content. Thank you. Item number three, agenda review. Are there any additions, deletions, or changes in order of the agenda items tonight? I wanted to make one request that we just get a brief overview of the activity that is being discussed with the school district at the school board meeting on Wednesday regarding an easement on Williston Road, which appears to be a part of a larger project, but I know I'm not up to speed on it, but I thought if we could just add a brief overview for those of us who might not be up to speed, that would be great. Okay. Are you prepared for that? Yes. And do we have a place we'd like to put it, maybe after the consent agenda or further down? Do you have a preference? I don't have a preference. Let's make it item 7.1. So after item 7. Any other additions or deletions? Okay. Moving on. Comments and questions from the public not related to the agenda tonight. Are there any comments from the audience here in the auditorium or online? Normally would have them take their themselves off mute or turn their camera on to be able to be seen, right? If you're online. So we don't see anybody like that. So we'll move on to item number four, which is counselors, announcements and reports on committee assignments and the city manager's report. Which counselor would like to go first, Elizabeth, would you like to go? Sure. I had an opportunity to sit in on the economic development committee meeting, which you were also at him. And I was doing this as a way to familiarize myself and kind of enhance my onboarding and I my intent is to continue to do that. And then also I know we're talking about appointments tonight. We had a good conversation. The economic development committee is looking for two new members and they have some robust activity going on largely focused on a childcare survey, which seems to be important right now in terms of understanding what childcare needs there are in the city and how that might impact employers who are looking to attract folks to the city. So that was one of the big topics. And I'm not sure I again have an opportunity to familiarize myself with committee members and with some of their upcoming agenda items. Andrew? Not this week, Tim. Okay. How about Lori? Nothing to report. Okay. Except that I will be going to the planning commission meeting tomorrow night to say goodbye with my colleagues and thank them for all the work we did together. Excellent. Mike? Nothing. Looking forward to going on to the committee liaison structure. It's definitely an exciting part of the work that we have ahead of us. Okay. Great. So I attended the economic development committee meeting just like Elizabeth and there was a lot of discussion about the about childcare and in fact they're working on a survey. They handed out a copy of the survey and it was reviewed. Some suggestions came up for changes to be made. I think that's going to be some more work done on that. Also Alana was plugging the illuminate Vermont activity that's coming on April 5th and 6th. So if everybody doesn't know about that, there's a, you know, on the city web page, there's information about that. So it'll be just like illuminate Vermont a year ago last December where they shut down Market Street in front of the city hall and they had vendors and food trucks and entertainment and bands and drinks and they're going to have beer and mixed drinks this year. I understand. Correct. Okay. Also, I was able to come to City Hall on Friday for a very short meeting with Peter Welch and Jesse Baker after he gave his trust conference about the bills he's working on to level the eligibility for SNAP benefits for seniors and people with student loans. So but we were able to thank him profusely for his work and able to, you know, for obtaining that $8 million gap funding for the bridge and we had a short conversation. It was, yeah, it was really good to be able to sit in on that. So thank you for inviting me to that. Other than that, I don't have anything, but I did have some feedback after the last meeting. A couple of people could not hear very clearly what we were saying. So I will just ask people to be close to their microphones when they speak. Make sure that you can at least hear yourself and enunciate clearly for the audience. Either in the audience here or online. So Jesse. Great. Thank you. So I just want to echo the chairs. Thanks to Senator Welch for joining us at City Hall. Last week, not only was he here to chat with us about the $8 million grant award, but also held a press conference in this room announcing some legislation that he's sponsoring in Washington and visited with our seniors during their Friday, senior lunch. So we're really appreciative that he thinks of us for those kinds of events and that hopes he continues to do so. For the council and the community, I wanted to remind everyone that early voting for the second school budget vote is open now. The actual vote is on April 4th at regular 7-7 at your polling places, but if you're interested in voting early, you can do that during regular hours at the clerk's office. The superintendent shared that if folks had previously requested a ballot for town meeting day, that we will send those out. So Holly has figured out how to do that, and those will be being mailed out as well. The rental registry for the community, we've gotten some... I have a question on that, Jesse. For those that didn't vote early last on town meeting, what is the last day that you can vote early as walk-in, do you know? That's an excellent question, and I don't know, but I'll be sure we include that in the next City News. I believe to walk-in. So is the question to walk-in or mail-in? To walk-in to City Hall to pick up an early ballot, what's the last time you can do that? So I would say to be safe, it should be April 2nd, because traditionally April 3rd, the day before the election, City Hall closes, or the clerk's office closes early to prepare for the election. So I would right now, if the cuffs say April 2nd, but we will include that in the next City News update. That's a great question. Thank you. So we've received some questions from the community about the rental registry. Just a reminder to the community that the rental registry ordinance is in place. It is...the application is up on our website, so folks can go online and complete that form and register their rental property. Thus far, we have about 60 properties registered. Also want to remind the community that animal licenses are due by April 1st. So while you're voting early for the school budget, you can register for your cat or your dog, and then the chair has mentioned some of this already, but we have an amazing amount of programming going on right now. The library and the recreation and parks department would really encourage folks to check out our social media and our website for a list of that programming. I also want to share with the council that Adam has coordinated SSTA public transportation services for folks who are having a hard time getting to programming throughout the city, because we don't have that centralized space on a bus route right now. Additionally, those shuttles will run every night to SB Night Out this summer, and they will alternate routes between City Center and Feral Street. So we're hoping to bring in some additional residents to that program who historically have not been able to participate. Some of you were on an email last week or the week before about Little League and JC Park. So our team has met on site with Little League, Parks and Rec, Public Works, and a professional field maintenance person. Major renovations are not needed. What was needed was improved water service. So that has now been installed, and there's a preventive maintenance plan for this summer. So we're hoping that will address some of the concerns Little League was articulating. Finally, I've heard some interest from counselors about doing facility tours of city facilities, which is great. We would love to show them off. So I have some dates here that could work for our team, and I'd be happy to talk about those right now, or we can do that scheduling via email. What would folks prefer? Email might be quicker. Email? OK. I will send those out tomorrow. So Tim can keep us on track. Thank you. Wastewater is the most interesting one. Is that it? OK, great. And now we have the consent agenda. And there are five parts to the agenda. Consider and sign disbursements, approve minutes from January 29th, February 5th, February 20th council meetings, receive the February financial statements, approve accepting stormwater permit 31539050 under the city's MS4 permit to provide coverage for the Stonehouse Village Homeowners Association and the Stonehouse Village Carriage Homeowners Association. And last but not least, accept easements for the construction maintenance of the Dorset Street shared use path between Old Cross Road and Sadie Lane and associated drainage and utility infrastructure. If that full list meets your requirements, I would entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda. Move to approve the consent agenda. Second. We have motion to second. Is there any discussion? I would just abstain from the minutes from the three meetings as I was not serving on the board at the time. Sure, that's fine. I just have a question, Tim. And this is really just more for not to really question the process because I understand it's pretty standard. But what's the incentives and the framework for the city to take over the stormwater and then fund maintenance, repair, replacement improvement, as opposed to leaving that funding obligation on the Homeowners Association? Like what's the thought process there? And what's in it for the city to do that? It's a great question. Marisa is on line. She is our stormwater superintendent. Marisa, are you available? Great. Did you hear Councilor Chalmick's question or would you like him to repeat? I did hear the question. Thank you. Yeah, that's a good question. So the main reason is that's how we sold the stormwater utility program to the residents. That's how the whole utility got approved. That's the benefit to the residents that we provide based on certain criteria that most neighborhoods have to meet. But this is one of the main benefits that the stormwater utility provides to our residents. So in effect, you're saying that because we raise the stormwater fees and those stormwater fees are designed for this very thing, this is just a natural course of how this is done within the stormwater utility framework. Yes, essentially. And we're accepting it once they've constructed it to our standards. So it's like accepting a road. We don't necessarily need to accept a road, but there's a public benefit to having city owned and maintained roads. Similarly with stormwater. Can I, that begs another question from my perspective, which is I think there are some homeowner associations that have either special assessments now and then or at different, I don't know how timely it is, but have assessments associated with stormwater activity. So is there the potential for a pipeline of these types of easement approvals that might come before the city? There is certainly a pipeline of accepting new infrastructure that may come before the city. I don't know the specific answer. Marys, I don't know if you know the specific answer about special assessments for HOAs that are maintaining their own stormwater systems and whether we have any of those anticipated to be accepted. I will also remind the, or suggest to the council that next week is or next meeting is public works night where you will receive a whole orientation on public work stuff. So this is a great guide to us about some things we maybe want to prepare to answer. But Risa, do you have any response about the HOA question? As far as I'm aware, the special assessments that we currently have are related to stormwater infrastructure upgrades that we provided funding for.  I'll hold that question for next week. That's a great question. Next week, yeah. We'll have Tom here then. Yeah, the whole team will be here. The whole team will be here, great. So we have a motion and a second. Any other discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Thank you. Item seven, we're going to introduce Jared Pellerin, who's the deputy city attorney tonight. Do you want to do Wilson Road first, or are you going to do that after that? No, after that, 7.1. Sure. So while Jared and Colin are coming down, just a few sentences of introduction. So today is Jared's first day with us as deputy city attorney. We are thrilled to have him. He comes to us most recently as the acting city attorney in Burlington, also served as council for the city of Albany and for the New York state legislature. He has a BA in government from St. Lawrence University and his law degree from the Albany Law School of Union University. So huge skill, huge talent, we're excited to have him on board. And while I have the microphone, again, really want to thank our city attorney, Colin McNeill for holding down the fort as the sole attorney for a number of months and doing it with grace and class and patience and humor and a huge amount of professionalism. So thank you, Colin. Thank you, Jesse. You kind of took most of the things I wanted to say about Jared other than the fact that I'm very excited he's on board. It's going to be great to work with and it's going to be a great opportunity for us to provide better legal services to the city and to you. So here's Jared. Thank you. Did I pronounce your last name correctly? Yes, I believe you did. It's not Pelchon. Maybe that's how my ancestors would pronounce it. But so yes, good evening, everyone. Jared Pellerin, I'm very excited to be joining the team here at South Burlington. I can already feel the energy within Jesse's team and everyone working hard to provide the utmost benefit and service to the residents and our local government is in good hands. So I'm excited to jump in with both feet and get to work. Excellent, thank you. Very exciting to have you on board. Thank you. All right, we're gonna move on to 7.1, which is a new item, which is a small discussion of the requests for the school district to look at an easement on Williston Road as part of the Williston streetscape project. Or short. So I wanted to, well, was asked to provide just a few high level summary points here. So Alana, our community development director and I will be attending the school board meeting on Wednesday to present this concept to the school board. This is a plan that has been in discussion with the city council for probably almost a decade improving the streetscape along Williston Road. It's part of the bond vote the community took last town meeting day to complete the walkability and bike ability of city center and create that infrastructure network. So where we are in the plans right now is as we get to final engineering, we have what's called our right of way set of plans that outlines the space we will need from private land owners to build our facility. So at times that's just a construction easement, at times that is a permanent conveyance of land. Specifically this request outlines the right of way we will need from the school district at the Williston Road side of the Rick Markott campus. We need about 10 feet of right of way to construct that protected shared use path. It will include improved streetscapes, street trees, green space, the snow belts and other components. This will be at we are proposing that this is at no cost to the school district. So we will reinstall their fence. We will put their parcel back together as however they request. Our ask for the school board on Wednesday night is really to enable us to talk with the for our right of way attorney to talk with their right of way attorney to come to agreement on the legal documents. And then of course those legal documents would need to go to the school board for approval and to the council for approval in the future. So no action is needed tonight by you or on Wednesday night by the school board, but this is the overview of the plans. And then just so you can see how they're all connected. Again, this is the Williston Road streetscape improvement here you can see in green and it creates this kind of walkability, bikeability loop around city center. So that's the project. This presentation is currently available on the school board's agenda posting for Wednesday night. So folks can go and look at this presentation at their leisure. And I guess while I have the mic, I do wanna say that we are working on probably, Colin, correct me here, probably 40 or 50 different right of way agreements at the moment between the bridge project, these projects you see here in front of you and in the Dorset Street shared use path project. We do this a lot. A lot of those things will come to you. If you have more questions about that for continuing projects, we're happy to answer those at your request. Just a quick question on was there input from the walkability study into this or does this inform the walkability study just for my benefit? So I'm not sure what you mean by the walkability. Well, you had mentioned that part of this included feedback from the, it was the school's safe, I'm gonna get it wrong. Oh, the Safe Roots to School Task Force? Safe Roots to School, yes, sorry. So the design of this has not gone to them because it was fully designed before that group came to be, but there have been many community processes over the last decade around these projects as a whole, around specifically the Williston Road streetscape improvement effort and through the bike and ped committee. Thank you. Thank you, Jesse. Moving on to number eight, which is council orientation for public safety, police and fire, Sean Burke, police chief and Stephen Locke fire chief. Come on down. Okay. Hi, Stan. Andrew has my slide deck. Mic check, we're good. Thank you so much for the record. My name is Sean Burke. I have the privilege of serving as the city's police chief. I'm in my sixth year with the organization. If we could flip to the other work chart. So essentially what you have before us, before you on the screen is our organizational chart at the top. You'll see it's the office of the chief, which encompasses our deputy chief, our executive assistant, and then our community justice center. We've got an extraordinary program going on with our community justice center where it's one of two in the state embedded in the police department. They physically work in the same space, which really provides an avenue for energy, case strategy and a referral process that many communities don't enjoy. And if you study restorative justice, restorative practice and see how it intersects with particularly like first time or low level criminality, there is proven data to suggest that there's less recidivism. So we see this as a meaningful path forward and we're fortunate to have that team staff with our executive director, Joseph LaVanue and he has one employee that assists him in that work in the community justice center that we'll talk about a little bit further on. If you go further down the chart, I'm sorry, on your left, now you're good, you'll see essentially the department has two silos. LT is an abbreviation for lieutenant and patrol is our largest functioning branch, the most visible branch of the police department. Those are the employees that you see in the street and our beautiful blue and silver police cars answering calls for service and patrolling neighborhoods. Right now we run patrol on a 12 hour schedule. So there are four teams, each team has a sergeant and three officers assigned. And then there are two additional sergeants that work a split shift, a noon to midnight. And what that offers us is a little bit of human resource to mitigate when one either day sergeant or night sergeant is out. The patrol division works 24 seven, 365 and we're answering just about 12,000 calls for service a year. On the right hand, I'm sorry, I want to add on to the patrol lieutenants responsibility, Lieutenant Battai, he oversees our animal control officer, which is actually a contract employee. And they do, depending on the season between 16 and 20 hours of work in the city and then emergency call out as needed on animal control issues. On your right is the second silo of the police department and that's the Lieutenant over administration, Lieutenant Jager, he's responsible for supervising our sergeant that's assigned to administration that sergeant is responsible for all of our training professional regulation compliance as well as day to day oversight of our dispatch center and the dispatch center we will as of tomorrow employee seven full-time dispatchers, which is exciting. It's a team that when I came over here in 2018, we only had five full-time dispatchers and we've been able to grow that to meet the demands. We do dispatch for not only the police department but for the fire and ambulance service in the city. Lieutenant Jager also oversees our sergeant in BCI. BCI is a, is an abbreviation for Bureau of Criminal Investigation or detectives. So we have Sergeant Eno in that role. He supervises two detectives that work in-house in our in-house detectives do everything from background investigations to murder investigations and everything in between. It's one of the most fascinating roles that you can have as a police detective in a small city. We also have a detective assigned at CUSY which is the Chittenden unit for special investigations. That is a multidisciplinary team comprised of social workers, some advocacy staff as well as detectives from around surrounding police agencies in the county and they are focused on sex assault investigations and serious issues of child abuse. And then lastly, in detectives, DTF stands for Drug Task Force. We have a detective that is assigned to the Vermont State Police Drug Task Force and their focus is on mid to upper level drug traffickers operating in Northwestern Vermont. The Sergeant TBD, that's to be determined that is a position that is funded now in the FY25 budget. We really see building that out to, it was once formerly called the Youth Service Sergeant, only responsible for oversight of our youth service officers. We'd really like to kind of build that into a problem-oriented policing team where we encompass a lot of different things to include how we better serve youth in the community, how we now respond to homelessness in the community, how we could better intersect with our community outreach team. And really be a better point of contact for the community on issues that really are directly criminality. That's the hope, the reality is that's vacant. We've got Corporal Breanne Williamson serving all of the schools. She's our lone SRO doing fantastic work. And then we have Officer Aaron Schwartz in TSU, which is the Traffic Safety Unit. And he is a dedicated uniform officer focused on traffic safety issues in the city. And then the last two blocks, we have our records division. We have two employees. They process all of our records that go to court or things that we have to keep on file. And they also respond to requests from the public or from the courts pursuant to discovery orders and prepare all that information to include digital evidence management, which is a big part of that work now and they do a fine job at that. And then lastly is that acronym is our Human Trafficking Case Manager Coordinator. So we have a state funded grant funded position. And this is a victim advocate that does direct service work with those that are actually in the sex trade. And that is she's responsible for the northern half of the state and also helps orient kind of the churn of new employees that they have in a similar role in Southern Vermont. This illustration is my brain on Monday mornings, but it really, what it shows is the challenges that our profession has been facing with sworn officer staffing. So you'll see the gold bars indicate the number of sworn police officers we actually employ and how that has started at 39 and is now down to 32. As of today, the red line is folks that have either resigned or retired. You'll see in 2022, we saw a lot of people reach their retirement age and without hesitation, they left policing. The green line is the folks that we've been able to hire and bring on to the police department and you'll see only in one recent year were we able to outpace the number of employees we actually lost. And working all the way to the right, you'll see that we've had two of our officers leave us in 2024. We were not able to identify anyone that met our standards for the current police academy class. We're hopeful that we've got our eye on four potential candidates for the August class, but they have to finish up background investigation and then accept employment. And as you can imagine, the employment landscape is wide open. It's really their choice where they wanna go and work. What do we do with all of our resources? And you'll see the graph that is labeled as incident and arrest trend over time. So in 2020, despite what some of our critics would say that we didn't have anything going on, we had 13,307 incidents that we responded to in that year and made over 1,000 arrests. Again, global pandemic going on. You'll see the incident line kind of trending downward. Really, that represents the number of officers that we had deployed in the field and the amount of work we were actually able to get done. It's really a point where we're doing less discretionary work and we're just responding call to call. The arrest trend line is similar in ways. When officers are tied up, they can't do proactive patrols for say like DUI or other crimes in progress. Some of that also can be attributed to what was going on in the court in terms of cases that just simply weren't being accepted for prosecution. The graph on your right, I'm at social service needs. You've probably heard me talk about this before. It's a catchment of five areas, mental health crisis, suicidal persons, overdose, intoxication and welfare. Calls, you can see that we've seen a pretty sharp rise in those over time. And despite our efforts to work with the community outreach team and in either a co-response model or a way that we can quickly hand off those calls, there's limits to what they can actually do, the community outreach team. And there's also a limit to when they're available. And when all other government services shut down, the phones still ring in our dispatch center and our public safety assets still respond. Thank you. Chief, is that the number of calls when you say unmet number of calls that you're not able to respond to? Is that what this chart is showing? No, those are the ones that we actually responded to. So 1,003 in 2023. So you're saying unmet in the sense that this shows there's a lot of social service needs, but you are able to respond to the calls? Yes. Okay. Those people could benefit from a different provider than police or firefighters. Prevailing crime trends, I know that you've all heard me talk about this before and we've seen double and triple digit increases in retail theft, larceny, installing cars. Larceny is a term for theft. So theft, installing cars could really be prevented if folks would not leave themselves vulnerable to the people that are preying upon them, blocking their cars, taking their keys, not leaving laptop bags or handbags on seats in the mall parking lot would all be really helpful. Retail theft is a little more fickle and we'll see where this retail theft bill goes. Now that we're getting through crossover and we'll also see what the court is gonna start to do with these issues because we're seeing the high degree of recidivism across the small number of people. So I think we could find a way out of this. I'm hoping that the backside of the criminal justice system can help figure this out. Our dispatch center, so this is a great picture that I did not take. Andy in communications took this photo of one of our new consoles. I think it's important to highlight that our dispatch center receives about 16,000 calls for service each year. Dispatch is 16,000 calls for service each year between police, fire and EMS. I don't know the number of physical phone calls or actual phone calls that they receive, but it's well north of 16,000. There are times in the dispatch center that we only have one employee working and it's just kind of artifact of how small government and public safety once was. And now that we're growing, it's definitely a service area that city management is focused on growing. And again, like we'll have our seventh dispatcher starting tomorrow. We have four brand new state-of-the-art dispatch terminals for them to work at. We've got the FireCAD program that makes the work more efficient and it's a system that the fire department needs to rely on. So there's a lot of good things going on in that space, but it's really work that's not often thought about when you think about the police or the fire department. We don't go anywhere unless they pick up the phone and tell us where to go. And there are always that voice that really resonates with crime victims or those suffering with some type of medical event in their homes, that calming voice. And it's much different. If you call a 911 center, it's very robotic. When you hear our dispatchers interfacing with the public on the telephone in moments of crisis, it's really work that I can't highlight enough and it's work that I'm certainly proud that they can carry out because that degree of multitasking, I tell them this all the time. That's a job I cannot do. It's extraordinarily tough. Can I ask, is there just one way to contact the dispatches at just 911 or can you contact by texting in other ways? We do not have technology into our center, but we do have a business line and that's<PHONE_NUMBER> extension zero. And that's actually the best way to call us for a non-emergency issue. 911 is routed to one of two state dispatch centers, well, two state police run dispatch centers and then there's about four other public safety answering points and they take a little bit of information, figure out that you're in a jurisdiction like ours where there's full time services and they route that call to our center. And then we pick up. Yes. And are there times where the dispatcher is handling more than four incidents at the same time? Oh, certainly between police and fire, there can be multiple ambulance calls and a need for police service. Like this morning there was a decent size or scale crash on Williston Road at Kennedy Drive and everyone gets on their cell phone and calls us, which is fantastic, but the dispatcher has to triage that. One of the most terrifying things I ever saw was when we had the shooting at the mall a couple of years ago. I walked into the dispatch center to figure out if it was real or not and the phone was going completely crazy and to watch our single dispatcher trying to navigate all those phone calls, get critical information because those are witnesses to a felonious act that we need to track down eventually and keep that all coordinated while getting the resources there. It was really, really work that was impressive. How many hours does it take to train somebody on this new system? So I don't know how much of an impact it's had on the number of hours we do. It's similar to our field training officer program, which is 14 weeks in duration to become a police officer after the academy. We put dispatchers through a program that is similar in length, 12 to 14 weeks where they actually work with a fully credentialed dispatcher. Thank you. So some of our emerging issues, this chart is kind of interesting. The green bar represents the number of officers that the South Burlington Police Department has essentially authorized or funded from 1970 through 2020. And you'll see starting at 19, getting to a high of 42, tapering down to 40. The red line is the trajectory of population growth over the same period of time. And then the blue line is our incident count. And you'll see that there's a linear relationship between all three lines until we get to the decade where we're losing the number of officers that we have active in the street. And I like to highlight this because that's a saturation point. We are no longer meeting the needs or expectations of the community, especially when it comes down to some of the relationship building opportunities, having more officers either engaged in civic events in the city, more officers assigned to the school, being more responsive to all the traffic complaints that we receive. And we're just simply answering radio calls day to day. So I found this data and assembled it during the budget presentation. And once it was graphed, I really liked the story that I told because it made sense. A quick question on that, the incidence line in 2020 was 13.25. Is that the incidence responded to or the incidence that we're called in? So responded to? Responded to. So is that numbered down because of the inability to respond because of lack of resources? That's less proactive activity. So more time is just spent on being responsive and not being proactive in areas. I hate to keep mentioning traffic enforcement, but we get a lot of traffic complaints in the city and we simply are stopping fewer and fewer cars in trying to curb that behavior because we're either committed to the other categories of incidents or catching up. There's a great deal of reporting that goes into 12 to 13,000 incidents per year and our day shift is really busy. They have very little time to do anything directed whether it's traffic related or simple as with all the urban scape that's now developing, getting out and we measure our foot patrols because that is an excellent way to kind of embed within the fabric of the community to the police officers. And we hope that we'll be able to hire more staff and be able to encourage that type of policing, that relationship-based policing because that's really what society is hungry for. Chief, is that a saturation point being reached because you don't have the positions or is it because you have the positions but as you were saying, you just can't fill them? The latter. The latter, okay. In that regard, can I ask you, as you are obviously very active in recruiting and trying to identify people, I've heard your conversations multiple times, what are the things that you can do or the city can do to increase the chances that you will succeed in your endeavors? And also I was wondering if you could just maybe put more in descriptive words if you do achieve full staffing, what does that interpret? I mean, yes, you can say the line is no longer but what does that mean for the average citizen for our sense of community? Because definitely public safety is one of the issues as I was going around the town that I kept hearing people starting to express concern about. Yeah, certainly, so both great questions. I'm gonna start with the latter one. I think what we would do is we would initially invest with at least getting one more officer back in youth services. And I don't wanna say that they would be completely just embedded in a school but rather figuring out holistically where the police could really be effective in better serving youth in the community, especially as we see this growth in housing and more young people living in dense areas. I think there's an opportunity for that. I think educating officers that are gonna be doing that work in what all is available through WREC or other entities within the city in order to channel kind of the energy of that youth would be extremely helpful. I think we could also do more work like we did in the holiday season in our efforts in curbing retail theft where if we had officers that we didn't have to assign to radio calls every hour of the day, we could go out and work like we did with lost prevention, be more proactive and do some real crime prevention in terms of the criminals would know like, well, the South going to police are all over the mall. Let's not steal there today. That's a win in our business as well as identifying who's involved in this criminal activity. And then to the extent because we see retail theft for what it is low level misdemeanor conduct, but we also then find other instances where it's more organized and has great financial impact to the community and also is funding organizations that are here drug trafficking and running commercial sex rings. So I'd like to see us in those spaces more and if everything were perfect and we were able to fill all 40 positions, we would be able to put more officers on the patrol teams, particularly on the day tour where calls for service are higher than they are at night and get some relief and some better professional balance for our team that work in the patrol division on the day shift. The first question, you may have to remind me. Recruitment, what is it? Is there anything? I'm obviously not the only police chief facing this challenges as you referenced in the call question to Andrew, but is there anything? I mean, there's an appeal for people to live in South Burlington. We're all here for that. Is there something that can be done to greater incentivize? Yes. So certainly so we have just really embarked on a new initiative with Andy, our communications director, the director, right? I always get this title wrong, but it's the first time when we actually have done targeted ads. So we're using some content that was built or developed with our team pictures and messaging and we're using pop-up ads on internet search and also targeted social media campaigns around areas where we know that we've either been successful in the past or have large criminal justice programs and also areas where we might be able to find this elusive diversity in our workforce. And I think some of that work has been illuminating to me, you know, the 50 year old white police chief when I see like one of our young women officers now portrayed doing this work, I hope that people like her can see themselves in those roles and say like, no, there's a space for me at that table. And hopefully we can make some headway there. But I think as a profession, we're all kind of trying to figure this out on the fly and do everything humanly possible. I wish I had the magic answer, but I don't. I will say, and it's, I think it's a little bit further here in the slides when our collective bargaining agreement comes up for negotiation in the future, we're simply gonna need to reckon with where public safety salaries have gone, particularly on the lower steps of our pay scale in both dispatch and police officer, because we do a good job of once we employ folks of really explaining total compensation in everything that you are afforded working here. I don't think we haven't found a way to effectively advertise that yet. And there are other things that we find once we get folks in the door and do a ride along with our organization, they like the philosophy, they like the people, and then they can see like our beautiful facility, we have a fantastic fleet, gorgeous gym, and learn about some of the non-tangibles, I guess, if you will, that you benefit from by working for the city of South Wellington. Is there anything that we can do to help support you and the police force gain prominence in the eyes of the police force as the place that they wanna work? So we do sell that, the community support here is resounding, and it's also something that really resonates with folks that we talk to. So I'm a little relentless about recruitment, like if I'm at a football tailgate at Norwich University, I'm working that parking lot, wherever I am, I'm working the room, and people that are actually looking around at police departments, they understand what it really means to have a community that wants their police department, that's not at odds with their police department, and working for this city during the last few trying years that we've had in the profession, there's no place better to be, and we do highlight that, but it's a story that it's hard to advertise, I think, and it's one that we do get to tell once we're engaged with residents, but perhaps we could talk with Andy too about ways that we could highlight the level of community support that we do have, because I know that's important to police applicants. Just one more, sorry. Are recruits able to find housing, or is that an obstacle? So it's challenging, and police officers do, they usually follow this path, like someone will have an apartment fairly close by, and they'll have a roommate, another police officer has a roommate, and they'll live that way until they meet that special someone, and now it's time to go get your own place, and that's where we see officers, dispatchers, our employees in general, have to leave this community, and now it seems they even leave Chittenden County in order to find affordable housing. So it is a bit of a hurdle for people to overcome. Most recently, we've got an employee that's in the process that's from the Boston area, and when I was recruiting this particular fellow at the football tailgate, I told him the dollars and cents are about the same, so you living in the greater Boston area don't think that it's gonna be really cheap to live in Vermont, please research that, and this applicant did and understood, so it's working out thus far, but it is a challenge. Could I underline just one more point about recruitment because the chief is incredibly humble about this? I think his point about not only the culture that you all support and our residents support around public safety and its importance, but also the culture that the chief has built at the department as a progressive, respectful, innovative department is appealing to candidates, and the culture change he has led is I think one of our key recruitment tools. It's part of why we wanted to bring on Deputy Chief Briscoe. This past year was to allow leadership development, leadership to focus on operations that would allow the chief, not only to be kind of that bigger public face in the region and the state, but also identify some of those bigger systematic challenges that you see reflected in some of these numbers. Having said that, I also wanna be really clear that one of our recruitment challenges is that as we have, as our staff numbers have decreased, as our retirements have been high in the last couple of years and our numbers have decreased, what we have not decreased is the quality we are hiring. So we are not going out and pulling every person off the tailgate and putting them in a South Burlington uniform. We have a very high standard for finding that right fit for our community and that officer, that young person who's going to learn and want to be a part of the community engagement, community policing culture that the chief has built. So it is a balance of wanting the bodies in and wanting to send as many folks as we can to the academy and train them up under our culture and making sure we're getting the right folks that reflect the community and are going to best serve our neighbors out on the ground. So it is, there's a balance point there that the chief is having to manage. Very well said, thank you. And we're incredibly lucky to have you. Thank you. That feeling is mutual, so I appreciate that. On channel three, they often have the corrections minute where they talk nonstop for a minute about all the great jobs and corrections. I think we need one for South Burlington policing, don't you think? I don't know what that costs. Yeah, we can look into that though, might be worth it. If we have one minute, it might be worth kind of walking through the steps it takes to become a police officer. So once an applicant applies with us, they go before a panel interview. So it's three of our employees and then our detective sergeant sits in on that interview to take copious notes because if they make it to the background investigation, either the sergeant himself will be doing that investigation or someone from his team. If the applicant is successful there, we issue a conditional letter of hire that allows us to ask all the questions that we need to have to send the employee to a polygraph examination. A polygraph examination can be adversarial if you've had a wild past, but it's also an opportunity where applicants that have made it through the panel interview that we see some hope in, they can kind of cleanse themselves of anything they've been involved with as long as they tell the truth through the process. There are a number of things that are complete non-starters that come out in background investigations. There's also the part of growing up and making adolescent decisions or young adult decisions that we can get around as long as honesty is woven in. Once they pass the polygraph examination, we'll move them into a background investigation. And again, this is the detective spending about 60 to 75 hours of interviews and then typing a comprehensive report of who this applicant is. Then that's reviewed by the command staff and we decide if we're gonna move them into the phase where they'll take the psychological assessment for the academy, which is fairly rudimentary. If you can get through a polygraph and our background investigation, you're gonna pass the psychological screening and then there's an odd physical fitness test for the academy, it's a row. I've never rowed as a police officer but now you have to row X amount of meters in a certain amount of time and you have to be able to run a mile and a half. That's a good exercise right there. Yeah, I've run a mile and a half in under a certain time based on gender and age. As long as you're successful in all that, we can entertain hiring you. Those that are hired have to go to Pittsburgh for what is now a 17 week residential academy experience and it's paramilitary. They do get to come home on the weekend. It's similar to boot camp for the United States military in some ways. It's designed for policing in other ways. It's progressive where the class is kind of oriented to the space and what you need to have in terms of professional demeanor and discipline as an individual and then the group is brought in or the individuals are brought into a group that then forms a team and then they become very self-sufficient and they're able to learn what they need to learn academically and then display that through scenario-based testing in the end prior to graduation. Once South Royington police officers complete that 17 weeks, they come to us for 14 weeks of field training. That's a phased approach where they'll ride with at least three, if not four police officers. This is also a crawl, walk, run phase where first the employee is observing operations in the field and then slowly the control is given over from the FTO to the individual officer. Assessment, written assessment is done every single shift and they're graded on a one to seven scale. Four passes, seven means you're better than the chief which doesn't take a lot. And once they're through the FTO process then they're finally able to go out now 34 weeks later, once hired and answer their first radio call by themselves about 34 weeks in. So it's a major investment and we have to take hiring serious because if you hire a problem today to fix a number problem, you're gonna have an exponential problem in the end. And how many sessions are there? Three per year at Pittsburgh? Two, just two, okay. And how many candidates are they averaging right now? So they're starting with about 40 and you lose five or six along the way, generally rule of thumb. What's interesting about the police academy, all police officers in the state of Vermont attend the same academy. So like when I went 30 years ago, my roommate was a state trooper. That is an excellent opportunity for Vermont to train police to a very consistent standard if you think about procedural justice and what does society expect? Consistency from the police is something they should expect. We do have a vessel to deliver that and we hope through some investments that are being made toward bringing our training curriculum to an accredited standard over probably the next four years that that can be an even better product. Right now, all of the instructors at the academy are from the field. So like last year in the calendar year, South Brogdon police spent about 303 hours of staff time teaching at the academy across the two sessions. And there's only so many police departments that are large enough in order to contribute at that level. I had a couple of questions. I know we wanna stay on an agenda, but one, I was curious to get your feedback chief on the regionalization efforts we've had and sort of where we struggle with that and maybe how this council can sort of help move that dialogue forward. And it may not be specifically in the dispatch area, but I know that's been frustrating to hear that more neighborhoods or communities haven't jumped on that. The other area is whether or not there are specific cities or towns that you would benchmark some of the best practices that you've introduced so that there might be other areas that we can look at as council members in terms of looking at those. And I'm sure you have an opportunity to communicate and train some in some of those areas. I wanted to ask if we have any online reporting mechanism within the department. And then lastly, I think just an observation. I think one of the challenges with a well-established culture is the challenge of integrating diversity and maybe some cultural sensitivity into that. So when you were describing that training process, that just sounds like such a well-oiled machine and the potential to draw from, despite the hiring challenges, to draw from a similar pool of candidates, it's a real downstream and upstream challenge. And I just wondered if there's any opportunities you've seen to change up that model to really look at appreciating maybe diversity and cultural sensitivity there. Sure. That was a lot of mouthful, sorry. No, that's all right. So Chief Locke might be a little bit more of an expert on regionalization than myself. I mean, we had really great momentum for a regional dispatch model, but when one of our larger towns could no longer afford it, it was game over. I think we made a very smart decision in investing in our center and building it not only for what we need today, but maybe what we'll need in the future with also a potential for some contract services. So, and maybe that's more the way forward in a regional model is contracted service as opposed to an all-payer model. I don't know as it relates to policing, I think policing is a little more intimate in a community and I don't think Chittenden County would be ready for a regional police model. And I think back to, so my dad was a, it was a Poughkeepsie, New York police officer started in the 60s, retired to shy in 1990. And he went through the professional error or the professionalism error of policing in the 70s where government wanted more efficiency, more technology so they could do the job a little leaner. And really what that did is it took cops out of neighborhoods, put them in cars, behind car glass, talking on radios, not on sidewalks, building connection, building relationships and it led to, you know, frankly an over-policing in some major metropolitan areas of marginalized neighborhoods and what we are coming to reckon with now with distrust of policing. So I think it's an area of extreme caution in my opinion, regional policing. I don't think you get it right and I'll tell you even when I was doing my time in Burlington, we change models from every shift each day of the week you would work a different patrol area. When we change that to work a consistent patrol area in the relationships that you're able to build particularly with high service consumers and the ability to navigate it without relying on an enforcement-only model without having to rely on use of force all the time was really valuable. And I think, you know, when you hear folks that complain about the relationship with the police department, it's because they don't know they're police officers and they don't understand all the work that we're trying to do. So just a bit of caution there. I'm gonna miss the middle part of your question and I'm gonna go to the Well Oil training machine. There has been talk about an alternative academy, 17 residential weeks is just too high of a hurdle for a lot of folks depending on what their family situation is or whatever demands they may have on their time. I know that it's going to be studied if we can stand up some type of non-residential training module which I think could potentially open up the avenue for others even if it's those that aren't really keen about going and living on a dorm deck for 17 weeks and marching around. I think there's value there. I think when we've done some really intentional outreach to try to get a more diversified applicant pool, what we see in terms of our new American population in Chittenden County is language is the number one barrier and the ability to get through like an interview. But an interview is similar to how you have to be able to have a conversation on the street with folks in order to provide police service. And there's also been challenges to the extent where the police academy stopped using the entrance exam. It was a timed exam, but English language learners didn't have the time in order to be able to read the question, translate the question and then respond to it and get the exam done on time. So there's some broader systems issues that are being looked at in that regard and I'm hopeful. But if you think about how policing even evolved in this country, so like I said, my dad was a police officer in Poughkeepsie, New York. So his father was a bricklayer who came from Ireland and was building buildings in the greater New York area, Bayow, New Jersey, and then Texco opened a plant up the river up the Hudson, and that's where he took his family and that's how my father became a Poughkeepsie, New York police officer. And it's not until that second or third generation of new American do we see folks coming in whether it's fire service or policing. But if you think about the history of the New York City Police Department for decades, it was Irish and Italian American police officers. What was, I missed the middle. I think it was the online reporting. Oh yeah, so I'm a little old school. When someone calls us, it may be the only time that they've ever called for police service and I still get really passionate about like, no, let's take 10 minutes and ride over there or talk to them on the telephone about what happened and provide that level of service. I live through the transition to online reporting in Burlington. And sometimes it's really effective and efficient. Other times when whomever's gonna manage that data for you opens it up on Monday morning, it's terrifying because it's like, why didn't this person call us to report, you know, the person that they had banging on their back door trying to break into their garage. I'd rather not have to get to that level but we do do some incident-specific online reporting. Like if you had your car hit a parking lot and you found it, you know, a week later, you can make that report online, we'll do that. But I think that's the only level of online reporting that we're doing. Are we taking questions from the audience at all? So, are there any questions in the audience tonight? Can you come to the microphone and turn it on and get close to the mic, please? Identify yourself again. To me, Wundell Coleman, 69 Joy Drive, F7 in South Burlington and I got up one morning and the right front tire in my car had been stolen. It was sitting on a jack. So I knew that there was nothing the police could do about it. I decided though, you want to know about it. So I made a call, which was the best thing to do. I think it's fine to report that via telephone to us. Oftentimes someone may need the insurance and it's also good to know because an officer may have stopped someone out that night with a random spare tire like on the roof of their car. Crazy things have happened. We put these puzzle pieces together. It's always better to give us a call. OK, thank you. In that case, 846-4111, right? Please, non-emergency line. Right. Two more slides. I'm sorry, go ahead with the slides, please. Oh, no, no problem. So I'm here for you, actually. So some of the advancements that we've made in 21st century policing, some of you may know in 2015, President Obama commissioned a task force to study policing. They published this report, 21st century policing. Essentially, there's six guiding pillars for police departments to follow. And this kind of gets back to the middle of your question. What model agencies are out there? I think there's a lot of agencies that are doing great things, but they're following the lead from documents such as this, or they're following the lead from our professional organizations. I particularly like the police executive research forum. They take a really an academic-based approach when they're going to study a challenge and then publish a fulsome report with some solid policy or training guiding principles. And we've used those principles in the development of some of our work as it pertains to the pillars. I want to say that a lot of these categories in the pillars, they overlap one another. So when we think about pillar one, building trust and legitimacy, so we've got a body-worn camera program that's fully integrated in all of our operating systems. So we have cruiser cameras, body-worn cameras, you turn the blue lights on, all the cameras come on.   So it takes all the thinking out of this. The ability to capture that level of data is really super for us from a training perspective. It's fantastic from an evidence management perspective. Those lenses see a lot of things, can preserve crime scenes to some extent. And then our ability to show that when there's a question from the public about what our officers did or emphatically did not do is extraordinarily helpful. Another way I think that we hold trust in this community is that the police chiefs that have served before me, and there's only six of them, have never lost sight of what the community expects from the police department, have always communicated, and have built this philosophy that, frankly, I inherited. The manager is gracious to give me credit for some of this. I've helped advance it, yes, and I appreciate those remarks. But this police department is very special in the relationship that they've had with the community. And it's because the chief has always listened to what's going on here and has always kind of driven service objectives in that regard. And so I think that is really foundational on pillar one, but it also feeds into pillar four and community policing. Community policing is a buzz term that's thrown around a lot. There's relationship-based policing that we do every single day. And that's what I just described, going to call for service, treating each one like the person's never called us before, telling folks what we can and cannot do, and trying to remedy whatever the situation might be. There's also the programmatic side of community-based policing, where we've got our school resource officer program, we've got our traffic safety officer that engages with a variety of groups on those challenges. We also do some other programmatic work. You'll see us at South Royington Night Out in the summer. We haven't done it since the pandemic, but Coffee with a Cop, those are the kind of the programmatic elements of our community-based policing. And then pillar four, again, just to wrap that one up, is our crime reduction. Like I described, our partnership with Lost Prevention at the University Mall this past holiday season, we're also able to partner with WCAX and really shine a light on the challenge and also our response that I felt was critical in order to kind of raise awareness of the issue and show away at least a strategy that we can try to prevent some of that crime. Pillar two, we'll pivot to real quick policy and oversight. So there's like 92 general orders in the police department, oddly, it's high liability work. Many of those policies are state mandates. So our fair and impartial policing policy was a state mandate a number of years ago in 2018. We since evolved, we actually have what's known as the Winooski policy. We have the most restrictive policy in terms of how we are allowed to interact with border officials on issues of civil immigration that works for a community like South Burlington because we're not a border community. Border communities have challenges because the border patrol themselves are part of that public safety fabric. They co-respond with state troopers and municipal officers and deputy sheriffs all on the border and they simply have different needs. We were able to adopt this more restrictive model of policy without any hesitation because in our assessment, it didn't compromise public safety in the city and it certainly didn't compromise officer safety. And those are kind of the first two objectives that we tend to look at when we're debating policy. We also have a state model use of force policy which is essentially, again, one of the more restrictive ones in the country. It's when we talk about use of force standard, our standard for using lethal force is not only reasonable but necessary and those words are critical and training to that standard is more of that progressive nature. I just wanna pivot quickly to pillar five when we talk about best practices and I talked about the police executive research forum. We adopted their integrated communication assessment and tactics model and really what this is is a decision-making model for officers in the street that is based on work that was done in the UK where officers are unarmed and it teaches officers to use time and distance to de-escalate active listening skills and communication. We don't always get to do that. Sometimes an officer will get out of the car and it's zero to 60 and they've gotta react and confront whatever that threat is. In a lot of incidents that we respond to, there's a time for law enforcement to slow down a little bit. When I talked about the professionalism and being more efficient, it made us really fast and decisive in the street and we've learned that there's more space to slow it down. Maybe instead of just sending one officer, we'll send two and we tend to over resource certain situations where we can create that distance and distance gives you time and as it pertains to kind of holistically training the officer and training them throughout their career, best trained officers tend to not overreact in the street. So if you wanna set yourself up for failure, poorly train your police officers, equip them with everything that they have to include the ability to take a human life or restrict constitutional rights that we all enjoy, that's the recipe for disaster. You train them, resource them and staff your shifts appropriately, better outcomes. So those are our focuses there. Technology and social media, again, I've talked about the body-warring camera technology, all of our evidence collection as far as digital is almost cloud-based, which is very, very handy. And then social media, we leverage that in a few different ways. We have a Facebook profile and an Instagram profile. That's the area where we kind of socialize our profession and then we use Twitter, now known as X as an extension of our media releases. And then lastly and probably most important is our officer wellness and safety initiatives. It's hard work and back in the day, it wasn't cool to say that you weren't feeling okay. We're kind of reducing that stigma. And here at South Grollington, it's a big part of our culture. We have a peer employee team. It's not just officers, all employees are availed to this and we have both sworn and civilian staff on that team. We have a department clinician and also in addition to EAP and then at Marathon Health, we have a mindfulness resource there. So we have all of those elements available to our employees and we use it in a proactive way. So a couple of weeks ago, we had a pretty horrific fatal cycle v car crash on Shelburne Road. It was one of our youngest patrol teams. They're probably not gonna say that anything bothered them, but their sergeant is a more senior person, heavily involved in our peer support team. So we just brought in workers from our designated clinician. They sat in roll call, they kind of talked about the incident and just normalizing the having the resources on hand. And if maybe you don't wanna use it in the moment, if you have the face, you have the phone number and you need to use it in the future, our hope is that they will. And the last part of our wellness program is our beautiful gym in the small amount of time that we afford our staff to work out on duty because it's very stressful.  And we hope through this concert, if you will, of resources that we can keep them for 20 to 25 years and present them with a nice plaque and have them retire healthy. And then lastly, officer safety, again, it really comes down to training and equipment in good supervision and cops that aren't scared make better decisions when the pressure's on. Next slide. I think we've done all this. I think the last thing I just wanna touch on is leadership development. So we're young. So we're doing a lot of really intentional work right now of preparing everyone for what the next step is for them and their career. In this police department, enjoyed up until 2022 officers that would stay 25 to 30 years. I don't think that's in this generation. And we just need to be comfortable with getting officers spun up to be detectives sooner in their career and then being sergeants sooner in their career, lieutenants sooner in their career and hopefully achieve a police or two to continue this great tradition moving forward. So with that, there's any follow-up questions? I'm sorry, I've consumed like a ton of time. I just have a comment, which is I'm really appreciative of the South Berlin Police Department all their efforts in their hard training. And the thing I worry about is that to me, I think the first responders, probably on a day-to-day basis, deal with the most micro and bigger traumas and stress and conflicts and the things that bother me and conflicts with other human beings.  Those types of things, that's where that wellness and having the counseling and the EAP available to the officers is really important to me. So thanks for telling us about that. I appreciate it. Well, we appreciate the fiscal support to stand up those programs and sustain them as well. So Chief, you and I actually chatted about this before, which is, you know, as Mike said, there is concern among residents about public safety, but some of it I'm wondering, I think you've articulated this is perception versus reality in the sense that there is more retail theft and people may also, unfortunately, perceive homelessness as a public safety issue. But in fact, as you know, I've chatted about, there's very little crime against person that people are actually personally safe. And wondering whether that perception versus reality could be addressed with like a public form or something. You're such a fantastic speaker, right? Then you're someone that could really educate the public and help folks understand them.  There are all these issues, there's clearly issues that need to be dealt with, but you know, from a crime against person perspective that we're actually in pretty good shape. At least I think we are. Yeah, we certainly are. That's a great observation. So generally, even the reported numbers of crimes against person, a lot of that category is consumed in domestic violence cases in the city that we investigate or in assault cases with involved parties known to one another. There's very little, you know, stranger violence, if you will. And the problem is what you just articulated. It's the perception of not being safe. And that could be as simple as, you know, having something stolen from your driveway, like your car or even your neighbor's car, because no longer do you feel safe in your space. And that's generally where we'll see, if it's not directly related to incidents that have been reported, we'll see more and more calls that we categorize as suspicious in nature, where people will hear something, see something and immediately call us. That's a clear indicator that they don't feel safe. And I do think that we could certainly fill right now a forum around public safety and what the data tells us, what the limitations are around certain crimes, like why are certain recidivists released on a constant basis. And then the reality of the stranger, if you will, violence. But, you know, I think it's almost like the cumulative stress element that our employees feel, like everyone has a breaking point and everyone is unique. And it's very similar in society. You know, I have a decent tolerance, right? Many people have a decent tolerance. They'll go to New York City and Boston and walk freely, you know, from dinner out to an establishment, back to a hotel and not think twice about it. There's other people that we live with that would never do that simply because it's a major metropolitan area. And you know, chances are you're pretty safe there as well. So I do think we could message that from a data perspective and hopefully that people could reconcile the data points with actually how they feel emotionally. Any questions online? A great council corner topic. Were there any questions online at all? Can we? No. No, okay. Thank you so much. Well, thank you very much. And now Chief Locke in the fire department. Good evening, councilors. Steve Locke, fire chief. Deputy Chief Corbin's gonna join me. We're gonna tag team this presentation with my dual role. The deputy takes a much more hands-on approach to the management within the fire department. So we really are a team as we're working through the fire department. So here's the overview of your fire department. This chart is really the organizational chart in the layout. We as well break our people into two silos. One is the operational, the people in the street, just like the police department. So there are 36 people assigned to a rotating shift that one of those shifts is on every day. And then our prevention division that's overseen by Deputy Chief Francis who is also in the room. So next slide, please. I'll let you take the end. As the chief said, 36 people are assigned to three shifts. We work a 24-hour on, 48-hour off rotating schedule. 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Right now it's a minimum of eight people on shift. Starting July 1, we will start 24-7 staffing of our second ambulance, which will then go to a minimum staffing of 10 firefighter EMT, firefighter paramedics per shift. Two fire stations, one Dorset Street, one off of Shelburne Road behind the Audi dealership. We have a ladder truck and an ambulance or staff to station one here on Dorset Street and an engine and soon to be a second ambulance staffed down at behind or off of Shelburne Road. Important to note of those 36 firefighters EMT, firefighter paramedics, 16 of them have less than two years on the job. So, and 20 of them have less than five years on the job. So between attrition and growth and retirements, we've just seen a huge change in our working demographic. And that in turn brings on a lot of training, a lot of leadership challenges and a lot of issues that for many of us, for many years in this profession we never really considered. And while we're not nearly as in a tough spot as our brethren in the police service, we, when the chief and I got hired, we tested with probably 500 people to get a job. And now we're lucky if we can interview a dozen people for six positions. So it's definitely a different environment that we're used to. We've definitely had to change our hiring and expectations based according to that. We respond on a two tiered system. So we're a fire base, what we call fire-based EMS. So every medical call gets a fire truck that responds to it from the closest available unit. And then an ambulance follows up fairly shortly with two ambulances, each dish, we call them districts. We'll have an ambulance in each district as well. We in the last six months or so implemented a computer dispatching, which is a great system not only for us, but also the dispatchers as Chief Burke had mentioned. That really allows us to allocate our resources appropriately for the given situation and puts the closest fire unit to the call. So it may be a call down on Shelburne Road, but that engine company may be at DPW, so it automatically dispatchs the lighter truck, which is closer. So it really works out well. We coordinated that or coupled that with standards of cover, community risk reduction, community risk assessment program that we did and we built our response models based on the community risk to deploy our assets appropriately. Next slide. So EMS, as I said, we're a dual role, fire and EMS. All individuals, including the Chief and I, are at least EMTs. Every, the majority of the organization are advanced EMS providers. We have 10 paramedics currently, four more in school right now. And that's pretty exciting. In 2012 or so, we sent eight people to paramedics school through a grant that naturally established paramedics in the city. And then through attrition and tough times, we kind of lost those numbers and we're finally building those back up to really provide top quality EMS service to our citizens and our guests of South Bruinsen. We're pretty lucky. We have a collection rate of what we can collect for revenue at about the low 90% aisle. So what we can collect from EMS building, we do a really good job at collecting those revenues and did quite a bit in fiscal year of 23, did quite a bit better in what we actually gathered than what we had budgeted. So in July, I've mentioned it before, in July one, we will start our second ambulance. 23% of the time, an ambulance not from South Bruinsen has served our public in the recent past just because of our call volume, that not only provides a pretty good drain onto the rest of the communities that are helping us, but in turn, we also can't help them back because we don't have the proper people. So July one is really gonna be a good benchmark for us. I can think back to I got hired when we started our first ambulance in the city. So it's pretty exciting to now see a second one in the city as well. And that's gonna allow us to not only handle the majority of our EMS calls, treat our guests and taxpayers of the city directly from South Bruinsen, firefighters, EMTs and paramedics, but also gives us undoubtedly more people on the fires and other emergencies that we have as well. So that's a great asset. I'll just add that we had not this community beyond the 2012 sending people to paramedic school had not supported sending our own employees. We had hired them if we could hire a paramedic, we would, but we had not invested in our own folks in the last two years, we've sent five people to paramedic school. Now it takes about 18 months to get through the program, but it's really exciting because that's something people want to achieve. It's expensive, it's a big time commitment, but our people have stepped up and we have a pipeline of eager providers to rise to that highest level of service. And it's great that we're investing in that every year to continue to grow our numbers and really support our younger generation. So our, certainly our operational people get to drive around the city with the red lights going and get all the glory, but really who saves the most money for our citizens and probably has as much of an impact with our customers is our prevention division of three.  And if you look at the work that that division does, it is very impressive of the work they are doing to make sure that our buildings are safe. Now, because of the way we deploy and what the workload is, most of that is on new construction. So similar like the buildings here on Market Street, when a project comes in, they approve the plans, there's a fee that's permitted, but every week during construction, our team is stopping by to make sure that the building is being built as it's supposed to be. And if you just look at both the number of inspections provided and the permits issued for a really small department, small number of staff, they are very mighty and the relationship that they have formed with our realtors and our builders is very powerful. And again, if you look at the revenue, 1.4 million that they collected on fees in the previous fiscal year, very powerful. But again, a lot of that was because of the new construction you're seeing on this street and as well in a couple other parts of the city. I suspect that we'll be pushing that again this year. So kudos to the work that they are doing. We are one of very few communities that have our own electrical inspector on staff. We probably will be coming to you for some consideration in the upcoming, or perhaps about regulating single family homes and inspecting new electrical work on single family homes. So that right now there is no code requirement. There's a code, but there's no requirement that's followed. But as we bring you some changes to the perhaps the ordinance the next coming months, that may be an area for you to consider. And I think the last thing is just not on this slide, but we will be seeing the rental registry fall under this division in the coming months as well.   In the last 10 years, we've seen a 57% increase in call volume and we're usually right around about a 70% EMS call volume. 70% of our calls are medical calls in nature. The 30% of everything from public assist, fire alarms to fires of any kind, motor vehicle accidents, that sort of thing. Again, there's not much to the trend. It's pretty common. It's what if we went back 20 years, we'd see the same trend. So we had finished it 5,100 calls in calendar year 23 and we're already on track to as early in the year, but move past that in this calendar year. Quick question. The growth in calls. Do you know how that relates in growth in population for South Burlington and whether there's a correlation between the growth in calls and the growth in population? I would say certainly right there, the increase in call volume has been much greater than the increase in percentage of population. I think a lot of that has to do with the more businesses, more economy in the city. Certainly more buildings or more fire alarms are more elevator, people stuck in elevators, more traffic or more car accidents. So I think it's more than just an increase in city population, but more of an increase still in city visitors and traffic through the city. And while again, not measured here, but it's the same consideration Chief Burke has the unmet social needs. So police cars and ambulances are now the social workers of our city. And that is just the facts. And so calls that would have never received an ambulance 10 years ago are just a daily occurrence. What about opioid overdoses? Is that included in here? And can you distinguish it and say that that's really grown at a faster rate than anything else? So they are included in those calls. We do not, correct me, yeah, we do not, I would not say we do not have the opioid at overdose problem that you have in other communities. Just that it is infrequent at best. It happens, but it is certainly infrequent. So the deputy talked about our creation of a community risk assessment standards to cover and it's a measurement tool. It's a measurement tool about how well your fire department deploys and how well we strive to achieve to meet national standards. So these benchmarks at six minutes for a medical call and six minutes and 20 seconds for a fire call are national standards. There are a lot of communities our size that will raise that up and perhaps we will after more data collection. So this is a six months performance that you're looking at here. Actual performance of nine minutes and 55 seconds from time someone calls 911 till the fire truck is parked in the front door for a medical call at 90th percentile. So if we were using averages, we would be down in about the seven minute range. So understand there's a big difference between the 90th percentile and an average. So we try to, we want to measure at a high benchmark but these are our actual performance and what these are impacted by station location. So we cover a pretty large geographical area out of two stations or three with the air guard. Right. So having the air guard respond to that north end of the city cuts down on our response time, gets us units there quicker and a product of our busyness. So today when the call is, when the company's out of Dorsey Street Station or out on this call and another call comes in in this district and it has to be handled by somebody else, it takes them longer to get there and that drives those numbers. So understanding we will continue to monitor this to bring you back more information so that you can make decisions. People are not complaining about our response times but it is always a good barometer to start measuring these things. So there's really three components of response times and we can only really control one. We can't drive any faster, we can't get dispatched any quicker, that's coming out of the dispatch center but from the time, hey, we know that there's a call to where responding is where we can make up some time and we've placed a lot of emphasis on trying to encourage our people to be aware of what we call turnout time, our readiness, making sure you're ready to go and when the bell hits, you head to the truck, you don't wait to hear what it is and where you're going and commuterated dispatch has given us that capability. Can I just talk? Yeah, sure. Just to elaborate on our partnership with the Air National Guard, so the airport is around the Air National Guard Fire Department, they work a very similar 24 on 48 hour off shift rotation 24, seven, three, 65. We have an excellent partnership with them where they have what we call a structural fire engine that looks just like our fire trucks and they respond off of the airfield to a sizable area in the city that's their first due responsibility. So it's the industrial area behind the airport, the large housing developments behind the airport and so all the commercial buildings that surround the airport is what we call their area. So it's still our jurisdiction, they respond to us, but we have a mutual aid agreement where they automatically respond. They're built in our CAD system, our dispatcher dispatches them and it's really a vital element of our operations. We train with them and daily communication with both their boots on the ground as well as their command staff. So it's a great partnership work, you have them. It's about 15% of our call volume. So it's not minuscule that we're, this community benefits by having them as being our partners. So it's pretty impressive that we have this capability really to integrate with another fire department to send the closest unit or we just need the bodies when we have a fire, we dispatch them on immediately because we know we need the bodies. So in fiscal year 23, an early calendar year 23, we developed the department's first strategic plan, five year plan, three day event, every member in the organization participated, which was great to see. And basically a roadmap for the next five years and what are five primary goals where we also set out our missions, vision and values of the organization, which was really at best a 50 year old document. So a lot of it focused on employee health, employee wellbeing and really a better response to the community as far as our resources, alternate response models and ways that we can really give the community the service they deserve and not put an overtaxing burden on the employees at the same time. So it's worked out well. Some of the things have just fallen into place out of it, computer aid dispatching, station alerting, funding for paramedic school, a lot of that stuff has just naturally fallen into place where it should and some of the other initiatives and goals we'll be working on in the coming months and years. And finally, our emerging issues. We are going to see retirements in our prevention division, both from in the next 18 months or even our assistant fire marshal was anticipated to leave in the next three or four months. So we are planning for some replacement of staff in that very important division. As the deputy talked about a large percentage of our staff are new and they need to be provided training and that training is costly, but it really is important that we give them live fire training. So we send them, we're sending each of the shifts this year again to the burn building. They need, they don't get, they gotta have that experience to make good decisions. And so our recruitment of our firefighters as the Debbie said again there on that one is something that's new to us, something new to the fire service nationwide. Our facilities are aging. Our facilities are not set up for a diverse workforce. And I'm proud to say that we now have four women on the staff from one 18 months ago or so. So it's nice to see that, but at the same time we need to create facilities that are more ready for gender diversification. This community is going to have to start and consider the risk of not having a dedicated shift commander. So we're heavy call volume, very busy, but we have a command and control structure that requires a dedicated shift commander and we don't have that. And that is a risk every time we go to a significant event that we don't have a quarterback calling the plays that's dedicated to that position. They're right in the right front seat of a fire truck that's a dangerous place to do on low frequency, high risk incidents. We're off to the, we're off and running with that. And we are interviewing some candidates later this week to hopefully lead that project, but we definitely need to get someone on board to handle that. And then, similar with the police, the impact of behavioral health and substance abuse on our workforce, I mean, it is a revolving door of we see the same patients, we transport them to the hospital, they're released, and we take them again. And that's not something that we can solve ourselves. That is a state and national problem, but that has impacted police and fire way more than what, than what we, than the cheaper eye or whatever envisioned when we came on the job 30 years ago, that we'd be dealing with this level of behavioral health and substance abuse. So it is a very different occupation.  Gladly take any questions. Thank you, Chair. Just a couple of things, just one clarification. Do we inspect duplexes? Is it really just single-family homes that are? Yesterday we did duplexes. I didn't appreciate that. That's great. When we service a neighboring community with the first ambulance or the new second ambulance, do we get reimbursed from the community or from the person who's being helped or? We build the patient. We build the patient. I've worked in systems where the community then guaranteed payment. We would be on the wrong end of that matrix. Okay. So yeah, so we will build the patient. Okay. Last question. I'm curious about our inspection department. And I clearly see the synergies of having an electrical inspector within the fire department, right? Those feel a bit natural, but I guess as we expand rental registry, other inspections, I know it would be talk over time of doing non-electrical inspections as well. Does it kind of still feel natural to you to have the inspection division within the fire department? Is that how other communities do it? Or is it, you know, something that as we kind of mature, you might think of having a separate inspection division? Yeah, it's an interesting concept. Certainly in Burlington it has a code, used to be called code enforcement. It changed the name now as permitting inspections, but a standalone division. I think there's a high value of having it integrated within the fire department. Even if its scope is expanded beyond what I would say is the usual and customary. And some part of that is because of the synergy that happens between operational people in the street that see a problem. They walk next door, they walk down to the hall of the office and said, hey, we went to this place last night. Something doesn't look right. Can you go over there? Or they had a problem and they need some help finding the right solution. So I think it's gotta be someplace. And I think that the value of having them together under the fire department, even if the scope is beyond the traditional electrical and code enforcement, provides still that high value. And it gets it done pretty efficiently. You mentioned your close working relationship with their National Guard and signing. I think you said about respond to 15% recalls. And I assumed that this is at no cost to South Rowlandton. So I wonder just for a great understanding, what would be the financial, if they were not there, what would be the cost that we would be? Yeah, that's a great question. If they weren't there, I'd be advocating for you to construct a fire station somewhere around that. Well, I'd do some GIS analysis, but somewhere you would need another fire station with a staffed engine company with three people on it, meaning nine or 12 people to have on rotation. That is well over just in personnel cost, a million and a half, $2 million investment annually that they provide by that relationship. Now, early in my career, they would not leave the airfield. Like that was their mission. And they have through changes with base commanders have agreed that they provide a high, they meaning their state, their asset, they provide a high value to the county. And, you know, Winooski relies heavily on them, we rely heavily on them, Colchester. So they, you know, they running about 1,000 incidents a year off base. So the area relies on them and they're great. Yeah, high value to us. I look forward to the inspections encompassing more than just electrical and fire and I mean, I think it's gonna grow in rental registry, but I'd love to see it expand not only to single family homes, but to other aspects, maybe even energy efficiency, making sure people, you know, a build to the, to active 50 stretch code or whatever that code might be at that time, you know, insulation thickness, you know, foaming, this, you know, the joist, you know. So things like that, I look forward to that because without that oversight, you don't know if the consumer is getting exactly what they think they're paying for. Are there any of the questions from the audience or from the council? Any on the line at all? You're not seeing any? Okay. Well, thank you very much. Really appreciate you coming tonight and giving an overview. It's 8.15, is everybody okay right now and keep going and maybe a break later if we need it and we'll see what happens. Okay. So moving on to item number nine, which is a receiver presentation on the equity and planning effort by Paul Conner, Director of Planning and Zoning. Hey folks, tough acts to follow there, but we standardized our presentation. So at least they'll look similar just to take the best of all of them. So I'm here to talk about a really exciting project that we are in the process of kicking off. It is a collaboration, not just from the planning department but with the city manager's office with our communications head. And it's going to integrate a lot of work that involves our built community. So really our public works department we think is going to be really closely involved and we're here to just talk a little bit about what we are doing. So I'm going to share a screen as soon as I'm given the just a moment. I was clicking the box that had your face on it which is the South Burlington presenter now. Your other box should be the presenter. Hey, all right. So I'm speaking on behalf of our staff team but it does involve myself, our senior city planner, Kelsey Peterson, Jesse Baker, Andy Brumba and others that we'll be speaking about in a few minutes. A little bit of background. So this is a really exciting project for us. Very core to the work that we do in the planning department and that our partners in the public works department do is gathering community feedback, community input, community engagement throughout the development of projects in our community. This is something that we have a long history with and they're always looking to improve. About a year and a half ago, the planning commission recommended and the city council approved the submittal of a grant to the state to do an equity in planning toolkit. This fell into a box of ideas they had not considered otherwise in other priorities that they identify every year and they were really excited to fund us to do this because this is really core to planning work about how we reach different people, make sure we're getting a cross section of our community. It is identified in the council's policy priorities this year and as we'll talk about in the next slide, it is one of the key principles of our city plan is to be equity oriented, transparent, equitable, and fiscally responsible in governance. So for those of our members who have not had the opportunity to read every single page of our new city plan, although it is much shorter, it is under a hundred pages, which was something our commission was very excited to get to to be straight to the point. There is a guiding principle for the plan, as you can see there, and then there are four key principles and the intent here is that in the decision making and in all the work that leads up to those decisions that these guiding principle and four key principles are carried throughout our work. So as we think about any project that we're doing, we're thinking about how do we be climate resilient, people oriented, collaborative, inclusive, and holding them together in all of our work. There is a whole bunch in our city plan that speaks directly to this subject of equity and inclusion in our work from very specific components about community outreach, as you'll see in action 92 there and 93 to more broad statements, such as our goal about promoting a cultural collaboration and city governance, having a governance structure and public participation that reflects the diversity of our population in lots of different ways. And so this project is really our first formal step into this, but as you'll see in a minute, it's building on a foundation of a lot of work that I think our community can be very proud of what we have done, so we're not starting at zero here. Our city plan that I'm going to be talking about is the city plan that I mentioned earlier. Our city plan that I mentioned before had a lot of different tools and mechanisms for outreach. As of many other projects in our city, the city plan had a series of community conversations on different topics, on different geographies. It had online surveys, it had ways for people to reach out. We've done some really different and neat engagement forms for lots of different projects including doing focus groups for the bike pad bridge over the interstate for different plans for neighborhoods and parks of having things on site. So this is really building on the foundation of that. But as you'll see in a minute, the work here is really about bringing a strategic approach to it. As we become a city that has now crossed 20,000 people, we know that there's a lot of different perspectives and viewpoints in our community that we wanna make sure feel that they can be a part of it from day one. We've hired the firm Civic Brands who's done work all over the country to assist us in this. And our kickoff with them was just last week. We are gonna be working with them, as I said, to develop a toolkit. And this is gonna be something that is scalable to the size of a project, whether it's a sidewalk along a street like Mary Street that we scoped a couple of years ago all the way up to projects like a parks and open space master plan or our next city plan, hopefully not immediately. But so it's intended to be scalable. The work that we're doing is to start by developing this toolkit in a way that is equitable from the beginning. So working with our project team, working with all of our department heads to identify some community leaders in our community. We've identified most of and soon the entirety of an advisory group to be appointed by our city manager of leaders of lots of different perspectives in our community. And from there, we're going to shape a project of what does it mean to have a toolkit in our community? So we're gonna be having focus groups and an online survey, various different engagements and a tool that I'm personally very excited about that Civic brand has brought to other communities called a meeting in a box, which is essentially all of the tools for a person who might be a leader in the community to then bring and host a conversation in their own environment so that it's not always directly the city or directly staff or directly consultants who are doing the outreach, but the outreach goes another step and then another step back there further out. And then we really reach a lot of people in our community. I spoke a minute ago about being systematic. One of the things we're really excited about is working with Civic brand to identify what they call personas in the community. So we met with a number of different folks about how can we think about who is in our community? And this has, I think, been a challenge. I've worked here for a long time and I'm deeply passionate about this community and it's a lot of different things. It's a lot of different people who live very different lives and finding a way that is both fair and reaching a lot of different people and also not spending seven years trying to get everybody's individual opinion. How do you do that in a way that is reaching a lot of different folks? And so their personas approach is one that identifies the ways in which people use or communicate in our community in similar ways. So it may not be necessarily what we often first think of of typical demographics of age or gender or renter versus owner or race or anything like that. It may be different ways that the community groups itself by who uses online social media and who tends to use you know, goes to certain kinds of grocery stores and things like that of ways that we can get cross sections of our community that don't fall along the lines that we might initially think of. And so they're gonna help us both from a data-driven approach but also making use of the community leaders in the advisory group and interviews and focus groups that we're gonna do to learn more about our community. So where are we headed? The purpose of this from planning projects and public works projects is to get different viewpoints that ultimately make our community stronger, that we are starting from hearing, understanding what our community really needs, those who both know how to access our government and those who don't, to ultimately help the leadership, whether that is the city council, the committees, the commission and staff leaders to better understand our community and to be able to make decisions for our immediate and long-term future. And that's really the big goal that we have out of this. And a big piece of this, of course, is you as our elected officials helping and ultimately making use of the work that we're developing through this. And I think that was my last slide. I wanted to be time-efficient because I know you're getting a lot of presentations tonight. I have a question, Paul. Do we have an idea? It's hard not to look at sort of our percentage of folks that are registered voters that vote in our elections. And I think this was a little bit of a high year, around 30% because of the primary, but my recollection is we're kind of in that 25% usually. But do we have any data that could serve as a benchmark on the city plan process, which was a long process that tried to collect feedback through a lot of different mechanisms you've described of what the number of unique community members that participated in that in some way. And I feel like my sense is that that could serve as a benchmark of what worked with folks that were self-selecting into parts of that process. And it could serve as a benchmark for how do we define inclusiveness going forward and the kind of personas that you described. We do have some information on it. We did collect attendance at each of the meetings. We didn't, in our polling, we didn't tell people they couldn't do it more than once, but a lot of people live busy lives. So I don't imagine that everybody was trying to stuff the ballot box too, too much with that. It's interesting that the cross-section of who we get out to different types of projects will also depends on the type of project itself. So the city plan was one that was really thinking about, you know, who do we wanna be five, 10, 20, 30 years from now? That's not necessarily the same cross-section as folks who have come out in over the years to meetings that the airport would have with Chamberlain neighborhood who are responding to maybe what they see as a direct change in their community. I think one of the things that we've begun to be looking at here and that we're beginning to work with Civic brand about is that it's both about identifying the unique individuals but also maybe more importantly about identifying the viewpoint is the word that they describe. But some of there are initial conversations with them. They've described that if there's a singular image of or a singular testimony of a person who says that they tried to walk their groceries along Williston Road and that they're getting splashed with cars mud because there's no green belt there, that doesn't need to be repeated by 20 other people to understand that viewpoint of a person and then we can build from there in the project and say, boy, how many people live here? How many grocery stores are there? There's a lot of potential people who are in this circumstance especially if we're trying to move to a pedestrian oriented environment. So it may not necessarily be say, oh, we heard one thing. Now let's see if we can find 20 other people to back that up if it's a fairly clear statement of a viewpoint that is shared in that community. So that's one of the things that I think has been really interesting to me about thinking about what does it mean to get higher turnout? It may not just be only about more people but more perspectives being shared. Paul, I really applaud this. I think this is just really fantastic. My own experience in going through this last election was that you go to different neighborhoods and you have a different sense of what are the priorities and I would even argue that the day-to-day issues and the long-term city plan are ultimately connected because they generate budget decisions and how the limited resources we have or how we grow those resources to basically expand the things that we could do to try to touch all the communities. I think the challenge that I constantly heard and I think will be interesting how you guys get beyond this is just people are busy.  And the usual refrain is, you know, I'm too busy. Usually participation is in the evenings. You know, I just don't have the time whether it's with children or just with two people working, exhaustion, et cetera. So it's gonna be the real challenge is how to get beyond that busyness. And the other issue was just the sense of, and I also saw this in Arlington, Virginia where they found an encounter was people saw things as very complicated. And when things are complicated, they don't want to participate because they presume it's too much of a challenge to learn. So, you know, I applaud you for, and this previous city council which supported this for, you know, making this a priority is how do we get to those 85% or 80% of the population that for whatever reasons are just not busy because we all here represent all of them. So I really commend you on what you're doing in the previous city council for making this choice. Well, thank you. And I think, you know, as I just described in terms of viewpoints, there's many, many tools and toolbox that we can consider about how do we systematically go about it. One of the things that I was most excited about in the city plan, for example, was that in addition to meeting with the committees, meeting with people who came out, our senior city planner met with the leadership of every department in the city, both to hear their professional expertise, but also to hear what are they hearing in the community? So what is the library hearing in the community? What are our firefighters and police officers hearing in the community on a day-to-day basis? What are they witnessing in the city? And so while that's not completely a proxy for talking with that really busy person, it is at least learning a little bit about how are some people living their lives in our community and one of the challenges that some of our other departments and opportunities seeing, and that's a way and certainly not the only way, but I fully agree with that statement. So can I respond in a different way? Because I think you're really right. I think there's the time issue and there's the complicated issue. I think one of the other things we've talked a lot about in this team that I would like to challenge all of us, department heads, me and the council to think about is people will make time for things that they perceive as making a difference. And I think part of this work, part of if this work's gonna be successful or not is what do we do with what we hear and learn? So we can have city plan conversations with thousands of people, but if people don't see themselves in their feedback, and I'm not saying this is the case for the city plan, but people don't see themselves in their feedback reflected back in the decisions that were made, they're far less likely to say they have time or want to dive into hard and complex issues. So one of the reasons that I really pushed Paul and Kelsey to come and talk to you about this today is that I think the success of this, there'll be great success of this for how we change our city operations and our city communications, but I think a lot of the success of this will be what you all decide to do with setting policy around what we listen in here and how we as staff feed that information back to you in a way that other those personas can see themselves in the decisions and hold that trust. So I think you're right on time and complexity, but I think we have a role to help people feel like their time is valued by providing feedback. You know, I think you're right about different departments, you know, having contact with people around the city. It's like, you know, like the center of the city halls, kind of like a brain, we have nerves that go out through the different departments to all different types of people in the community for different reasons, right? So this could serve as a method to figure out how to communicate with them more effectively and allow them to communicate back with us more effectively and let their voices be heard. And because we're gonna have to learn how to do that, right? And that's what the toolkit should help us achieve, right? So this is a good effort, I think. Just to add to what you said, Jesse, and I think what you said, Mike, the feedback loop is really important. What's really gonna be important are results. And when our residents see us as city counselors, see the city in general doing things that actually make a difference in their lives, they'll be much more interested in getting engaged. Any comments from the audience at all? Anybody else? Nothing online? I'll make this real quick. I come from a very different environment and the more people can fee included, the more they're going to participate. I come from rural Vermont, where we had a traditional New England town meeting. And so did many places around me. And there were always those who would say, well, we should go to an Australian ballot because people can't make town meeting. It lets you have more participation in the vote. But almost invariably, those entities that went to the Australian ballot, their total participation went down, not up, because it weren't really participating anymore. Good comment. Thank you. Anybody else? Thank you, Paul. Thanks, everyone. Appreciate it. Keep us up to date. It's not the last you'll see of me, just in case you're wondering. Would we like to take a five minute break? I have a chance to go on YouTube and just type in Russian dash cam and watch the series of videos of cars just defying, well, they're obeying physics, but the drivers aren't obeying what are the rules of road at half the time. It does. All right, we are back with the meeting and we're on item 10, which is discussion of community engagement, including current efforts, counselors corner and other ideas. Jesse Baker. So you all asked to have this put on at your last meeting. We wanted to intentionally place it after Paul's presentation on equity and planning effort, just for some context of other things we're talking about. Having said that, I know that this council is very interested in its own engagement, which I am a huge fan of. I think the more that the council and the individual council counselors and the council as a whole can kind of be champions of what together we are doing and out in the community talking about it is great. So I want to really just give you this time to talk amongst yourselves about counselor corner, about front porch forum, about other things that you may want to try for a couple of months, institutes policy, be nimble about in the future as we learn more from the equity and planning effort and other conversations, but really this is really your time for that conversation. So the first idea would be, are we still interested in pursuing the counselors corner and the other paper, which I think is really great. And we take one article per month and we set a little schedule and identify who's going to do which months. Would you like to identify those people now? Starting with March. I mean, we have half of March left where we could start with April. If you want, I mean, I could take the first article and be glad to do that. Who would like to go next for, I'll take March for example. Who would like to take April? This is like a 600 to 800 word. I'll be up for June. For June? I'm away for part of May and April, so. Okay, so April, Andrew, A-A, okay. May, all right. July, okay. So that's five people in five months. So we'll just, we won't schedule beyond that for now and we'll see how it goes. And if you don't know where to send it, just go to the other paper webpage. You'll find I think it's editor and just specify that you know, you're sending in your counselor corner. And is there a particular issue of the month that it goes in? No, you mean, is there, it's an issue for each month? No, no, it's up to the counselor. When you get it in. Okay, so just any time during that, there are four issues or five issues that come out. You may want, so they usually have to be in by Tuesday morning at the least? Very late. Yeah, they like them Friday. So Monday night is really when they want to have it. They like them Friday, but it doesn't matter if it's the first or the third or the second. You may want to ask in advance if they have a preference, right? And just make sure that you edit your essay very closely and then perhaps after they've received it, ask for a copy back of what, if they may need changes. Just ask them if they may need changes because sometimes if you're doing something technical like kilowatt hours and they change it to kilowatts because they didn't see the kilowatt hours and then people go, why is he saying kilowatts? Doesn't make any sense at all. Just for clarity, it's a good idea. Tim, do we share the topics or do we have a list of topics that the council wants to make sure we have a schedule of presenting to the community? And then I guess the second part B of that is do we give our fellow counselors an opportunity to see a draft and provide any input before it's submitted? We haven't done that in the past and it's been up to each counselor to pick a subject matter that they want to write about. But if you want to share it with other counselors, that's fine. If you think you want some like editing service just for clarity or whatever, I mean, that's fine as well but it's not necessary. Yeah, I mean, I guess at the heart of my question is does this article represent the position of the council or the individual? Individual. Okay, thank you. And if we do group editing, we have to warn the meeting. Can I just add that if as you're writing there are data points that you would like or resources or links or anything like that that you would like for your articles, feel free to reach out. We're happy to provide those. Data is really important. So that takes care of the counselor corner. And we talked about front porch forum before, right? Where have you all had a chance to, if you hadn't registered before you've registered and you've got an account now and... I haven't got an account, but how do you expand it to? I mean, I've registered for my own. Have you gone in recently since you've been elected and looked at the, and hit the compose button to see if you have a dropdown of two? Yeah. So who? It's not quite automatic. On a separate, I had to go in with the south brogdon to get all the districts like it didn't... You should go in under my old email.  And if you haven't gotten that. Well, I can check on that. Okay, all right. I could forward you the one I got or somehow we... You should get an email that then gets you a city council account. And that's where you can get in and write to all the... And you do have to use your city of south brogdon address. That's the trigger for it. So it's not your personal account, it's your official account. But I'll check for everybody. And you're limited to four postings a month. So for me, on their webpage after I've logged in, because it doesn't really ever log you out unless you refresh your browser, right?   And when you do that, then it's like, well, what for do you wanna hit? And one checkbox hits all, was it 11? Nine. Nine? Nine, okay. So... Excellent, yeah. And that's a great way of getting in. And I've used it in the past to advertise again. There's an opening for a position on the DRB, there's an opening for this committee, even though the city does its own advertising, right? If you have a personal experience that you wanna put into that, to say that these are the types of people we need, if you're interested in diagrams, schematics, planning, construction and things like that, this might be... But I think as you also told me before, it's a great way to just have the pulse of what's going on, our concerns and different little parts of the neighborhood that are not your own. So that's fantastic, yes. Anybody else? Are there ideas for engagement that... So actually, I'm just on a frontboard forum. I was looking around at our neighborhood communities and I noticed that Manuski advertises all the, I think they call it the select board agendas on frontboard forum. I don't think we do that, but it seemed to me it could be a useful thing to do. And we might also, if you agree, we might think about expanding it. I could see advertising the planning commission agenda, maybe sitting news, but it's a great way to communicate with the public, right? Probably more effective than posting things on healthy living, right? A lot of people read it. Especially if there are agenda items that are of specific concern to the community. So it might not be every agenda or it might be, but particularly when we have issues that are considered hot button topics that we're gonna be discussing, it would be a great way to let the whole community know that you might wanna show up on Tuesday night. You don't know what's gonna interest folks. So I would, I would just honestly just make it a routine. You know, just, you just press another button, right? Each week, every two weeks, or... Even if it's just a link to the city webpage that has the warnings, you know, for the week, that that's at least what would help. Yeah. I know, does the city newsletter go, is that advertised on proper form at all? So we, I know, not immediately. We did just do a little push in the other paper around city news and signing up, you know, thanking the voters for coming out and participating. If you're interested in city events going on, sign up for city news. The, you know, it's interesting because in Winooski, there's no paper, right? There's no other paper. Seven days is really like this, the newspaper for Winooski, but it very rarely covers Winooski. So the reason we, and when I was in Winooski, the reason we used the front porch forum, so heavily was that it was, there was no, nothing else and it is a hugely effective tool for that. I think we, I don't, I mean, to my knowledge here, we haven't really used it that much, but for committee advertisement. But I think it's a really interesting idea and certainly something that's worth trying to see, kind of what percolates up from that. And just to clarify that, Jesse, I think we're suggesting that come centrally from you or from Andy or somebody that we're not all trying to post. Yeah. Yeah, I think it would come either from me or Andy. Great. I have another sort of two pronged community at reach thought that I wanted to put out. Jesse made me aware a while ago of the neighborhood forums which got approved with our city charter a while ago. And they're a tool that I don't think has been used very much. And I know that Burlington uses neighborhood planning assemblies. I've heard a lot of conversation about how different parts of the city are not represented. And I wonder whether engaging somehow the neighborhood forums to begin a conversation about whether neighborhood planning assemblies or something similar would make sense for a city of 20,000 that's spread out so far so that there can be more of a direct dialogue with residents. So that's one piece. The other piece I want to put out to run by you, Jesse, particularly, but the council in general, is I'm considering putting out, inviting people to join me for a councilor's advisory group. So that I would put that out on the front porch forum probably, but inviting neighbors from different parts of the city to join a periodic, whether it's monthly, I can decide meeting so that I can get direct feedback from different perspectives, different players, different parts of the city, and have that direct feedback so that I'm aware of things that I otherwise would not be aware of. And I wanted to find out, first of all, if that's a legit option, and also if it is to suggest it as something that other counselors might consider as a way to have greater direct engagement with our residents. Could I maybe add something to that? I think the idea of reaching out into the neighborhoods is fantastic, great. I was just wondering if, in this particular instance, that unlike the articles in the paper, which is their individual councilor, that perhaps we could do this as rotating basis, because if we could almost do something monthly where we create, and it's like we report back into the committees, hi, I attended the committee, and this was the committee discussed, one or two people could meet, and ideally, I know it's a big ask, but on a time that is more accessible to people, in the evening, the challenge is that it's very limited, accessible, but if it was on a weekend, where we rotated, taking times, going through the different neighborhoods in a predictable way, I don't know if it can do that at a school or something, where it's accessible to wherever that neighborhood is, and then basically come back in the same way, say, these are the issues I heard, and also it gives an opportunity for people to say that, like here, they are talking in some de facto way to the council, and having a response back from the, from one council, not the whole council, but that way it's an interorganic kind of back and forth process where we're all sharing similar information, similar perspectives, and as I see the committees being the same thing. Yeah, I think to build on that, and I think it leverages, Lori, what you were saying a little bit to and Mike, I was interested in doing something like some of our legislators have done, I know Made of Townsend did this, and Martin LaLonde has done it, and it's really, and they're focusing on their districts in the past, so they would pick a fixed place to meet, whether it's Panera Bread, or Duke's Public Tavern or something, but one of the interests I had might be to create more of that, hey, your counselor or a couple of your counselors are gonna be in this neighborhood at this forum, and address the issue of availability a little bit, and kind of invite people as more of a listening session, so it's not as formal as an advisory panel, but there would be, in my mind there would be neighborhood representation, it'd be rotating, and it would be an opportunity for people who wanted to, voice either concerns or feedback on a more informal basis, but I think it leverages off both your thoughts there that I think we're all trying to get input from a variety of neighborhoods on some routine basis. Let me just build on that, so I totally see the value of informal. Let me throw out the thought that, and I raised this in a similar thought at the beginning of my term last year, that the council meet one day a month during the day where we invite the community members to come and just talk to us about what's on their mind. So it's not at night where maybe some people can't show up. Coffee with the council. Yeah, and make it less formal, the agendas we wanna hear from you, so that we're all hearing the same thing. I'd be willing to do that, and I think that'd be very effective. So I throw that out there. I've heard four really good ideas, I wanna jump back, I don't wanna discount any of them because I think they're all great, but I do wanna ask the question so that I'm clear what is inbound than not. If I decided to reach out to different constituents to say I'd like to meet once a month to have a conversation about what you're hearing and what's going on, and that's something that I was doing so that I could have direct feedback, is that something that is okay to do? And do I have to be careful about what I'm saying, quote, as a counselor? So I'm gonna answer as a manager, but ask Colin to answer as an attorney if needed. So this is representative democracy, right?   And whether that happens over dinner parties or people you call together from Porch Forum or soccer teams or Little League or whatever it is, you are absolutely allowed to talk to groups of people and hear their advice and comments. I think that is totally fine for a counselor to solicit feedback and take that in whatever form it comes. I think if you're starting your own little committee and you're voting on behalf of that committee, you could run into some perceptions of a conflict, but I think it's a gradation of formality. If you have a group of five best friends and every Tuesday you go for a walk and have coffee together and they're informing you of what they want you to work on versus you put a call out to from Porch Forum to say, hey, I'm trying to hear voices, contact me if you want to be heard. I don't think there is a, I think that is what you are supposed to do as an elected official. So I don't perceive any concerns with that. I don't know, Colin, if you want to build on that. No, nothing really additional. I think I agree with Jesse. I don't see concerns with doing that. I think that is the, you're here representing the people of South Brunton and the way to do that is to hear what they have to say. Yeah. And that's one way to do it. So if I reach out and end up having a group of eight people from throughout the city that I met with on a monthly basis just to get feedback, I couldn't be seen as doing their bidding. I think at that point it just falls into the confidence of interest conversation we had last week is if you can still feel like you're doing, acting in the best interest of the city of South Brunton and you're not, and you don't have a conflict of interest there, I don't see a problem with that. Perfect, thank you. On to the other three. Well, I guess I would, I totally agree with Colin. I guess I would also add, you might have a conflict with your counselors. You know, there might be a perception that you are acting, you are taking action that is different than the group. And so listening to this conversation, by the way, it's super exciting when like two meetings in a group of elected officials is just building on each other's ideas and layering up. I think it's awesome. It may be that you wanna try a combination of things as a council for a couple of months, try that, try the coffee with a counselor idea, have official kind of listening session, try a few things for a couple of months and see what has traction. And to your comment, I just wanna say, I think this is appropriate for all of us. If ever any one of us is doing something that feels like it's counterproductive to the council or causing whatever, I hope we just talk about it and clear it instead of letting it fester. So I think that's a really important point that you make. And I'm always open to feedback. I think it's important to note that, I mean, we have some regulars that come in person and we have some regulars online. And if we're trying to solicit feedback from the community that's outside of that group, the more people that you can reach that would come to talk to you if you give them the opportunity, that's valuable feedback. It's just to be able to talk to people that you don't normally see and aren't normally online. It gives them a chance to talk to you as well. So I think it's a great idea. I have one more. So at the beginning of last term, I was kind of toying with the idea with some trepidation. And because of the trepidation, I didn't do it. Of doing like monthly talk with city council, with councilor Chandlik about climate change. With climate change, kind of such a focus of the city plan now. And I'm thinking that maybe I will do that if I can. And if people are okay with tha