the hard problem of affordability programs is providing relief to renters. And I think we've taken a small step towards there providing relief to the nonprofit affordables. I think that's great. We're going to continue to research this and try to come up with something, but it's not just you. It's it's across the country. And Megan's right. And New York City is the only one that I know of that is getting into rent control. And I'm not sure that's something we want to get into here, but we're going to keep analyzing it. And, you know, the, the Raft program hopefully is going to continue to expand and we can get more and more customers involved in that. This is our, the best we can do right now though with the information that we have. Okay, great. Thank you. I think the mayors joined us, but we'll just maybe wrap up this agenda item. Are there any other, maybe one more question before we move on? I can't see everyone actually, which is a problem. Okay, it doesn't look like it though. There's counselor Pine and counselor Carpenter, which I am also happy to spend so much time with you to answer all of your questions. I appreciate your engagement. Yes, I can't see everyone. I'm so sorry, counselor Carpenter. I am going to prioritize counselor Pine because he's on the board of finance and that's going to be the final question, but please follow up with Megan. She's so knowledgeable and passionate. In the meantime, counselor Pine, quick question, and then we will move on to item 5.01. I just wanted to put the idea into the public realm that I mentioned to staff today it was to shift away from poverty as the guideline and instead use the HUD median income. And if you look at the chart, 50% of HUD median is for certain households is pretty close to this number. But what it does is for single person households, it will expand the number of households that benefit. And I think we ought to be using that as poverty is a horrible indicator. It hasn't been adjusted in 58 years. It's a terrible way to define benefits. So I'd rather go with the HUD median. It's a much more real, vibrant piece of data. So hopefully we can do that. Thanks. And Jess has actually already reached out to CBOEO to see when and where they use that indicator. So it's something we will definitely explore and probably circle back to you with some additional questions. Our main thing is that we water resources are not prepared to do income verification. And so we want to make sure to keep the administrative costs low by leveraging other programs, but we definitely appreciate the idea being brought forward. And I think we could at least come up with a couple of different approaches to try to hit some of those things on the head. And lastly, if you're using another agency, CEDO does it for their programs as well. So that's, I put in my email was CEDO was the entity that within the city that does this every day for eligibility. So it's, yeah, thanks. All right, excellent. Thank you so much, Team DPW. And I am going to turn it over to the mayor and mayor, we are ready to move forward with item 5.01, the BEDIT Forward Software Systems that I believe Director Chapin and Assistant Director Wheelock are ready to present. Great, thank you, Catherine. Good to see everyone. Happy New Year. Let's move to, sorry, you just said 5.01, the BEDIT Forward Software Systems. Thank you, Darren, for being here. And why don't we turn to the board? How would the board like to proceed on this item? Would you like a short summary? Yeah, okay, Darren, why don't you kick this off? This is, there's some complexity with this. Excellent. Good evening. Joined by Emily Stone's Wheelock Director, or sorry, Manager for Strategy and Innovation. And what we're here tonight for is part of our IT Forward process. And this has been a multi-year process, really dating back, even before I started at BED in January of 2017, there was work that had started on this. And so this has been an effort to look at our various technology systems, our critical technology systems that serve our financial needs, our customer information needs, our reliability needs, and how they all connect and what we need to do to update them and keep them functioning. We had consultants involved in helping us form a roadmap, a technology roadmap, back several years ago with the heavy involvement of dozens and dozens of members of the BED team. Frontline technology users, folks who are managing these systems day to day, taking their feedback in terms of what functionality they need to be able to do their jobs. And the challenge has been that our systems, our current systems are reaching end of life in many cases, they're reaching the end of the vendor support in many cases. And the current setup that we have involves multiple vendors is not an enterprise system with one vendor, but involves multiple vendors and requires having various interoperabilities between different systems in order to function. And so what we had done over the past several years following that roadmap, we've gone through lean process training with the Vermont Manufacturing Extension Center to try to make our processes more efficient as we moved to upgrade technology. We issued a request for information from various vendors in this space to see what types of technology systems and functionality would be there and had extensive presentations during that phase. And then we issued an RFP with very rigorous and objective criteria around what our team had determined is needed to carry BED into the future. And we're talking about here is everything from how do we manage outage response? How do we manage our billing systems? How do we help customers get access to their energy data in a usable way? How do we have the ability to implement dynamic rates that support our net zero energy efforts? And how do we manage things like net metering? The complex billing that accounts for customers that have solar feeding it into the grid and taking energy in their own homes or businesses from their solar panels as well. So that brings us to today and Emily has really led the effort to conduct scoping with our selected vendor and has been a key member of the team along with Sue Fritz, our director of technology in really shaping this process. Emily and I are happy to answer questions on the materials presented. We're looking for your authorization recommendation to the city council and ultimately authorization to proceed with our selected vendor and our electric commission has given their approval and recommended this item to you. It Emily has more information we can provide but I'll pause there and see if there's questions from any members of the board of finance. Great, thank you, Darren. Floor is open for questions or a motion. Councilor Putt. It wasn't clear to me why the process was that you notified them in November of 2019 and here we are 13 months later. What happened in that period that took so long? I guess it wasn't clear. Sure, Emily probably is better suited to speak to that. I'm gonna turn it to Emily. Yeah, certainly. So, Councilor Pine, you're right. Negotiations did take a year. Part of that was due to the interruptions of COVID and both our team and the selected vendors team adjusting to that. But I think more importantly as a sort of source of the time was the effort our team put in into reviewing and negotiating six separate statements of work for software implementation. So these are, we reviewed dozens of pages of statements of work, right? Be sure that the functionality we needed was included, that we understood the effort and resources that we at BED would need to dedicate to ensure that the representations made in the statement of work were consistent with the representations made in the RFP response. And then concurrent with that, we have four legal documents that we would, if proved by you and the city council, would execute subject to city attorney review and approval. So there's a license agreement, a hosting agreement, a maintenance and support contract and an implementation services agreement. So there were many, many discussions between us and the vendor and their legal team. And also we engaged Bill Ellis, BED's regulatory council in supporting us through those negotiations. So many documents and many discussions as well as price was a third thing that we negotiated hard over the past year to result in the fees that were included and sent to you in exhibit one. It's helpful, I just wanna make sure that the time period didn't necessarily relate to a difficult relationship. That's what my worry was, is 12 months of negotiation suggests something's going on there. So I just wanna make sure, thank you. Are there any other Councilor questions? Yeah, quick one.  Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And I think the only thing is missing and it seems you said you already sent us the costs associated with this, right? Is it through a different memo or as part of this memo in front of us? I believe the pricing is confidential and subject to a nondisclosure agreement. And as such, it was distributed to you, I believe by city attorney Blackwood December 31st, I believe. Okay. Okay, are there further questions or are we ready for a motion on this item? Councilor Bynum. I would move to recommend the city council authorized general manager of BED to execute with and Harris Computer Corporation, a software license agreement, a software implementation services agreement, a master's support and maintenance agreement and a hosting service agreement that grant BED the option to purchase and receive associated services for software systems at fixed prices, good June 30, 2023, subject to review and approval by the city attorney's office and to appropriations for each relevant fiscal year. Okay, thank you. Seconded by Councilor Powell. Further discussion, questions? All right, seeing none, we will go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. Darren, Emily, thank you and good luck with this. Thank you. Great, this brings us to 5.02, which is a presentation from Superintendent Tom Flanagan and the rest of the BSD team. It's good to see you all here. Good to see you, Nate and Joe, welcome. This is regarding the approval of financing guarantee for construction loan from Burlington High School move to the Macy's building. And Marty, nice to see you as well. And why don't, this is a somewhat unusual item. Let's make sure we kind of laid out what's going on here. And I'm pleased we're at this point and we're able to, the city's able to play a productive role, helping move towards addressing this terrible community challenge of having no high school right now. So that's what this is about. And I turn it over to you all to take it from here. Thank you very much, Mayor. This is Joe McNeil. I served as council to the district during this transaction. So I'll take the first part. Tom had a unavoidable conflict and had to not be available. But Nathan is available on financing aspects and Marty is available on the technical aspects. As you know, surprising to the BSD. We'll never complain, Joe, about getting to hear a presentation straight from you. We don't get to hear from you enough these days. So although we miss the superintendent, we're welcome having you here. It's nice to have you back with us. Thank you very much. So as I'm sure you know, came as quite a surprise to the school district and to the students when the first day of school in September, we learned that as a result of PCB, as a result of testing for the $70 million bond issue, PCBs were discovered first at the exterior and then on air quality testing on the interior and the department of health recommendation was that the building be closed for in student education. BHS have been remote since that time, except for more recently, it has been able to utilize the Edmunds complex on Wednesdays, dividing the school half and half. The fix is not ideal, was not ideal, and we looked around for alternatives, speaking generally for the crew that worked on this, including the school board. It came down to two alternatives. Number one alternative was the placement of custom designed trailers, if you will, on the BHS campus, mostly utilizing the athletic fields. There were advantages and distinct disadvantages of that, including the anticipated increase, a higher cost than what turned out to be the option that manifested itself to utilize the former Macy's building. When we identified that as a location, potentially we commenced a significant negotiation with the owners of the Macy's building, which are Don Sinex, Al Seneca, the Ireland Company and Barrington Construction. And to make a long story short, we were able to reach an agreement that involved BSD being responsible for the initial fit up of the space, which is estimated at $3.5 million, and that's what this evening relates to, and also the rental for three and a half years at $100,000 a month. So it's somewhere around a $10 million project over the three and a half years. The anticipation is that the fit up will be completed in mid-February to allow the move in during the February break and the commencement of educational services to begin at the Macy's location downtown right after the February break. Northfield Savings Bank is providing financing to Barrington Construction and the school department has agreed to cover that cost. It can cover it upfront or it can cover it through financing. The Nathan can go into greater detail but the school district has been working with the governor's administration to hopefully receive a significant contribution towards the fit up cost of three and a half million dollars but that will be dependent upon legislative action and the governor's budget adjustment recommendation which will come out shortly. So that's not firm and fixed at this point but we're hopeful. Northfield Savings Bank indicated that it would like, it would insist upon the guarantee from the city of Barrington of the school department's financial obligation to pay for the fit up, not the 10 million but the 3.5 million. The school department in turn indicated that it was prepared to back up any commitment that the city would have to make so that at the end of the day the school department will own the entirety of this obligation and hold the city entirely harmless. In talking with the mayor and with attorney Blackwood, we also agreed that because of the requirement of separation of municipal and educational finances that it was important to receive a determination from the state agency of education, Secretary Dan French, that this agreement, this guarantee would not cause a violation of those standards. We received that today, a positive declaration. So what we're hoping for is a motion to approve a backup guarantee of the fit up cost and subject to the city attorney's review of the entire document flow, the guarantee agreement and subject to the school department's commitment that any dollar you all expend, we will make up for. With that as a quick backdrop of a long story, I would turn it over to Nathan and or Marty. Marty is available to answer any sort of fit up question as to what's happening, how quickly it's happening, where it's happening, et cetera. And Nathan on the financial opportunities here and alternatives. So Mayor, that would be the opening of state. Okay, excellent. Why don't we, yeah, why don't we pause there and see how much more detail the board would like? Councilor Pine and then President Tracey. You want a motion now, Mr. Mayor, do you want to wait on that? I think let's get a motion on the floor if you're ready to do that sounds good. And then I'd like the floor back, I'd recommend the city council approve the attached resolution. Excellent, is there, sorry. Councilor President Tracey seconded it, I think. No, you just want to make it nice, okay. I can be the second, that's cool. Okay, sorry.  Thank you, President Tracey. My question is really, it's blunt, I don't mean to be rude, but it's a bit like having your uncle guarantee your mortgage, but your uncle is, it's like this family thing. So we're guaranteeing the school district's ability to pay the debt service. And yet the school district saying, oh, but if you have to pay it, we'll cover it. Is that really what is being proposed, Joe? Is that? That is a good summary, Brian. Councilor Pine, and it's accurate, except that the reason the bank is looking for this guarantee is because the school district, although an independent Vermont school district is also a department of the city of Burlington. And because of that, as it was making its loan commitment, it wanted this backup. The city in turn wanted to, the city attorney's office and the mayor's office wanted to make sure that if that was called upon, that ultimately this would be an educational expense. So it is indeed sort of like a closed loop, Brian, but the end result I think is protection to the city and exposure to the school district. I see, so if there were ever an instance where the school district was unable to make those debt service payments, the city would essentially front the money and recoup it perhaps in installment payments over time or something of that sort. Yes, and the hope would be that the city would not even have an upfront dollar outlay that by, and Nathan, you might wanna come in and just speak a little bit about the financing plan of the school department if indeed that was required. Yeah, so we are, I mean, first of all, we've been doing some outreach and having great communication with the governor's office and we are optimistic that we will be, that an allocation and appropriation in the budget adjustment bill that will be forthcoming in the next couple of weeks will go a long way toward covering the fit up costs. So that's like our plan A in this whole thing. And but of course we need a plan B for obvious reasons and we are already incorporating into our budget consideration of what it would take if we were to pay these costs over the term of the lease. So we are not gonna be in a position where we have to come up with $3.5 million at one time to pay this down. If we have the money such as the estate support, we would probably do that and that would reduce our ongoing monthly costs. But in the absence of that, the financing would be pretty straightforward in that it would be a poor, it would be folded into our monthly rent and we would pay it on a monthly basis. So we shouldn't have a problem, frankly, in either case we shouldn't have a problem but we should be able to manage, we'll have plenty of time obviously we're not gonna be paying the whole three and a half million upfront. So we would be able to pay it on a monthly basis and make necessary adjustments in our budget to ensure that we could continue to make the full payment each month. Okay, thanks. And lastly, is this a triple net lease where you're having to cover everything? Well, how's that structure? It's a hybrid, Brian. It's not a pure triple net. For example, in addition to structural and roof responsibilities, they have continuing responsibilities to make sure that we have functionality of like the elevators and the escalators and the basic systems in the building. We're expected to pay like normal utility cost, insurance, that sort of thing. But so it's a bit of a hybrid. And the probably the most important element in that equation that we are planning to seek is the fact that the property taxes, because it would be educational use, we'd be looking for it to have those deferred. Well, we'll have to come to you for that. And the state will approve that, do you believe? We think that we're hopeful. We obviously have both the municipal side and an educational side to deal with there. Thank you. It's a great work around here. Thanks. Councilor Jain. Oh, sorry. President Tracey was next. Thank you, Councilor Jain. Thank you, Mayor. Appreciate that. So I was curious as to the relationship that this has to the city's overall debt policy and specifically also our credit rating. We had noted that we were reaching sort of the upper levels of that debt policy with some of the bonding that we've recently done. And I'm curious as to how this interacts with that policy. Does that take us even close? Does this take us even closer to the edge or is this something that's separate and apart from that? Cause that's certainly something that's just a concern, just overall with the city taking on quite a bit of debt recently with bonding and that's starting to hit in coming years. Yeah. Thank you, President Tracey. Catherine, did you, were you looking to speak to that or would you like me to? Go for it. So the debt policy is certainly a critical policy that we have to be mindful about when we're taking on major obligations. I do think that there, this whole episode may well create challenges that the district and the city are gonna have to talk about in the future. You know, what this whole need to utilize, you know, this was not part of the plan that went to the voters to have to spend millions of dollars on this interim site. I think we're all, our fingers are crossed that the plan that Nate laid out there does succeed here and that this doesn't sort of end up dramatically impacting the already approved high school rebuilding project in some way. I think it's too soon to know exactly what the implications of this temporary space and the PFCs, PCBs that were found will ultimately mean. Certainly you're correct, President Tracey. We with the bonding approved for the high school combine, you know, with Bonnie approved for the high school combined with the bonding that we plan to do in our sort of 10 year plan, if you will. The last time we looked at the debt policy, assuming you know, major another round of significant infrastructure spending investment as well as investment in Memorial Auditorium, that would take us up near the limits of the debt policy. We are currently tens of millions of dollars below that and certainly there's nothing about taking this action.  That said, even if some kind of worst case scenario happened here, we would still be well within our debt policies is my sense of it. Okay, thank you for that. And is there a protection and how might this impact the city's credit rating? I think this will have no, I mean, I don't believe this Catherine Rich, if you see this differently, please weigh in. You guys know I'm a total hawk on the credit rating. I don't think this will have any material impact on the credit rating, you know, certainly with all the indemnification from the district, which is really at the end of the day, I see it as this kind of an indemnification from the state, the state ultimately has responsibility for school finances. So I think this is a tiny risk financially for the city and I don't think it's gonna, I don't know that we've talked directly to Moody's about it. It's come up quickly. I don't think we've had that opportunity, but I would be shocked if they had any significant negative reaction to this. And I would just point out that one of the reasons why the secretary of education approved the transaction in their deliberation and declaration today is that it would not represent a cushioning of the state's educational funding obligation by the city, which actually is, their concern is the reverse, but the mayor's observation is correct. Okay, thank you for that. Two other questions were, how was the $100,000 a month figure arrived at? Given that this is a building that wasn't in use, how did that figure get negotiated? And then the other piece was just the timeframe for reimbursement, because that's not entirely clear in the resolution, like an absolute end date by which the city would be, if the city had been extending funds when they would ultimately, and finally be at the very least or at the very most kind of extended on a timeframe. Good, good questions, both president Tracy. The negotiation, it was an intense negotiation. I would just say that our starting point was zero on rent. Their starting point was quite a bit higher. Won't go into the precise amount, but it was substantially higher. This was less than a halfway point between where we were starting and where they were starting. And on the basis of the, we checked with the commercial realtors in the area of some experience to get a feel for where we should end up and the $8 a square foot was where we were able to land that was tolerable to the school board and acceptable to the owners. I would just say that it was, that was probably where most of the time was spent in negotiations. But the guarantee I would point out President Tracy, again, the guarantee does not apply to the rent, it only applies to the fit up. And I'll let Nathan deal with the question of the duration of the financing. Yeah, I don't think that we have any, you're right, I don't think I've seen anything kind of specific about that process, but again, our expectation would be that in the event that we would be, that we do go through with financing, which is the interest that Northfield has that we'd be making a monthly payment. And so under any circumstance where somehow the city, it's hard for me to envision a circumstance where the city would have to step in on the monthly basis to make that payment. But I think the point is that if for some reason that happened, there wouldn't be any hesitation on our part. So if, yeah, I don't have any more specific answer than that, I guess, or know how to enter it more specifically other than to say that you would do it as quickly as we could. And we are accustomed on occasion to wiring funds to the city and likewise. So that's not a problem. We certainly have the mechanisms in place to do that promptly. And the de-amortization potentially would be right over three and a half years, the duration of the leasehold President Tracy. Okay, thank you very much. Kester Paul. Thank you. So President Tracy addressed one of my questions, although I would imagine he, he may feel the same way, but I'll just speak for myself that I do think the rent should have been zero. And I am disappointed that there wasn't an appetite for doing that, given the fact of all the other things that are going on with this project that could not have been done for the sake of children being able to finally go back to school and just to do something that would be good for the community. So I'm disappointed, but I'll take your word for it, show that you did the best you could. And then the other thing I just wanted to just say is that, you know, throughout the last couple of months, I have heard from a number of people, as I'm sure we all have, about just the upheaval that has befallen our high school kids and not being able to have a high school and a number of people who have really pleaded with me about the fact that this is not a school issue, that this is really a city crisis and one that we should all be working towards. And so I think for that reason, amongst the people that have been working with us, so I think for that reason, amongst others, that this is a very, probably one of the easier votes that we'll have this evening and I'm happy to support this. So thank you. Thanks very much. Thanks for all your effort. Thank you. Okay. Looks like with that, we might be ready. Okay. Go ahead. Yeah. So the first question is for you, Mr. Mayor, I think at our last meeting, I believe requesting an update around the debt policy and was wondering if our next meeting, we can have an update about where we are. We will have to look into, I mean, just to be clear about when you say an update to the policy, the policy, there's no planned change to the policy. If you're looking for an update on where we stand with respect to how much capacity we have, in both the city and the school under that policy, we have typically done that at the moment of incurring, incurring new debt. If you would like, if the board would like that sooner, we, we can, we can work on doing that. It takes a fair amount of work to update, you know, to make that fully accurate. There has not been. So I would, I guess I would welcome further thoughts on, on how the board would like to handle that. I can certainly get you a written communication. Councillor Jang that kind of reiterates where that basically restates where we were last time. We formally reviewed it and there has been no material change since then. But for this, as we've discussed fairly, you know, minor additional indebtedness and emerge, you know, urgent additional indebtedness by, by the district. If you would, if what you're requesting is that we have a kind of presentation with updated figures that, you know, I'll have to talk to Catherine and Rich on how long we take us to, to pull that together. So which, what, what. It would be helpful if I understood which you were seeking. Okay.  My last question was, can we have an update about our debt policy? And I think I was very specific. How much do we have to borrow? What is left? The capacity that we have to borrow. It seemed as if I seen this coming. I seen the reason why I asked it before. I knew that this conversation will.  Looking forward to anything you can provide on that. Okay. I am happy. We will update the figures. The last time we reviewed this, I believe we had something in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 million dollars of capacity. So I think you can act. And there has been no material change to that. You can act on this with great confidence that. That we are, you know, that we are no way. Really. Cutting into that. Especially given that the district has. You know, something approaching 70 million dollars of capacity that.  When and how that's going to be drawn down. So if that's the question, I'm not going to answer that. I'm not going to answer that. I'm not going to answer that. I'm not going to answer that. I'm not going to answer that. I'm not going to answer that. I'm not going to answer that. I'm not going to answer that. I'm not going to answer that. I'm not going to answer that when and how that's going to be drawn down. So if that's the question. I would say the city. Has in excess of 30 million. Go ahead, Catherine. It's desired. I know that. Rich has been working on this in recent weeks. And I don't personally have an update, but I would like to invite him to give a very brief update. I can absolutely provide an update on. A debt capacity. And I can do that for our next quarter finance meeting. That is scheduled. And I do confirm with what the mayor stated in my quick. Glance at the debt is that we have significant. Capacity for debt. Without having any impact on our credit rate. And we will provide a memo in projection. On the debt. As you requested. With our next Bola. Thank you. Thank you so much. That's good. The older question that I have, maybe Mr. Superintendent come from again is here. No. Superintendent was unable. Had a conflict. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Nate, you can speak to this. When would you. When do you think you will have a confirmation from the state that would they will actually provide some financial support about this? That's a good question. So what we currently anticipate is that the governor will include a recommendation to support in some level. And we think that. And we think and hope that that's going to be. A little more timely. And but it is that, you know, just as you folks do the, the governor has to make a budget adjustment proposal that balances a lot of competing interests. And we will, you know, will the proof will be in, in what is released, but that typically comes out in the first couple of weeks of the legislative session. And the question is how long will it take to move from a proposal to actual law? That can be a much less certain timeline. It often, it depends on how controversial elements of that proposal are sometimes there are a few that offer really any, any fodder for discussion and the budget adjustment moves very quickly. I saw that when I worked for the legislative staff and other times there are more items that are more. More closely resemble major policy changes that the legislature wants to debate more fully. So it's not clear. We won't know the answer definitively, but I think that we will have a good sense of whether that issue is being viewed with skepticism. From the legislative branch pretty quickly after it is released, because I imagine it will be one of the most high profile elements of what is often a relatively low profile budget adjustment bill. So my, my, in my head when I think about it, I'm thinking to myself, we should have a pretty good sense of where this is headed by the end of January, but I would be surprised if it's actually law by that time. Just, just in addition to Nathan's comment. As he indicated, this is, we're hopeful that this will be a part of the governor's budget adjustment. Recommendation. This will come and be dealt with in advance of the budget recommendation, which follows later in the session, the so-called big bill. So we're hopeful that this will be dealt with. In the early part rather than the later part of the session. Wonderful. Mr. Joe.  I have talked to a couple of them and was just need some reassurance here so that they would be pushing. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. Be assured, be assured that we will be. Yeah. And we did have a formal briefing with the governor's staff for where, where the, our local delegation was invited. We didn't get a hundred percent attendance. As you can imagine, we have a pretty large delegation when you factor in senators and representatives, but, but that was made available and shared with them. And I would say that by and large. So I think that there's broad support at this, at this time. Absolutely. And you know, I think we are talking about seven in seven million so far. And it seemed this project is around 10 millions or more. Is that correct? 3.5 million borrowing 3.5 million you expecting from the state. But I just wanted to also hear about a plan B. What is playing B. So I would, yeah, just to clarify there. So really what we are looking at potentially is the three and a half million dollars. Covering the fit up costs, which would then. Eliminate the need for any of this longer extended financing from Northfield savings bank. If we get that state money, we will in all likelihood put it all toward covering the portion of the fit up costs that we would pay to the construction company. And then there would be essentially no debt associated with this project. Our law, our obligation on a month monthly basis would be the rent, as well as the related costs, utilities, insurance, and so forth. And that is money that we are factoring into the development of our FY 22 budget right now. In fact, it, I don't know if it's posted yet, but I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. And then at the meeting at the school board meeting, we all share as I've done before, some of the estimates of what I have in the budget for the downtown BHS project and also kind of show how if we get the relief from the state that will allow me to reduce the estimated costs next year as well, because we won't be paying back that fit up costs in a month until we can get the budget back. So that's a good point. And then we'll also have a long term temporary solution to the issue so that our students will have a physical location to learn. But now the long term, let's talk about the Wellington high school. Do you think then in four years from now, and that house school will be built. And then the kids will just transition from maces to their new high school. How does it all enter points? I don't know. But I think at this point, it's kind of premature to speculate too, too deeply on this. We're doing, as you know, additional testing on the PCBs and are going to be doing some work to determine whether there are affordable efforts that would reduce the indoor air. Concentration of PCBs that are already planned for a renovation. That is to say, does the work that we already have planned and budgeted to do, will it solve the problem? Or is it likely to solve the problem or not? I don't think it's going to solve the problem. I don't think that that I think is going to be critical in determining how we move forward because if it turns out that. The project as it's currently envisioned will not resolve the indoor air issues. Then there's going to be some really difficult decisions to make about how we, how we proceed. So I don't, I don't think we have the answer yet, but we're taking the steps so that our school board and our community has the information that they will need to, to make those decisions. Yeah. Yeah. Further questions from the board. Are we ready. For action here. Thank you. Looks like we're ready for action. Good. I. Before the vote, I just want to say I fully, I fully support this. I. Appreciate the urgency that the district has acted with to find an alternative plan given this. I think it's been very, very unexpected and unwelcome loss of the use of the high school. I'm pleased the city was able to play a legal and helpful role here. I appreciate the team working on this from the district. Appreciate Joe that when there was some confusion in the negotiations where suddenly it seemed that even, you know, something that I think would have been very challenging for the city to do was being requested that you were able to resolve the issue. So thank you for, for your negotiation and, and getting at this point. And I fully support it. And with that, all those in favor of the motion, please say I. I. Any opposed. The motion carries unanimously, I believe. And. Thank you all for, for your input on this. Good to see you all you again. Thank you very much. I appreciate it and forgot to your marks reminded me, Mayor, to thank guy lean significantly because. She was a great help to us getting through these challenges. Here on the board of finance, we know that that is a given for virtually every item. And we appreciate her too. So thank you for saying that, Joe. We'll see you all again soon. Take care. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. We are down now to 5.04. Revenue airport revenue bonds. Sorry. Has this been. I'm confused. Yeah. Sorry. This is, this is for action tonight, but we are. As we use in the old days, do things. Or regularly, this is not. This is not a concurrent item. This is, this is on for the boards review tonight. It would be acted on the plan is on the 21st. Assuming that we can get to a place where the board can be supportive. So welcome gene. We've got a big team from the airport here tonight. Why don't, how would the board like to proceed? Would it be? Well, you know what, let's, let's, let's tee this up just again. This is a pretty significant item with some complexity to it. Gene or rich, who would like to just summarize what, what we are proposing to do here. Okay. Rich can go ahead and summarize that and then I'll answer any questions. Okay. Great. Thank you, Gene. What I'd like to do is very similar to what. Joe McNeil did is I'd like Thomas Maloney. To just give a quick overview of. The legalities of this refunding and then based on. His overview. I will provide some insight to the actual financing. Okay. The impacts of COVID-19 on air travel. Thomas, we're having a little trouble. At least I'm having a little trouble hearing you can. Get a little closer to my microphone. Okay. That's, that's an improvement. It's slightly better. Still a little faint, but if you could just project, we can all turn up our volumes, I guess. Okay. Go ahead. We'll try now. Okay. That's good. Due to the, due to the impacts of COVID-19 on air travel and the financial impact on Burlington airport in. Specifically. The airport has been looking at ways to restructure. Some of its outstanding revenue bonds that have principal payments coming due with the, within the next few years. So with. The city solicited proposals from different underwriting firms. Qualified to underwrite bonds. The structure is looking at some of the 2012 and 2014 bonds that, that are coming due within the next few years. And pushing out those debt service payments out until the future. Under the city charter and under the general bond resolution for all airport general revenue bonds. The city does without additional voter approval. City council does have the authority to issue these. Revenue refunding bonds. They do not constitute a general debt of the city, but are payable solely from airport revenues. The process of doing it is to adopt a supplemental resolution under the general bond resolution that was applicable. And constitutes a pledge of all airport revenues for, for the indebtedness. So what is, is being presented for consideration by the board of finance and ultimately for the city council. Authorizes the issuance of up to $32 million of these revenue refunding bonds. As I said, they won't constitute the general indebtedness of the city, but are payable solely from the revenues of the airport. The resolution also authorizes and delegates, certain duties to the chief administrative officer and the director for financial operations of the city. To complete and authorize the ultimate terms and provisions for, for this financing. The ultimate goal is to give a breathing room for the airport. So to wait for, you know, with COVID-19 and improvement in the, in the travel industry for it, then to be able to, to service its, its debt. Okay. Thank you, Thomas. Okay. How, I think that teases up pretty well with Councillor Pine. And then Councillor Paul, we'll go from there. Okay. Either rich or, or Thomas, would you help us understand if the current outstanding indebtedness on these, on these bonds, this is the 32 million, or is that just a, the aggregate amount of, of all the bonds that were approved for issuance for the airport. That's a total of the aggregate principal amount of bonds that, that would be issued to constitute the refunding. So if it was in federal tax law, specifically the, the, the tax cut in jobs act past. These would need to be issued as taxable bonds. And so some of the money that will, will be borrowed will effectively have to fund an escrow sufficient to pay off a couple of the, the maturities that are coming due within 2021, 2022 and perhaps 2023 or 2024. The, the covenants that the city has undertaken, including setting its rates sufficient to have a 1.25 debt service coverage would still apply. The city airport has engaged. The city airport will be able to meet that, that service coverage. So what we are doing essentially is, are we capitalizing a sinking fund to pay off those maturities as they come up? That's, that's correct. And restructuring it to, to extend the ultimate principal payment off into the future. When the, when the travel industry and, and. The airport is expected to be in a better financial condition after the impacts of COVID-19 have, have softened. And then lastly, are we just, are we, are we projecting a cost of this capital rich? Do you have a way of the PFM, giving an idea of how to forecast that because I didn't see anything in there about what you project to be the interest rate. Yeah, so we've done some preliminary numbers on what that interest rate would be. The biggest challenge that we have is that we are going to go into this deal looking at what's going to make sense for the airport. So we're looking at all the debt. And we wanted to be very careful that we didn't cap what we would predict. Ultimately our goal is that, as, as Thomas had stated, is in the financial world. This is called what's, it's called a scoop. And it's called a dump.  And you will pay that at a later date. And this provides us, you know, the effort being more proactive. You know, the flexibility that's needed with the unknown of COVID improves liquidity of the effort. And it basically ensures us that our debt coverage ratios that need to be obtained are, are achievable. So again, the strategy is to, based on the market conditions, at the time we're going to look at the existing debt and we're going to make a decision on what we will refund. So that will be the actual strategy, the rate on the, the loan, which you did ask. It's very difficult to determine. The challenges that we have is, you know, the airport industry is unique in the sense that the rates in that market are higher than what you see in, you know, the general fund where there's a little bit more predictability. I would also like to add real quickly that, you know, we had a review from Moody's city-wide credit. We had a review from Moody's city-wide credit. That took place December 18th. We shared the idea on this refund date. It was well received. In addition, we will be reviewed the second week. Of February. By Moody's on, you know, providing them an update on the actual amount that we plan on reflash. So they've been part of this conversation. They do agree that it is a, these are good steps that, you know, the airport in the city collectively is working on. Thank you. And then, sorry, lastly, Mr. Murphy, the rating agencies, they, they don't anticipate making any adjustments to the airport's credit rating. Is that right? Brian, I can answer that. We, we would hope not. You know, last time we met with them, they, uh, kept us where we were at. We had a very good meeting. But, uh, at this point we, nothing has changed. And this actually, if anything, should be looked at as a proactive. And thoughtful. Move. A lot of people who start doing this when they're in trouble. And, um, we're not going to get in trouble. We still have a fair amount of cash. Um, we still have another, you know, money in our carers package. We have another carers package coming. Um, but what we're seeing is we know our industry. Isn't going to rebound quickly. And we know it's going to take time. And we really want to make the necessary steps to move forward. So I think if anything, they'll look at as a very proactive and thoughtful move. A lot of people start doing this when they're in trouble. And we're seeing that look at as very proactive and thoughtful. Move. Thank you. So I was wondering what is then missing for us to, in order for us to take action tonight. What else are we waiting for? In order to put the motion on the floor. Um, Councillor Jang. Um, just. We are, we are hoping that the board of fine, just in case it's not clear the board of finance. Um, if we're going to take action and make a recommendation tonight, we just simply, um, have not, uh, scheduled the matters concurrently, which used to be our sort of. Pre pandemic. I would see say best practice in case if there was not a need to, uh, take action from the full council. Um, there was often, you know, there were times there were complications that arose from having concurrent issues on, especially on issues with some complexity and significance like this, um, if there were changes that the board of finance recommended, that could be challenging. So this time, the schedule allowed us to spread it out and, and that's, that's why. Okay. Wonderful. So, uh, uh, thank you, uh, Jean Richard yesterday for taking the time to call me on the session. Really always appreciate that from department ads, um, to give people heads up and discuss this in details. Since we do not most of the time have time in here. I appreciate that. And was wondering if you can, uh, maybe go back two, three years before COVID and how much of a debt would, uh, accumulated by the Burlington airport. And also what is the total, um, the asset of the airport? What is it in on top of your head? Cause I just want to see the percentage of the debt and also the asset itself. So Marie, do you want to just tap on that a little bit and also hit, uh, how much we've paid down? Sure. So annually we pay about $3.6 million in debt. Principal and interest. That's combined. About 1.2 is interest alone. And the remainder is the principal. So every year we've been reducing the amount by about $2.4 million. So we've been reducing the amount of principal each and every year. So it's continued. This is debt that we refinanced, uh, in 2012 and in 2014, the airport, um, also had some refinanced debt as well. And this is, so we've, we've been making very good progress reducing that each and every year. Yeah, I think we've had a lot of money back in the past year. And I think we've had a lot of money back in the past year. Marie, can you also just talk about days of cash on hand that when we started and what we had. Yeah. His, would you like me to talk a little historically as well? Really, really quick. I know they're out of time. Okay. So historically from we'll say back in 2011, uh, 2012, the airport hadn't. Zero days cash on hand, effectively. They didn't have any cash. as of the end of June of this current fiscal year 2020, we had about 450 days cash on hand that did include the RAND, the Revenue Anticipation Note. The airport has been very prudent and thoughtful in increasing those days cash on hand. Okay, Nick, what's the value of the airport? Yep, so we did a recent study back in May 2019 associated with our master planning study, which valued the airport assets. As you requested, Councillor Jang, and that came in at about 600 million dollars on the asset value of the airport, including depreciation. It also went into some details of the economic impact of the airport as well, but the asset value came in at about that. Wonderful, guys. Thank you so much. Thank you. Further questions? Sorry.  I have one more. I just want to clarify the, this debt is not general obligation debt. This is revenue bond debt and does not pledge the full faith and credit of the city in issuance or does it? I'll answer that if I may. Yeah, thanks, Thomas. It does not. This is revenue debt. This is payable solely from the revenues of the airport after payment of operating expenses. So it does not pledge the full faith and credit of the city. Thank you. Just wanted to clarify. Thanks a lot. Thank you all. Okay. I'm not seeing further questions. So we will go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion. Sorry. We have a motion on the floor. Anybody moved it? No motion. No motion. Okay. Thank you, Councillor Jang. Councillor Powell, you'd like to move it? Yeah, sure. I'm happy to, I'll take the recommend, in the interest of time to move the recommended action. Okay. Thank you, Councillor Powell. Second from Councillor Pine. Again, any further debate? If not, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion. That is now properly on the floor. Please say aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you, airport team. Thank you for joining us. Thomas has been a while since we've had you. Good to see you. Okay. Thank you all. Have a good night. You too. Thank you. All right. That brings us to 5.05. Increase in the calendar year, 19 street reconstruction project budget. We have Laura Wheelock here and how the board like to proceed on this one. I'm going to have Chairman Spencer here as well. Councillor Pund. I would move to approve and recommend the city council authorize an increase in the calendar year, 19 street reconstruction project budget in the amount of 827,000. I think we're missing some decimal points there. We're not. 827 dollars? Is that really what it is? And 23 cents. Okay. For a new total project budget amount of 2,189,715 dollars and 78 cents with funding coming from the same FY 21 street capital fund. And secondly, to approve and recommend the city council authorize the director of DPW to execute the final change order with WITCOM construction up to a maximum limiting amount of 2,189,715 dollars and 78 cents to pay for the final expense. Okay. Councillor Pine, is there a second for that motion? Thank you, Councillor Jang. Discussion? President Tracy. Just wondering if we can get an explanation of like what happened here in terms of the overage in this and why and where it happened like what streets were talking about here that caused this to happen and what the challenge was that made it more expensive. Yep. So this contract as well as our sidewalk contract are a little bit different when we think about the use of contingency because they're reinvesting basically in a maintenance program for our infrastructure. So they are two contracts that we actually do try to use all of our contingency on to make best use of the funds that have been approved by you guys for this work type. So for the calendar year 19 contract late in the season we chose to use some of the contingency towards Batch Elder and the intersection of Maple Street and Union Street to fix some of the profiles, the grades and some drainage in that area. It was a unit priced contract. And so while it's advantage that the city generally gets a lower price bid on these it struggles from the fact that we don't have a true maximum cap. We kind of play a little bit of a game with estimating how much work is remaining how much is going to be billed versus how much is remaining fund-wise. So unfortunately the way that this contract ended which was back in 2019 there was some pavement markings that were still left to be done in the spring of 2020 which carried into the summer of 2020 with the pandemic and other closeout items in the contract. The pavement markings unfortunately was a bust in our estimating. We estimated for the existing markings on the street and we needed to estimate for the increase in the bike markings that were going down on our repaved streets. And so while we purposely chose to use all of our contingency to maximize our paving before winter we also are unfortunately suffering from some bad estimating on DPW's part in the contract. Okay. And one question that this raised for me is looking ahead to the next construction season how do you then plan for, I understand that construction costs are pretty volatile right now especially materials costs given supply chain issues. And so how do you plan for contingency in these circumstances? Like I guess how are you thinking of the next year's some of these investments and the costs associated in the coming year, recognizing that some of these typical models are really not necessarily as relevant as they once were. It is definitely an interesting guess I would say at this point in time there's not been a lot of bid projects to be able to understand how the market has changed. The only indication that I have so far is the late season bid that we had for Queen City Park Road was really very competitive and both of the bids that came in were below engineer's estimates. So despite materials being somewhat volatile we're also seeing really hungry contractors because they don't have as much private work. So on all honesty I'm not quite sure where our bid for paving and sidewalks and this work will come in this spring. We will be probably proposing add alternates so that we can make the most use of the funds that we are approved for for the fiscal year and do as much work as possible but not have to rebid any work ideally. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for all your work on this. Thank you, President Trissie. Excuse me. Further questions? Councilor Jang. Yeah, no further question but maybe a comment. And since this amour was so minimal I was just wondering why even we should have it as an agenda item. Could have just been a communication. Yeah, the original approval for the contract was more than $100,000 and as such any budget overages as our current Board of Finance and City Council approvals is written would have to come back to you. Thank you. But actually, I mean maybe City Attorney if we can should also put a cap if there are a little changes that is over 1,000 or 10,000 then it need to come back to us because how about it's like $59 should it come back to the council here again? I mean, there are two issues Councilor Jang that's one of them and I mean to understand this is over your contingency. So you already had a cushion in order to work with and this is going over that cushion. So I would hesitate for us to say you grant a cushion plus something in addition to that but that's a little hard but the big problem in this one is that it was spent before getting any approval and that's really not okay and that's why it has to come to you all and for you to say, okay, we've looked at this and we're making sure that city officials are doing what they're supposed to do and that they have as Councilor Tracy asked a good explanation for what happened and how they're gonna avoid it in the future. Okay, thank you. Okay. Okay. Good. If there are no further questions, we will go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. There are any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Laura and Chapin. There is a communication regarding a donation that was made for the end of the year. If there's no desire to discuss that further, I think we've reached the end of the agenda and if there's no objection, I will adjourn the Board of Finance. Go ahead, Councilor Pine. Sorry, Mr. Mayor. I was looking at the accountability list because I know that the Community Development Committee has a number of items on that list and I noticed that there's an item on there about seniors that we probably should be coming back to. So seeing this note from Megan Humphrey just reminded me that we as a Council went on record saying we wanted to look at senior issues and plan more proactively around senior issues. It seems like it was about a year and a half ago, perhaps so a lot has happened and we've been busy a lot of other issues. We should definitely, we'll circle back on that but I just wanted to highlight this was a good reminder as well as looking at the accountability list for our committee. So we will be bringing up some senior issues here soon. Thank you. Is there anything else related to this final item? Seeing none, we are adjourned as a Board of Finance at 6.55 p.m. And see everybody shortly. And if I could just please be made host just so that we get to public forum, enable folks' mics. That would be awesome. And for members of the public who have already signed on, I see quite a few people. We'll be getting the Council meeting started in about five or so minutes. I'm trying to give councillors some time to get on there and then we'll start with some of the non-deliberative items first, moving then into our public forum closer to 7.30. We may get into that a little bit early given that we do have quite a few folks signed up. But yeah, I just wanted to give folks a chance for that but we'll take a short little break here. Folks are on this meeting, please stay on this meeting. This is the link that we'll use for the regular City Council meeting as well. So let's call to order the regular City Council meeting for January 4th at 7.03. I think we have everybody on who we're expecting to have on. So let's dive into the meeting. First item is the pledge. So let's go ahead and do the pledge. Okay, that brings us into our next item, our first item on the agenda, which is the agenda. May I please have a motion on the agenda, Councillor Stromberg. I move to amend and adopt the agenda as follows, add councillors Carpenter and Paul as co-sponsors of agenda item 5.02, resolution advisory ballot item, garden climate justice and building decarbonization, councillors Hanson, Stromberg, Pine, Tracy, per councilor Hanson, note revised version title change and add councillor Carpenter to agenda item 5.03, resolution ballot question authors, authorizing retail cannabis sales while addressing systemic racism and other equity concerns revised. Remove from the agenda item 5.04, resolution allowing state licensed cannabis retailers and integrated licensees to operate within the city of Burlington, Councillor Carpenter per Councillor Carpenter, note recommended action for agenda item 5.05, communication Mayor Murrow Weinberger regarding veto of charter change, regarding police community control board to reconsider the resolution pursuant to charter section 46, per city attorney Blackwood, no email from Peter Clavel regarding transforming police services for this agenda item per COS Riddell. Thank you, Councillor Stromberg. We have a motion on the agenda. Is there a second? Seconded by Councillor Mason. Any discussion of our agenda this evening? Seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of adopting the agenda, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, hearing none, that passes unanimously and we now have our agenda. Our next item on the agenda is the public forum. However, we usually try to get to that closer to 730. As I said before, we may get to that a few minutes early but I did just want to also go to some of the non-deliberative items first and take care of those and then once we get through those I'll can circle back to public forum. So I'll move to item number three which are the climate emergency reports. Did any Councillors have a climate emergency report that they'd like to offer? Okay, seeing none, I will move past that item and then move down to our item number six which is committee reports. Are there any committee chairs interested in offering a report on their committee's business? Councillor Paul, go ahead. Thanks very much and happy new year to everyone. Just wanted to update the council on the fact the Park, Parks, Art and Culture Committee has not had a meeting in a couple of months mostly due to the tremendous amount of workload that has befallen a couple of the committee members and but we will be scheduling a meeting in mid January. Don't have the date quite yet but we'll be able to pass that along at the next council meeting. One will be reviewing highlight and also do have a further update on the mural going into the spring. So be able to give that further information in a couple of weeks. Thanks so much. Excellent. Any other committee chairs interested in giving a committee report? Okay. Oh, Councillor Pine, go ahead. Sure, I just wanted to mention that I was looking through our list to do list as Lori Olberg keeps us on task with the accountability list that's on our agenda and notice that our committee community development neighborhood revitalization has several items that have been on there for some time and so we'll be tackling them. One of them I just wanted to call your attention to is about a year ago a group of citizens including some counselors and some folks from senior organizations that serve seniors got together and suggested that the city place greater emphasis on the needs of our aging population in Burlington. So it's an issue that there's not a lot of detail or specificity to what we should do although it did say we should create a senior advisory council. I'm not sure if that's the path we'll take but I just want to at least let you all know that that wasn't forgotten. It was nearly off the list for a little while but not due to it not being important just because we had other business we were attending to and we'll be bringing that back after the committee gets a chance to talk about that. Thank you. Great thank you very much Councillor Pine. Any additional committee reports? Okay seeing none let's drop down to city council general city affairs. Anyone interested in commenting on general city affairs? Councillor Hanson go ahead. Great thanks I maybe could have done this one in committee reports too. It's a little bit ward one specific perhaps but there is going to be a meeting regarding potential changes on Colchester Avenue. That's going to be next Monday, 6.30 to 8.30 p.m. over Zoom. It's the Colchester Ave. Bikeways, parking and intersection safety group that's going to be meeting and I'm the council representative on that group and Councillor Hightower is the Councillor alternate on that and we're working with some public works commissioners and residents on that if anyone's interested. Thanks. Thank you Councillor Hanson. Anyone else wishing to speak to general city affairs? Okay seeing none.  Thank you I was going to wait and see if either any of the councillors who organized the food distribution event last week were going to speak up but I would just say thank you very much to councillors Paul and Mason and I believe I don't know if Shannon was involved but I would say everybody who was involved I know I saw no review there. It was actually kind of remarkable and also quite sad to me in a sense because the number of cars that were queued up went to Flynn Avenue and beyond and they had to be told you know if you have a child in the school system you can come back to the meals program the high school and if you don't there is the food shelf and there's other resources but just the degree of need and the degree of folks who are feeling and experiencing incredible economic insecurity was very sobering and it just made me feel that we have a lot of work to do we have to redouble our efforts and our commitments to trying to move the trajectory and move the narrative and the needle on these issues so thank you, just wanted to thank folks for that. Thank you so much, I agree with was a wonderful event and I'll recognize councillor Paul next go ahead councillor Paul. Thanks very much, so you know we've done these we've been having these food distribution events just about every month since the pandemic began and chose to go a new route with this one we had it during the week the other ones have all been on Saturdays and in between Christmas and New Year's the councillor Pine is absolutely correct the response was beyond overwhelming we had the most bags of groceries that we have had in doing all of these food events and it was nowhere near enough to meet the demand and our planning are already planning for January and hoping to increase that at least 50% in order to be able to accommodate a greater need. I just wanted to not only to thank councillor Mason who has been a tireless councillor involved in these efforts from the beginning but also councillor Carpenter who came out of the new North end to come to the South end when asked and has been tremendously instrumental in bringing these to life and then also just wanted to recognize ward six resident and someone that I would imagine many of you are familiar with Shannon Jackson who came into this effort at the second food distribution and we could not do these events without him. So just also wanted to thank that. Also councillor Pine, President Tracy and Mayor Weinberger who were also at the event. Thank you to all of you and to the many volunteers. We had a record number of volunteers. I think one of the things I also wanted to mention it didn't come to my attention until someone alerted me to the fact that in talking about how broken our system is and how incredibly dire food insecurity is that our Senator Bernie Sanders on the floor of the Senate actually mentioned the food distribution event at Champlain Elementary as yet sadly as yet another example of how much work we have left to do. So thanks very much. Very much appreciate that councillor Paul, councillor Jane, go ahead. Thank you. On top of the food distribution I think in the new North end too there is this particular individual. His name is Thomas Fleury who is doing an incredible job. And every Saturday this is ongoing. This is every single day and we have a food pantry here and with his leadership I think councillor Paulino and also carpenter has been instrumental in supporting the people in need here and it's ongoing. I don't know how he's doing it but he needs a great wonderful thank you from the city. I think also all the community members such as Melissa Kane is doing an amazing job supporting people during COVID-19 in terms of food distribution, winter closing drive for new Americans and low income families. I think those are incredible people that we all need to at least send a card to say thank you for the great work you've been doing behind the scenes. That's one. And the second thing, I think we are city council's elected officials and we were all divided in committees. Some of them we are interested in. And I think what councillor Paul was talking about the PAC has not met for months now and highlight has passed and we have no idea. I think we need to be really mindful for these committees to keep on going. Doesn't matter what, we all stay from home, we can meet from home, get regular updates from department heads about what's going on. I think it is unacceptable and we need to be mindful as we move forward to have these committees keep on going and also do the great work. Just wanted to put that out there. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else wishing to speak to city council general affairs? Okay, seeing none. We'll move on to city council president update. One thing that I did want to just cover and remind folks about because I do see some confusion around the public forum email that we use sometimes. So if folks are interested in signing up for public forum, that's not the way you do it. You sign up for public forum by going to burlingtonvt.gov slash city council slash public forum both city council and public forum are one word. And that will take you to a forum that you fill out that feeds into a Google sheet that I then use to organize and call off the public forum. So that's how you sign up for public forum itself. If you are interested in sending a message to the entire city council, the best way to do that is to send an email to the email city council. So city council one word at burlingtonvt.gov. So I just want folks to be clear on that if you're wishing to send a message easily to all counselors without having to put all their emails in. That's a really easy way to do it. So just wanted to clarify that because sometimes I see a little confusion around that there. So with that, I will now go to mayor Weinberger if you are ready, mayor, for your update. Otherwise, if you'd like to give it later on in the meeting, you're welcome to do that as well. Looks like, okay, you're ready. Go ahead. Yes, thank you, president Tracy. I just really would like to speak to two items at this point. One, I want to congratulate the Burlington city arts team and the many hundreds of partners really that they worked with to arrange a New Year's Eve. Unlike any other, from everything I've heard and witnessed myself, highlight was a resounding success. In fact, I've had some constituent request suggesting that we should do something like this every Friday night and that it really created a real sense of community and ability to see many other Burlingtonians and Vermonters in action and their element in a really unique way. It was a treat for me to see some of my 14 year old daughters. One of her friends performing in front of hundreds of people. It was great. So thank you to everyone who worked on that. If the council or the public does have any feedback, further feedback on it as we kind of debrief from this and figure out where to go from here with highlight, that would be awesome to get that. I should have started by saying happy New Year to you all and to everyone who's tuned in with us tonight. It's this 2021, I'm certainly hopeful we'll have much better year than the one we are closing. And I started with a lot of optimism about where we're headed. That said, right now, I think we really can't miss any opportunity but to remind ourselves and to be clear with each other that we are still in what is probably gonna be the toughest month of this pandemic from a public health perspective, virus cases continue to be rising or at a very high level, maybe slightly plateauing nationally. We've seen, we continue to be doing far better than just about any other community as a city, but we have infection levels at higher rates than we experienced until the beginning of November. And looming out there is this new strain of the virus which we are all still trying to figure out its implications and understand the science of it. But we are back in a period of some uncertainty of not really having good science on this new strain and it's dangers and what it exactly means. So I raise that and I will be speaking more later in the week on this to say that it is just a further indication that even as tired as we all are of these COVID provisions, we gotta stay vigilant in the month of January, continue to be mindful of all of the steps we have talked about for so many months. Any death at this point is particularly tragic given that the imminent arrival of the virus, of the vaccine really means that in a real way and a way that wasn't the case earlier in the pandemic, all deaths are potentially preventable now. But to prevent as many as we can, we've gotta continue to do the hard work, stay strong until the vaccine arrives. Hopefully we'll have more positive news on the vaccine front soon. And my office will continue to have COVID updates in the week's end. Thank you President Tracy. Thank you so much Mayor, I appreciate the updates from you and other counselors on General City Affairs, committee reports and all of that. We are a little ahead of 7.30, but I was just checking. I mean, we do have a lot of our first speakers already signed on to the meeting. So I am gonna just start public forum a little bit early if someone isn't on or we're not able to locate them, I will certainly go back to them. With this public forum, as has been our practice, I've prioritized BIPOC community members as well as Burlington residents. So if you're a non-Burlington resident, we are prioritizing Burlington residents first in this public forum. One of the things that I would ask is that people, please speak to the issues, keep it as focused on the issues on our agenda as possible or other issues that you wish to speak to, but please focus on issues in this meeting and we're gonna give two minutes as a time limit for folks. I do let folks finish their thoughts, but we do have quite a few people signed up for public forum tonight. So please just be mindful of that, wanting to make sure that we give as many people as possible the opportunity to comment this evening. So please just be mindful of that as you're speaking tonight. But again, I will let you finish your thought, but just please try and stay as close to that two minutes as you can. And with that, I'll ask if we could please get the timer up. I'll go into our public forum really quick. And thank you to Holly Bushnell, who's gonna be operating our timer this evening. Very much appreciate that. Let me get into the sheet really quickly, just to read off the first 10 or so commenters, just so that folks know who is coming up. So our first speaker will be Ashley LaPorte to be followed by Jessica LaPorte, Jada Bearden, C.D. Madison, Katarina Campbell, Infinite Cochleisure, Brian Chena, Deirdre Graham, Rhiannon, and Alyssa Chen. So I'm gonna locate Ashley LaPorte. I have found Ashley. Ashley, I'm gonna be, I've enabled your microphone, so you should be able to speak. Hello, President Tracy and the rest of city council. My name is Ashley LaPorte. I live in the south end in Ward 5 in Burlington. Calling tonight once again to ask this council to uphold your vote to pass community control of police and to push back against the mayor's most recent veto. At the core of it, we have hundreds of residents across Burlington who are engaging with our democracy and are looking to build a system of police accountability. And we're being kept from bringing this new system of accountability to a vote in March. It's really that simple. I thought it might be helpful to remind people of the facts, which is that over the summer, this council voted nine to three to pass the racial justice resolution and in the fall, passed a protesting and public safety resolution, both of which called for a revision to the city charter relating to police discipline. Over the past few months, some of us got to work on this. We engaged hundreds of community members to ask them what they wanted when it comes to holding the police accountable. We called into city council meetings, charter change committee meetings, joint committee meetings. We emailed and called and zoomed with city councilors. In short, we operated inside of our democracy. After a summer where we were all actually safely making good trouble out in the streets as inspired by John Lewis and others, we then turned and followed the other half of his example and got to work inside of the system. And many of us hadn't done that much before. We did it in good faith, hoping that the democracy would work for us. We talked to lawyers to the ACLU of Vermont. We did our own research on other models of community oversight of police in cities like Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin. And then we handed off the work to all of you, our elected officials, trusting you to take the next step in the process so that all of the residents of Brownington could vote on the policy this spring. But that's honestly when things started going off the rails. It's when people started coming out of the woodworks and I think we're honestly shocked that black and brown people had worked with elected officials to put a legal, viable solution on the table. A solution that both affords do process to police officers and puts the power of oversight and discipline into the hands of our community. And it's when the obstruction started. First, the rerouting of the policy that passed out of the Charter Change Committee to the Joint Committee. Then a resolution to get even more outside input from folks like Nacol. And then the misrepresentation of an opinion of a senior staff attorney at the ACLU. Then an unvetted memo from a couple of police commissioners attempting to speak on behalf of the entire joint committee. And even then the community continued to show up and fight for the policy that we created with counselor Freeman. We in fact got the backing from Nacol. Some brave members of the police commission publicly spoke out clarifying that they support community control of police. But most importantly, hundreds of us called into public forum and spoke through midnight to support the community control. And then this council passed the policy with a seven to five vote. But even after all of this, we are now facing a veto because the mayor believes that what? He personally knows better because what he doesn't believe that Burlington residents should be able to vote for what's best for us. That we should not be privy to participating in public panels to continue to discuss and revise a policy that will serve us. The massive tone shift coming from the mayor and the police chief as of late around public safety is so manipulative and it's so problematic. The people who should be afraid in this city are black and brown people. The data is telling us that, that we should be afraid of our own police department because the Burlington police department is harming us more. And the people who are experiencing houselessness and those with mental illness and other marginalized folks. If you're gonna fear monger, do it with the facts. The mayor and those who represent his office have continuously pushed back on a completely independent board with investigatory and disciplinary power and specifically are calling for the police chief to be more involved. And the mayor's memo is published on New Year's Eve. He states, the removal of the police chief from having a role in all serious disciplinary decisions is unique within all models we have reviewed and it impacts the operations of the department. That to me states that he's interested in a policy that gives the chief more power than the one that was originally passed through this council. My conversations with the mayor's police transformation director have only further solidified this. How is it that the mayor thinks we would trust in the police chief, this one, or the four interim ones before him or the social media harassing police chiefs before that? All the data shows us that these people, these policemen are the ones and the ones leading the department are the one disproportionately harming black residents. This old system is decidedly not serving us. And in the memo, the mayor asks that he himself have more power in overseeing the police. It is he says, and I quote, it is so problematic that the proposal does not increase the ability of the mayor to formally weigh in on disciplinary matters, despite the concerns about this that I raised repeatedly for a year. The mayor wants more power because why? He's done such a good job building trust in the community. He's pushed back on our efforts to reduce police funding. He brought his own guy to do police transformation work that has zero prior experience and is being paid by the police. And we know that now that the mayor had a really problematic role in the del pozo debacle. I know I am way over time, but I wanted to make sure that we're starting this conversation tonight with the facts clearly laid out. And these facts are stated above, not among not any of the political storytelling and propaganda during the mayor election year will change the facts. The fact is that the people are speaking and the mayor is willing to silence us to defend the status quo. But I deserve better than the status quo. My community deserves better than the status quo. In the end, all we have is us. We know that. We feed each other by a mutual aid. We hear each other and love each other with unconditional love. We inspire and nourish each other with our divine gifts of poetry and art. We're peaceful. We are brilliant and we're resilient. So I hope you'll choose to be with us and stand up to this veto. Thank you, Councillor Freeman, for creating this with us and for always standing with us. To the Councillors who already voted yes, Councillor Hightower, Tracy, Hanson, Strongberg, Pine, and Dang, thank you for taking part in our collective liberation. To the rest of you, I hope you choose to be in community with us. I promise you, it's much more fun and fulfilling and healthy than maintaining this current toxic status quo. We welcome you. Thank you. Thank you for that. And again, if folks can please really try and keep to the two minutes so that we can get to as many speakers as possible. Jess Laporte is our next speaker to be followed by Jada Bearden. Jess, I've enabled your microphone. Hi, would you be able to put me after CD Madison or a couple down the list? Sure, yeah, I'm happy to do that. That's okay. I'm gonna go to Jada Bearden next to be followed by CD Madison. So Jada, I have enabled your microphone. Thank you, President Maxx. My name is Jada Bearden. I use they them pronouns, excuse me. I would first like to share a quote from author Ajiomolua when we identify where our privilege intersects with somebody else's oppression will find our opportunities to make real change. To the five counselors who previously voted no, tonight is your opportunity. I see you. I understand the discomfort you may feel regarding the charter change. And I hope you can hear me when I tell you that there is a huge difference between being uncomfortable and being traumatized. The possibility of you five sustaining the mayor's veto traumatizes me. The cognitive dissonance of declaring racism as a public health crisis, while simultaneously hindering anti-racist progress traumatizes me. Living in Burlington without community control of police traumatizes me. Having only two minutes to convey the overwhelming anxiety I feel when I think of a potential increase in police presence traumatizes me. Right now I'm considering moving back to Texas, but this is not just a Burlington issue. This was never about politics for me. This is about staying alive. Tonight you five have the opportunity to choose democracy. Tonight you can vote to sustain BIPOC lives. Your move counselors. Thank you. I yield the rest of my time. Thank you. Our next speaker will be CD Madison. CD, I'm enabling your microphone. Good evening everyone. There is no question that transformative change of policing is required to save lives and deliver racial justice for a BIPOC community for whom the dignity of equal justice and recognition of our humanity have been denied for far too long. Doing nothing is untenable and is not an option. Mayor Weinberger made clear in his memo that he would not veto the charter change over his request to increase the ability of the mayor to formally weigh in on major disciplinary matters despite his concern that the public holds and we are accountable for police disciplinary decisions. This specific request is not about Mayor Weinberger. This is about the success of the oversight policy in and of itself. Regarding NACOL, National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement. They make clear that the most important factor for the success of the oversight system is involving all stakeholders. Specifically, the rapport between the chief players, oversight director, chief elected official, for example, the mayor, police chief or sheriff and union president can be far more important to the success of the oversight system than the system structure. My concern is that all stakeholders have not been invited to the table or heard. The charter change on the table is outside of NACOL's recommendations and model. For NACOL, within the current oversight landscape, few existing oversight agencies have the authority to make final determinations as to the outcome of an investigation. Excuse me for a second. My frustration and hope is that there's an opportunity to do right by the people and deliver a charter change framework for oversight with ordinances that allow policy to adjust as needed. Creating an overly detailed and flexible charter change will create unintended public safety consequences regarding the city's ability to be nimble and responsive as the policy impact plays out. Mayor Weinberger and city council members who voted against the charter change as it stands have reached out and initiated several opportunities to amend the proposed policy so that it can protect black and brown people against disproportionate policing. Their asks promote an extensible flexible framework that can respond and adjust as needed via ordinance changes, which unlike a charter change do not require a citywide vote. Every city council member and the mayor agree on this point. Doing nothing is not an option. Compromise is needed. Flexibility is needed. The gap in my reading of the mayor's memo is bridgeable between the mayor's ask regarding his policy concerns and the charter change as it now stands. My ask as a community member is that all parties recognize the shared position and find a way to get to yes. This charter change will be put to a citywide vote. I want it to deliver a substantive change and I want it to pass. Thank you very much. Thank you. Our next speaker will be Katarina Campbell to be followed by Infinite Co-Cleasure. Katarina, I've found you and have enabled your microphone. Good evening, beloved community. I'm here to discuss the mayor's December 31st memo about his decision to veto the proposed charter change. I too noticed the statement that, quote, removal of the chief of police from having a role in all serious disciplinary decisions, end quote, is a cause for, quote, deep concern, end quote. While the charter change would require the chief of police to focus more on prevention, accountability and culture change over force and discipline to claim that this would entirely remove their role and power in the disciplinary process is unfounded. There's a framework for understanding within the anti-violence movement and advocacy that those who create harm tend to believe that they are powerless when denied unmitigated power explicitly on their terms. This is an emergent theme within the memo. It is important that we recognize the tactics used against us. I do not argue that the mayor is consciously malicious. First, the obvious, bait and switch. The mayor shares his difficulty to reach agreement on the, quote, remaining differences, end quote. He posits an alternative plan that could be enacted immediately through existing channels. In short, the memo communicates that the work up to this point could not bring forth an actionable proposal. The mayor's alternative plan manages to evade the core demands of our people and reinstates power and authority of those already with disproportionate control who are key participants in past harm. So what are we talking about here? We are talking about putting the will of the people to ballot. I am so proud of our people for all the ways we show up and continue to build toward our freedom. The will of the people has been collaboratively captured in this charter change and deserves to be put to vote within our community. I yield my time, thank you. Our next speaker is infinite co-cleanser to be followed by representative China, infinite or enabling your microphone. Thank you, Councillor Tracy. And thank you, Mayor Wonberger for the second veto in just about two months in showing all the peasants who the boss is. It kind of reminds me of all the signatures that were rejected by the city council when concerned voters came forward with a different proposal for City Park. And so I really hope that this might be the signal for Brawleton voters to move in the same direction of just about every other city, a town in Vermont where the voters have the power and authority to pass or reject referendums and increase civic participation across the city. Today, police accountability might be the central issue but tomorrow in the next year, in the next generation, the underlying issue will be a small number of people who are not representative of the larger community making decisions for everybody. We need another path to democracy that doesn't rest on one person's veto. Please check out propositionzero.org and sign our petition. We need 3,000 signatures in order to have referendums in the city of Burlington, like Winooski, like Essex, like Colchester and a whole lot of other towns across Vermont. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Our next speaker will be Brian Cina to be followed by Deirdre Graham. Brian, I've enabled your microphone and you should be able to speak. All right, I think it's working. So I would like to respond to the mayor's memo regarding the veto and ask the city council to override the veto. In the memo, the mayor says that in the short term, placing the charter change on the ballot is likely to accelerate the departures of sworn officers from the department. Well, this departure is already happening and it isn't gonna stop unless we move forward with reimagining public safety. The police officers need to see how they fit into a system that truly takes care of the people instead of being used as pawns to protect the property in interest of those with the most money, property and power in the city. And let's look at the numbers of what the police are actually doing. They're responding to overdoses and mental health crises, housing crisis. We don't need more police. We need mental health services, universal housing, economic opportunity for people. We need to take care of each other better not to police each other more. And the mayor mentions that over the medium and long-term, the charter change if adopted will have an even greater impact on the city's ability to field and effective police department. Well, why would we want police officers who are afraid of community oversight? Why would we want a police chief who's unwilling to accept community control of the police? We need to recruit workers in leadership of the police department who are willing to embrace the reimagining of public safety that's needed at this moment in history. And the mayor says, while getting police discipline right is critical, we must expand our focus if we truly seek to secure different policing outcomes. I do agree. Let's expand our focus. Let's reimagine public safety. 10 years ago, mayor, you came and visited us on Isham Street to see what we were doing with community gardening. And over the last 10 years, crime rates on our street have dropped 30 to 60% due to our mutual aid without any changes to policing. All the changes that have happened to policing didn't have an impact. It was the mutual aid. It got to the point that the police wanted to work with us to expand the smile around the city, but we didn't get the grant. Why not continue this work to explore alternatives to the police? Ultimately, I'd just like to thank all of the activists, especially the BIPOC activists and extra, especially the Blackfems and gender non-conforming leaders. I just want you all to remember that although we may lose a battle tonight, this is only one moment in time in a war against us that has gone on for 400 years. Remember that the ancestors are standing here with us tonight and we will continue to fight for collective liberation and their footsteps. Regardless of the outcome tonight, we all have to live together in the city and we're all gonna have to figure this out together. So please override the mayor's veto and let's move forward with reimagining public safety for the city. Thank you. Thank you, Representative China. Our next speaker, I couldn't find Deirdre Graham, so I'm gonna go to Rhiannon. I believe I've located you. So I'm gonna enable your mic and Rhiannon is to be followed by Alyssa Chen. Can you hear me? Yes, I can, go ahead. Hi, I'm Rhiannon Wiley. I'm a resident of Ward 6. So I guess councillors Karen Paul and Joan Shannon pay special attention. So I wanna speak today on that revote for the charter change in light of the mayor's veto. I just wanna say, my understanding is that this charter change is meant to give us as a community a way of holding our public servants accountable after years of them brutalizing our residents of color without recourse. And now we can't even vote on it as a community because of this veto. That's, it's incredibly paternalistic and to be honest, that's fundamentally undemocratic. The mayor said in his memo that this charter change is divisive and that it'll compromise public safety because it's gonna lead to decrease in the number of police officers. Who's public safety is he talking about? Did you see that recent use of force data that just came out that said like 28% of those that the Burlington Police Department used force on in the last year were black? Like, have you seen that graph, the graph in Vermont Digger showing how the disproportionate rate at which the police have been using force on black people in our community has been increasing steadily over the last few years. Saying that you're not going to allow community accountability of the police department because it's quote unquote detrimental to public safety is just coded language for saying, I prioritize the anxieties of white residents over the rights of black Burlingtonians to live here without being assaulted by police officers. The mayor says that he wants to work on a resolution to address disciplinary authority over the police. He's had every opportunity to champion concrete policy to ameliorate racism in the city and he's dragged his feet. How can any of us trust him to actually do that? Counselors, I call on you to vote and provide a veto proof majority to allow this charter change on the ballot because I know you genuinely do care about this community. And we live in a democracy so we should act like it. Don't allow him to override this charter change with his veto. I'm done. Thank you. Our next speaker will be Alyssa Chen to be followed by Adam. So Alyssa, I have located you and have enabled your microphone. Hello, this is Alyssa Chen speaking. You see her pronouns and I live in Ward 2 and I'm a biracial Asian white resident of Burlington and I've read through Murrow's memo and I just have a few comments to give on it. And I just really want to encourage either Murrow not to veto or for the city council to override that veto. Murrow, I find it interesting that you state in the first line of the memo that you're vetoing primarily because it compromises the city's ability to ensure public safety. I think that the real thing compromising the ability of the city to do public safety is a lack of public oversight that has allowed officers under your watch over the past several years in your mayorship to act with impunity as we've seen in many of the cases of police brutality. The only accountability that took place was through countless hours of BIPOC-led protests. What we were trying to do here is systematize this accountability. Murrow, in your memo, you bring up the concern of police leaving the force at a quick rate. I want to build on what Brian Cheena said and that this to us should not be a concern. It should be an opportunity to door for transformation. Videoing this charter change is putting the brakes on the transforming public safety that's taking place in Burlington. And it's putting our values into the police instead of the transformative systems of mutual aid, affordable housing, mental health and civic engagement that can actually keep us safe. Murrow, at the end of your statement, you stated a hope to reconcile between the police and the BIPOC community. What you need to recognize is that in order to reconcile a situation, what you need is accountability. Accountability that can ensure that the harm that has occurred is not going to continue to occur. And that accountability is the goal of this charter change. In videoing this charter change, you're overriding the city council and also the overwhelming movement of our nation and our city. In choosing to veto this charter change, you're acting in a paternalistic way of thinking that you and your elite class of people know better than the mass. Please let us practice and use our democracy and stop hoarding your power all to yourself. Thank you. Our next speaker is Adam. And I appreciate you identifying yourself, Adam. I will enable your microphone, but just wanted to read off a few more speakers who to follow just so that folks have a little bit of an idea if they're coming up. So I have following Adam, Luis Rosario, Zanavia W, Jess Laporte, Zoe Keninger, or Zoe Keninger, I'm sorry, Tia Hunt, Daniel Muntianu, Grace Field, Marissa, James Lent, Maxwell Solter, Lauren Akin, William Keaton, Dana Keys Gibbons, Rachel Gallus, Nell Carpenter, William Emmons. So Adam, I'm gonna come to you and enable your microphone. Hi, my name is Adam. I'm a resident of Ward 2 and I'm here to voice my support for charter change around police control. The first generation American who grew up in a state as white as this, Burlington initially seemed like a place where issues like police accountability are taken seriously. This does not reflect in the city's government. The Bakery Park Movement has shown what change the community stands for. This charter change could reflect that. Mayor Murrow expresses concern about public safety with a reduced police department. However, police use of force against black individuals is not only disproportionately high, but also increased this last year. The public safety concern that I have is when my friends, members of my community are unsafe from the police and there is still no change. Putting this charter change to public hearing will allow this issue to be solved out and democratically. Thank you. I yield my time. Thank you. I have Luis Rosario next to be followed by Xenavia W. Luis, I have enabled your microphone. Yep, go ahead. Two seconds. All right. My name is Luis Rosario. I live in the south end of Burlington in Ward 5. I've lived in Vermont for the past seven years. I've lived in Wanooski and Burlington. I'm originally from New York City and I grew up in a strong Dominican family. I was raised by my mother, my grandmother and sister. I typically don't engage in local politics, but I've been getting more involved in Burlington since the lynching of George Floyd and the passing of the racial justice resolution this summer. I'm still having to be in community with BIPOC in Burlington. This movement has brought us all together and made us brave enough to raise our voices against the status quo and systems of power, which is why I'm appalled, but not shocked at the blatant fear-mongering misinformation and backdoor politics that occur among some of you. Meryl's attempt to pander to his base by spreading of substantiated claims of that community control of police will cause police officers to quit in an ability to secure public safety and it's designed to be, quote, hostile to the police, is absurd. The mayor's memo never takes into account that community control of police will bring the type of officers that know that they're not above the law and truly want to help everyone in the community and not just be the king's guard and hopefully avoid another deposal situation. That public safety is already ensured by the people, good citizens all over Burlington keep each other safe way before ever calling a cop and as far as for community control of police being hostile to the poli