So we'll start this meeting of the regional planning commission. There is no consent agenda. So we can move into. The call to order, which I have just done. Amy. Has obviously taken attendance. And are there any changes to the agenda? Seeing that there is none. We move on to public comment period for items that are not on the agenda. Do we have anybody who is from the public or anyone else who wishes to speak to something that is not on the agenda? Does anybody see anything? I don't see anybody. So we can move on then to approve the minutes of September 22nd, October 6th and October 20th. To me, it's. It makes more sense to do them individually because it's cleaner, but it's cleaner. It's cleaner. But if people wish to congregate, then that's up to them. I'd request that we do them separately. Cause I was. Missed one meeting. I like to stay in. Great. That was my preference anyway. Let's start with the Wednesday, September 22nd. Are there any. I'll move. We adopt with any changes if you need the motion. Yes, I do. Thank you. Second. Are there any corrections or. Items of note that need to be changed. Hearing none. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Abstentions. Aye. Yeah. Michael Brian. All right. The motion, the, the minutes are adopted. Okay. Minutes of. A Wednesday, October 6th. This was a move again. Second. We have a second. Chris. All right. Did you get that Amy? Okay, great. Are there any corrections as of note. For this particular. Minutes. Is that your job, Catherine? Well, yes, but I don't, I don't, I don't want to take it from everybody else. This, the only correction I have is that. Kurt Johnson and all the other minutes have been his listed as an alternate. He is the official alternate for under hill. So he should be listed as the alternate, even though he was the one attending the meeting for under hill. That night. So all those in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Abstentions. I abstain. I was not in attendance. Did you get that Amy? Great. Thank you. The minutes are approved. And now we come to Wednesday, October 20th. The minutes, which was a regular meeting. Do we have a motion to approve the minutes with corrections as needed for this one? Make it three for three. All right. Do we have a second? Second. All right. Are there any corrections of note for this one? All right. Page three, line 37. It's, it's very minor, but it. And I'm sure it was auto correct, but instead it's per, for personal, it's biases, beliefs, not beliefs. Attitudes and actions. Yeah. So that's if there are no others, all those in favor of the, the motion to approve the minutes say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any abstentions. Zaconi will abstain. Thank you. The mo, the minutes are accepted. Moving on to the next item of the agenda. Which is always an exciting one is a discussion of the fiscal year 21 audit. And so we have our audit. Extraordinary accountant extraordinaire to present the information. Thank you, Catherine. So I think you've all had this document in front of you. We met with the. Finance and executive committee a couple of weeks ago and went through it in, in a lot of detail. So what I'll do with the full board is try to just give you some highlights and then see if there's any questions. So this is a multi-purpose document. It's an audit in accordance with generally accepted auditing standards, which really are done with any audit. Of any private or, or public entity. It's also done in accordance with government auditing standards, which is required by state statute for every municipality. And required for the planning commission because of the next requirement, which is a single audit. And that's, that's a federal audit in accordance with what's called uniform guidance. Some of you may have them. Some of you may not. Some of you may have to have them because of all the opera money that's coming through. But if you expend more than $750,000 of federal funds, if you're in direct in any year, then you have to have what's called a single audit. And that, that expands the standards and the reporting that's required to be included in this document. So there's a lot in here. We basically provide three letters. The first letter is the opinion on the financial statements. And that's on page two of the report. And as in the past, what it says in the middle paragraph is that you present and present your financial statements in full conformance with generally accepted accounting principles for governmental entities. And that's different accounting principles than for profits or nonprofits. But it's a clean, unmodified opinion. There's been no changes in the standards from last year to this year. So it is consistent with the prior year. As I've said before, what I typically read is the financial statements. It's written by management's discussion analysis. It's in about eight pages. It starts on page four. It's written by management. Our responsibility is to make sure that everything in there is consistent with the audited financials that follow. And it is. But it's narrative. There's some summary financial information. It really gives you a good sense of what happened in. In a narrative format. There's a lot of information. There's a lot of numbers. There's summary financial information. It talks about what went on during the year. And it even talks about what's what's what's happening in terms of budget variances. Why things changed. And so it's more of a, a why than a what. So I usually find those very informative when I'm looking at a new, a new town or a new statement. Exhibit one is on page 12. That's it. I don't know if you have heard of that. You've heard of that. I know. A lot of people have heard about that. And I've heard a lot of people have heard about that. A lot of people have heard about that. So I'm not going to go into that position. And in the past, as we've talked about, we, we kind of breakout your net position. Between what you've done three wrong operations, which ends up with a total. That position of about 680,000 five 72. That's, it was about five 88497. And then because in order to get a clean opinion, for employee retirement system. And that has a real negative impact on your financials. The impact this year is a total of 613,239 negative, but we break that out. There's discussion in the MD&A about that. There's a bit of information in the audit itself, but there's nothing you can do to impact that number. You're paying what you need to pay, you're paying what you're supposed to pay, you can't pay more. It's a pretty volatile number depending on what's going on at the state level, what's going on in the marketplace. But that's why we break it out. So it needs to be in there to get a clean opinion. I wish it didn't, but it does. And so we do break that out and so that you can see what you did versus what the impact it had on you. Starting on page 15, there's a lot of notes to financial statements that explains who you are, how you function, how you're governed, and then a lot of information about the entity itself and all your various assets and liabilities. There's a lot of schedules in the back that are required. Some of them relate to your participation in the Vemurs. It will be a 10-year trend schedule eventually. It shows you how they're doing. They're actually pretty well-funded compared to most state systems way better than the teachers, way better than the state employees. The actuaries and consultants believe that there will never be a point in time where the current funding level won't be enough to pay every municipal employee when the money is due. So it is well-funded, but not fully funded. And that's not abnormal, but it does have that negative impact on you. There's a budget actual schedule on schedule three. There are a number of schedules related to your indirect costs that are required by the state so that they can see how your indirects are affected and how they change from year to year. Agency of Commerce and Community Development requires a specific schedule that shows their grant funds. That's on schedule seven, so they can see how you did compared to your various tasks in your grant application. And the last schedule is a schedule of expenditures of federal awards. That shows every federal grant that you receive, either directly or indirectly, how much you pass through to sub-recipients. This is what all of your grantors will look to make sure that all of your federal money is included in this audit. We have to cover a portion of that. The grant that we spent a lot of time on this year was the largest one, which is the Highway Planning and Construction. It makes up almost 2.9 million out of the 3.2 million that you spent. So in a single audit, we have to dig in specifically to that grant. We have to make sure that you're complying with all the various rules and regulations that are consistently and constantly changing. And so we do spend a lot of time on that. And we have to provide a specific opinion on your compliance and controls on that particular grant. And the other grants we do look at some, but not to the level of that one. Lastly, in the report, are two letters on internal control and compliance with laws and regulations. The first letter is at the financial statement level that that's required by government auditing standards. And then the second letter is the compliance and control letter at the grant level. And that relates primarily to that Highway Planning and Construction grant. And then what most grantors will look at, and this whole audit, along with the form that summarized it, has already been submitted to the Federal Audit Clearing House, which is a publicly accessible clearing house that everybody who has single audits has to submit. Your grantors at the state or anything that's passed through will go there to get this audit. They'll flip to this very last page that we're looking at on page 43. This tells them everything they wanna know. As we talked about your financial statements, you've got a clean, unmodified opinion. We had no compliance findings, no internal control issues. And at the federal award level, the same thing. We had no compliance issues and no internal control issues. So therefore we have no findings that are required to be reported. We tell them the major program we tested. And finally, which is important, we indicate that you continue to qualify as a low-risk oddity, which is really important. What that indicates to them is that you have the systems and the capacity in place to manage federal and state funds appropriately. So that's an important qualification to have. And they find that important and they look at it. So that's a lot of information that I've gone through pretty quickly. I don't know if there's any general questions or any specific questions I can answer. Any questions? Usually Jeff asks questions. Yeah, how are you doing, Jeff? Missed you at the meeting earlier. You know, just for perspective for some of the new board members, we've had clean audits now, what about eight years in a row? I'd say so. And just for everybody's perspective, it wasn't always this way. We went through a period of time where we had difficulties and we had some also difficulties prior to the merger, maybe not so much on the NPO side as the RPC side. So this is kudos to our staff, kudos to our executive committee. And this is important because it underpins our federal funding just so everybody knows how important it is to reach the conclusion that Fred has reached. And so that's not as much of a question as much as an observation for everybody who maybe doesn't have the benefit of the annoying number of years that I do. Charlie? Yeah, I also don't have a question, but I just wanted to take this opportunity to really thank Forrest and Amy for all the work that they do to get to that point. And also to thank Fred and his team for the work they did to audit us. So thank you. Absolutely.  That's great. Our job now is to accept the audit, correct? I would move we accept the audit as presented by Mr. DePlessis. Second. All those in favor say aye or raise your hand, whatever works for you. Aye. Motion passes. Thank you all. Moving right along. All right, I'll leave you now, take care. Same to you, thank you very much for another good year. Thanks so much, all right. Thanks Fred. Nick's work is from Sandy Tebow for Katma talking about telework trends. Yeah, so, and I think this dates back many months. There was a conversation we should, you'll see or have a conversation here about teleworking and Katma's been doing some work in that area. So I'll turn it over to Sandy. I think you want to screen share Sandy?  I think you said yes. All right. Thank you. So yes, thanks for this opportunity, Charlie and the RPC board. There's been some developments and we've been conducting some surveys and excited to share with you some of our commute trends and telework findings. So I'm Sandy Tebow. I'm executive director at Katma. I have been at the organization for 19 years and in the ED role for nine years. Tonight, Josh Katz is Katma's data analyst and he is joining me to share the survey data with you. I do just wanna thank the RPC for their support over the years through the UPWP to Katma. It really has enabled us to grow as a regional organization and engage more businesses and developers in the transportation demand management, TDM discussion. So thank you. I thought I would just start with a quick overview of Katma for those who may not be familiar with Katma. We were founded in 1992 by the Three Hill Institutions, Champlain College, UVM and the UVM Medical Center to jointly plan transportation and parking in ways that reduce environmental impacts, ensure efficient land use and provide sustainable transportation options for our employees and students. We administer a comprehensive suite of TDM programs, including transit subsidies, bike walk incentives, guaranteed ride home support for car pooling, bike share, telework support. And in 2015, we expanded to a regional TMA, Transportation Management Association. So we changed our name, we kept our acronym. We were the campus area TMA with the institutions and then when we expanded became the Chittenden area TMA. Next, Josh, just thought I'd provide a couple of quick definitions for a TMA and TDM just to refresh folks or just inform folks on what a TMA is. So a TMA is a nonprofit organization made up of employers, developers and property managers working together to address transportation and commuter issues in a defined geographic area. There are two TMAs in Vermont. There is Katma and there is the Upper Valley TMA that serves the Dartmouth College Hospital area and part of New Hampshire. There's about 175 TMAs in the country and we come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some TMAs run shuttles, some provide strictly marketing and outreach. In Katma's case, we do a little bit of programs we do marketing, we do surveys analysis and have partnerships with our transportation providers on behalf of our members. The goal of TMAs is to reduce single occupant vehicles, to reduce traffic and parking congestion, improve land use and the environment. The definition of TDM is the use of strategies to inform and encourage people to maximize our multimodal transportation system, to improve mobility, reduce congestion and lower vehicle emissions. And I'm just really excited about the presence that TDM has really taken, I think especially over the past three to five years, it's really strengthened its presence, its value from employers to developers to municipal policies, regional and state transportation planning, energy and climate plan. So I think it's an exciting time for TDM and look forward to really engaging with TDM moving forward. So after several years, after we transitioned to a regional TMA, our organization embarked in a strategic plan process. The plan was approved by our board in January, 2020 as a three-year action plan. And unfortunately, two months later the world shut down and so now we're playing a bit of catch up like many others in our strategic plans. But our vision is to work with members and community partners to gain an efficient, reliable and sustainable transportation network in Chittenden County to reduce the reliance on single occupant vehicles. One of the goals in our strategic business plan was to expand our board to better represent ourselves as a regional agency. We currently, our board is a member of each of the three founding institutions and we're really excited that Charlie Baker is joining our board of directors at this time. So we're really excited to expand our board to better represent ourselves as a regional agency. So looking forward to working with you, Charlie. The next slide is a nice visual, I think to give you an idea of the membership and our dues paying members, which is sort of the top section of this visual. And the bottom section is our employee transportation coordinator network which has been supported through the UPWP. We have 15 dues paying members and we have over 80 businesses, developers and municipalities in our ETC network. And ETC is basically all these businesses that you see here on this sheet have appointed a person at their organization to serve as the ETC, which is a point of contact for Katma. We invite our ETCs to two to three events a year. We provide them with quarterly communications that's filled with transportation information and opportunities, including encouraging them to participate or provide public input on any corridor or projects that impact transportation. So if anyone here ever has a project or a transportation related project that you're seeking input on, please let us know, we're happy to share that with our network. Just wanted to quickly cover, we are a nonprofit 501C3 membership-based organization. This here is just a quick snapshot of the benefits that members receive through Katma. We categorize them in four areas, programs and services, data collection, marketing outreach and strategy planning and support. In 2015, when we expanded, we were receiving a lot of inquiries from developers who were interested in TDM programming for their projects. And part of that was due to some of the ordinance that were in place specifically in Burlington. So as Katma has primarily worked with the institutions and employers, we were excited to launch our first pilot membership with Eric Farrell, Farrell Properties for Cambrian Rise. And so it's been a real nice learning process to learn how we can serve developers with TDM strategies and marketing. There's various types of members interested in Katma, TDM programs, which is really exciting. In fact, today I received a call from a pre-professional soccer team that is going to be playing at UVM this spring, 2022, at UVM's virtue field. And they contacted Katma because they have a goal of net zero. So it's been really interesting to see the different types of members and the interests in TDM. Certainly this information is on our website if anyone was interested in learning more about each of these programs. So transitioning over to some survey findings in response to COVID-19 pandemic, obviously organizations across the globe immediately transitioned their workforce to working from home. And then a few months later, some employees were returning to the workplace, some did not. And the next year, people continue to work from home. So as the pandemic evolves and vaccines are rolling out, there's clearly gonna be some shifts in commuting. So throughout all of this over the past 20 months, Katma wanted to follow the impacts of COVID on commuting and telework. And so we've been conducting surveys at our institutions and our membership and in partnership with some regional associations. So I'm gonna turn it over to Josh to share some results of a few of our surveys that we've conducted showing pre-COVID during COVID and sort of where we're at today. With our fall survey that we just closed out. So I don't know if there's any questions about Katma or we can just keep moving through with the survey data. All right, no questions. Cool, well, first of all, thank you all for having us and I'm gonna speak on this. I was actually interned with the RPC not six months ago before I started here at Katma. So it's really cool to be here in this different position talking to the board. And I must apologize, there's planes flying over me here in Wernusky. So I hope you can hear me well. So just what's on your screen right now is a survey that we had done in collaboration with the CCRPC and BTRANS to survey vermonters on how COVID impacted mode use as commuters began to return to the work site. This was done in June of 2020 and was launched nationally by the Association for Commuter Transportation or ACT and over 2,000 vermonters responded. So some things that we were seeing, again, this is like early pandemic, this is June of 2020, so about a year and a half ago at this point. But what we were seeing unsurprisingly was a drop in bus use and carpooling as a way to get to work, but an increase in teleworking and biking. And so we also got some more interesting data points from this survey, including some income relations to driving alone rates and rates of taking the bus in that the lowest income bracket was over two times, two and a half times more likely to take the bus than the average population and about two and a half times less likely to drive alone than the average person. So this was a survey that was done in June of 2020. And so moving on to a survey that Kamon had done to our members in April of 2021, so last spring, we were here in the pandemic and we decided to ask our members and we were looking for data to support planning efforts and return and around the return to the workplace for employees and want to know more about like telecommuting and their policy. So Katma released our spring micro survey we called it to our members on how they were commuting before COVID, how they were commuting currently and what their future, what their future anticipating commuting habits look like. And from this survey, as you could see, we found that there was a large drop in drive alone rates during as of spring 2021 as compared to before the pandemic. And then you could see that even the anticipated, what people's anticipated commuting habits were after the pandemic were still, their drive alone rates were still lower than pre-pandemic. And telecommuting was also up as of spring 2020 or 2021 and we predicted based on that survey that it would stay much higher than it was pre-pandemic. Pre-pandemic, according to the survey, it was like less than 1% of people were teleworking as of spring 2021. It was found that about 19% of people were teleworking and in the future, based on the survey, we thought that about 8% of people would be teleworking after herd immunity was established. So now fast forwarding to this fall, we did another survey to our members. And this is our comprehensive survey that we do about every other year that asks our members about their transportation habits. So this is a survey that we've done many years. And since we, as Cindy said earlier, expanded to more of a regional organization and expanded beyond just the institutions, we have these three data points of 2016, 2019 and 2021. So these results reflect the transportation patterns of some of the largest employers in town, including UVM, Champlain College and the UVM Medical Center. So you could see here that the number of people teleworking increased from a near zero number in 2016 to around 9% as of 2021. And you could also see a decrease in drive-alone rates from 2016 to now. And other modes besides telework and drive-alone have had a slight decrease or remained about the same. And these results that we're seeing from this fall are not totally reflective of what we expected from the spring, but I would attribute a lot of that to us not being what we would call herd immunity or at least out of the pandemic right now as many workplaces are still in flux. And I must add that the 2021 data from this year is not weighted. I just haven't had the time up to this point to do that. But we will release an annual report with all this data updated and weighted for this year. But I don't expect there to be any big changes. And then here, we also collect a lot of other data points, including demographic information from our survey, from our comprehensive fall survey. Here you could see drive-alone rates by race. Not this specific data point but generally the demographic information that we're collecting on gender, race, income, we think will be super important to our continued centering of equity around our work that CAVA is doing, similar to the work that I know the CCRPC is really honing in on that and pushing that. So we're excited to see how we could use this data more in order to really reach more diverse groups with our programming. And yeah, I'll turn it back to Sandina. Great. I don't know if did anyone have any questions on any of the data points? I can't necessarily see any hands raised, but guessing not. Great. Well, thanks, Josh. Very interesting. So Katma, as Josh said, we've been conducting transportation surveys for a couple of decades now. We have a really large database and we've kept our survey scripts pretty consistent in order to be able to provide these trends. We've added a few questions in our surveys if we were seeking data to inform a program, if Green Mountain Transit was interested in getting some data, because they were exploring a new route or bike share or car share. But for the most part, we keep our survey script consistent. I just wanted to point out because of the large database that we have and how our data is utilized. For the institutions, the survey data is used to project future parking demands in a report that they are provided to the city of Burlington. The data helps understand mode trends and form opportunities to improve transportation services or infrastructure or microtransit. We work with the UVM Transportation Research Center. We provide cleaned out data for students to conduct some research projects. And we've had some interns that have done some pretty fantastic, interesting work with our data that we plan to expand upon. And then we also provide our data to support any municipal policies or ordinance changes. We recently provided some data for the I-89 TDM Bundle Study that's underway. So, yeah, we're really pleased and excited to have all the data that we have, particularly from a few of the largest employers. I'm gonna transition here to the last section of the presentation is to introduce you all to our telework toolkit. So employers immediately had to adapt and redefine their workplace and their workforce with the pandemic. And some employers had to develop telework policies. Some had to update telework policy. I know a lot of employers were and are challenged with equitable policy because obviously not all jobs can be, can telework. And return to work plans look different now as everyone is attempting to keep up with what seems like ever-changing scenarios. We make plans, they're altered, they're delayed, they're planned again, certainly an uncertain time. So, Katma recognized there was a need for a telework support for our membership, for our employers and employees in the region. And we were fortunate to receive a multimodal transportation innovation grant from V-TRANS that enabled us to formalize and brand our telework toolkit that I'm gonna, I just have a couple of slides on this toolkit. But I think it is worth reminding ourselves that telework has always been a TDM measure. And as Josh just shared in our survey data, telework was always a 0.8% in our, in our survey. And now certainly, we're at 9.5%. It's always been a TDM measure to reduce greenhouse gases and vehicle miles traveled. And telework's gonna continue in some hybrid form if people are in the office two or three days a week. And it's gonna, it will be continue, I guess the new normal, as we say. And I feel like we should embrace this opportunity. It eliminates work commutes, it reduces the number of single occupant vehicles on our roads. And I think with widespread adoption of telework Vermont, we'll be able to meet our state's emission reduction goals. As the regional TMA serving Chittenden County, this is an online telework toolkit. It's a resource for employers and for employees to help them navigate telework. It's basically a comprehensive collection of assessment tools and resources to give organizations some guidance as they're establishing and implementing telework policies that benefit employers and the employees. And actually the core tools that we develop can actually be used by multiple types of businesses and organizations. And we consider that, you know, sort of a primer for employers, all these resources and best practices that we have available are available to employers and it helps guide their internal discussions. This is a screenshot from our website. This is the employer telework toolkit. It's pretty interactive, but I hope that you'll take an opportunity to visit. We have a lot of sample policies, some best practices, and we have an assessment tool, employee survey, all to really just try to help employers develop or update their telework policies. If a business has telework policies in place, we have tools that will help them evaluate the effectiveness of their policies. And the employee survey to gauge employee satisfaction with current telework policies. So I'm pretty excited because I've been hearing, you know, the institutions have been utilizing this toolkit, our membership, municipalities. And in fact, we heard the town of New Haven was recently has been using it. So we're really pleased to see that it's been very useful and valuable. And our plan is to continue to update the information and resources and tools with current, as current as possible. And this is a screenshot. We have an employee telework toolkit. So here employees, when you, you know, click on these toolkits and request to telework and consider best practices, there's a lot of resources and guidance for employees who are interested in requesting telework from their employer and some best practices. So lots of resources for employees as well. So that basically wraps up our presentation. I just was thinking it's been 20 months since we have all been shifting to telework and adapting. And I think employers are continuing to, you know, refine the culture in their workplace. There's a lot of benefits to teleworking, the work-life balance, the cost savings, certainly the environmental impacts, recruiting and retaining talent. So it'll be interesting to see how telework evolves and where we are in a year from now. So any questions or information, please feel free to reach out to us, check out our website and really, again, just thank you for this opportunity to share updates from Katma on the survey data. Thank you, Sandy and Joshua. I still remember to unmute periodically. But does anybody have any questions? Well, you know, we're still on the topic then. Well, before they say good night, well, seeing done. Well, thank you again for the presentation. And have a good evening. Thank you. Thanks. Have a good night. You're ready. And I'm just going to add that, you know, this issue about transportation demand management is definitely on our mind. And we've dug a little bit deeper into that topic as part of the 89 study.  I'm looking at a landing maybe January timeframe or February the latest with some of that TDM research. So stay tuned more and more on this broad topic. And thank you, Sandy and Josh. Really appreciate it. Yeah, great. Thank you for having us. Goodbye. Next on our agenda is the 2020 census results and forecast for use in the 2023 ECOS plan. And I believe it's Melanie that will say something about this. Yeah. And I'll just do just a quick introduction of, I think there's really two topics that Melanie's going to discuss. One is just kind of giving you a quick update on what the 2020 census numbers look like in case you haven't had a chance to look at them. And the second part is just to kind of take an initial look at those numbers compared to our forecasts that we've been using for our regional planning work and MTP. And you'll see at the end of that, we're hoping that you can kind of affirm that we can stay with those same forecasts that we're still, I don't know what the right term is, but they're still reasonably reasonable. So I'll let Melanie get into the details, but. Thanks, Charlie. I'm just going to share my screen here. Okay. I'm hoping everybody can see that. I'm Melanie Needle. I'm a senior planner here at CCRPC. If I haven't met new board members, it's nice to meet you over Zoom. So the presentation tonight is about the 2020 census and the ECOS plan forecast. The presentation like Charlie indicated is going to talk about the 2020 census population, what the ECOS plan forecast is and a staff recommendation for continuing to use the ECOS plan forecast that was done for the 2018 ECOS plan work. So as you may know, new census data is available for each municipality. The data is available for a range of geographies from state all the way down to individual census block and here the data is shown by municipality. The colors indicate the year of the census. So the purple is the 2000 census, the blue is the 2010 census and the orange is the 2020 census. So this is just a visualization of how population has changed by town over the last 20 years and we'll get into the details over what this means for towns across the county in the next slide. So this is the raw data behind that chart. So in comparing 2010 to the 2020 census, population change across Chittenden County ranges from an increase of 2,500 people in Essex Town and Essex Junction to one person in Beale's Gore. Essex Town and Village grew the most, then South Burlington and then Burlington in terms of pure population but St. George had the highest percent change in growth at 18% and then after that Williston and South Burlington and Essex Town and Essex Junction were tied in terms of percent change. Overall the county grew from about 156,000 people in 2010 to 168,000 people in 2020, which is an 8% change. So in terms of the ECOS plan forecast, we're preparing for the 2023 update of the ECOS plan and we're talking about the forecast because Vermont statute requires that all plans are based upon surveys of existing conditions and make predictions about future trends and shall be made in light of present and future growth. It's a requirement that's in statute. CCRPC prepared future demographic and employment forecast for the 2018 ECOS plan and the metropolitan transportation plan as well. Forecasts are used as inputs to, in the 2018 plan that were used as inputs to the energy plan that we did in 2018, that's our enhanced energy plan and then also the travel demand model. We worked with a consultant to prepare these forecasts. Those consultants were RSG and economic and policy resource and the forecast includes estimates for future population, households and total employment. So this graph is seeking to compare the 2020 census to the 2020 forecast and also the 2025 forecast and then looking out to 2050. The census 2020 population count is closer to the 2025 forecast than to the 2020 forecast. The forecast was done in 2018 and the difference between the 2020 forecast and the 2020 census is about 2%. So even though the forecast was done in 2018, because of the small difference between 2020 forecast and 2020 census, it's still valid. The 2020 population forecast is about five years ahead of schedule, so it's closer to 2025. So now looking at households. The 2020 households for census, they're not available yet. That's more detailed census data that will become available in 2022. So to substitute that, we're looking at 2019 households and making a comparison between what we have for existing household data and the 2020 forecast. So as we saw with population, the 2020 forecast and the 2019 household, there's only a 2% difference and then there's a 1% difference between the 2019 households and the 2025 forecasts. And again, the 2019 households, the actual number as best as we can say, it's survey data from the American Community Survey is closer to the households forecasted in 2025. So again, the difference is minimal and therefore the forecast that was done in 2018 is still valid. Total employment, just a point of definition. Total employment includes farm employment and farm and non-farm proprietors. So it's a complete picture of employment. Last I checked, which was about a week ago, I probably should have checked today, but 2020 total employment is not available. So the best we have for an actual number is 2019 total employment and there's a 6% difference between 2019 total employment and 2020 forecast. My guess is that if we were to look at 2020 total employment, it would probably be lower than the 2020 forecast and 2021 employment would probably be even lower because of the pandemic impacts on employment. So as we know, people are still working remotely as we heard from Sandy's presentation about commute trends. Over the next few years, conditions will continue to change and shift slightly. Letting time pass for things to settle will give us a better sense of how the pandemic will affect employment and demographics for the long haul. More time will also provide better data for future forecasts. And so since 2020 is such an anomaly, it makes more sense to wait for conditions to normalize a bit. So therefore staff is recommending that we continue to use the 2018 ECOS plan forecast in the 2023 ECOS plan work that's underway now. So as Charlie indicated, we're looking for action on this. I'm happy to take any questions. I was gonna say Melanie just threw a lot of data at you very quickly. So let her know if you wanted to back up to a certain slide or make sure you understand what was presented. Melanie, this is Wayne Howe from Jericho. I had a quick question about some of the data you presented Jericho. And I see some of the other towns on the Eastern end of the county were relatively flat. And yet maybe you don't have access to drill down into the data this much. Generally school enrollments, at least on the Eastern side of the county, are trending downward. So I just, and that can affect employment, it can affect transportation needs. And I'm just wondering if you had any sense or any data that supports that. I mean, I know that boom towns like Milton and otherwise South Burlington, their enrollment, school enrollments are probably going up, did you get any sense about, on the whole Jericho seems the same? So that it would appear that there are fewer kids in Jericho, but the overall population is the same. How do you square sort of those numbers? What's your take on that? Well, I think what you're saying is consistent with the demographic trend that we've been seeing across Vermont with older population. Also people are having less kids, our household size is decreasing. I don't have the age data at my disposal and I haven't looked at it recently and I'm not sure if age is one of the early 2020 census data products. But if you're interested in seeing specific age demographic information, if it's not available from census 2020 it would likely be available in the 2019 ACS five year estimate and I can provide that to you as a follow up. Yeah, I'm less interested in the actual numbers. I'm just wondering if in the overall mix you see an effect on the ECOS plan because the percentage, there's fewer kids and more old people or whatever, if that somehow translates into a slightly different strategy going forward, just a what if question. And Melanie, I'll try to jump in but my sense is Wayne is that that was a trend that we were seeing a few years ago too. No news flash to anyone here where Vermont is getting older and so we're seeing that pretty broadly as a trend. So I think that's part of the reason we're not really recommending any change to our forecast. And we're also waiting, I think Melanie's being very nice trying to say who would give data based on the ACS but we're really waiting for more detail from the census to see if that shows us something different is happening but from what we can tell it looks like the same trend of Vermont getting older is happening. Great, thank you. The Census Bureau, this is Jeff. The Census Bureau has never delayed the release of the American Community Survey before it's entire history. And it did that this year because of COVID. And the other thing that's happening with the data is school enrollments are bouncing all over the place on one hand, you've got resort towns that are having increases because of COVID refugees. And then on the other hand, you have other districts where parents are pulling their kids out of school because of COVID. So it's not even tracking the five to 18 age population anymore and I'm in the state economists for the legislature are frustrated as hell because we can't get it solid enrollment data out of the Department of Education for two years ago. So the only other thing and obviously my company had something to do with the projections back in 18 just for everybody's perspective. When we did the projections in 18 we had actuals for 15, 16 and a little bit for 17 and those were a good five to six years beyond the last actual data point that we had for the 2010 census. So when you consider there was a pandemic involved and we now know that the census in all those in between years was actually undercounting the actual population in the mid-year estimates. To be where we are is not bad but we need to probably take another look at this as we get the actual data for a couple of years beyond the pandemic impacted years and it's just like remote working. Remote working probably works really fine for the short term because everybody had a relationship in the office, an in-person relationship and going remote doesn't but what happens when there's turnover and all of a sudden you've never met the person that you work with and you're working with them remotely for two years what does that do to the office environment? So there's an awful lot of things that are gonna come up and sugar off in the last couple or three years. So it's probably prudent to wait to 2028 before we do anything to update projections, five years down the road when we have to look at ECOS again at least that's my perspective. And then the last thing I'd say is this is a long-term forecast. There are gonna be differences in years up and down because long-term forecasts don't try to take account for things like business cycles and those kinds of things. The long-term forecast try to do is try to hit the data 10 years out, 20 years out, 30 years out, 40 years out like we have in these projections and it's not unusual for us to have deviations both up and down from things in individual years. And when we're doing the 2023 ECOS plan we hope we're gonna have 2020 census data and we hope we're gonna have updated American Community Survey data from which to go forward but just recognize we're not gonna be done until 2023 and we're gonna be using actuals from 18, 19 and 20 to do that. Exactly. Thank you, Jeff. Thanks, Jeff. Bart has his hand up and has it. So, he has a question. Well, I have a couple of comments and a couple of questions. Melanie, while I'm trying to talk would you pull up the pound slide, if you would please? The table? There you go, the table, yeah. Yep. So, we pay a fair amount of attention to this at my day job in state government and I'd make a few comments for those who don't deal with this demographic data and deferring to Jeff but we don't put a whole lot of stock in the ACS when it gets into discrete data because of the sampling limitations. You have to recognize like, this is a true story I once saw a data point that said a value of 13 and their confidence interval suggested that that was, they believed the true value was somewhere between negative 10 and 23 or 33, however that works out. And it illustrates the margin of error that comes with samples especially when you start trying to break out age groups and small towns. It tends to be good at statewide, not good at town level and sometimes okay at county level. So it's really important for ACS to look at the margins of error and confidence intervals, especially when you start to try to break it down into age and another topic of interest, things like race and gender. So that's a general comment. The other comment I'd make, we often focus on statewide data which masks some very significant differences by counties to town. So Chittenden County is growing. If you look at immigration data, people are moving from other places into Chittenden County. People are not at least from the available data so much moving into those other places. There is evidence in ski towns that people are moving there into second homes. But you should know there are parts of the state that appear to have shrunken in the last 10 years. So Chittenden County is kind of unusual. And especially when we get into towns like my own, like what's actually going on in Richmond? It's pretty small, pretty stable. It feels like it's growing in places, but it's all relative. So I would say we should probably pay attention to the 2020 census data when it's available. That is kind of the gold standard as opposed to best available data which is typically the ACS. Best available data also makes for a great acronym of BAD which I think is apt at times. And then the final comment I'd make is the further out we go, if we go out 10, 20, 30, 40 years, what will happen when Miami is no longer habitable because of climate change? Those are unknowns when we get further out in terms of immigration into Vermont while it's been pretty stable over a fairly long period of time. There are great unknowns when we get further out. That's sort of political and rational comment, I guess. Thanks, Barrett. Can I just make a point of clarification? So the data that we're looking at now, this is the actual 2020 census data. This is not the American community survey data. We only use the American community survey data in subsequent slides when we were talking about households. So I just wanted to clarify that. Melan, that's a good point. That's actually my point that this is kind of the gold standard here. And the ACS is kind of eh, it's what we've got until we have something better. Well, I mean, there is a difference, Jeff. There is a difference between one year, three year and five year ACS estimates. And to Melanie's credit, she used the five year ACS, which has more data points and then lower ranges, Bard, what you were talking about. And clearly the one in three year ACS data can have those confidence intervals that exceed the sides of the observation. So that's why we try to avoid those whenever we can, but sometimes we can't. Thank you. All right. Did your questions and comments get answered then, Bard? I think they did, yeah. And this is essentially prognostication when we get further out. I would say the census is much better at telling us where we've been than where we're going. No long-term forecast that even uses census data, which is the gold standard, can anticipate discontinuities. So if there's something that happens 25 years out, like Trump is ordained king, okay? Then all bets are off. Thank you. Garrett, you have a question? I just wanted to say, and this is the right chart for here. Buell's score is 100% accurate because that one is me. Just figured it was worth a smile. Where'd you go? Here it is. Essex. Oh. One thing on the Buell's score, I think the percent change, it should be a negative actually, because as opposed to a positive 3%. Yeah, in the Excel formula, I made them all absolute numbers to just not deal with negative, but thank you. Yeah, you're right. It should be negative. Well, it is a negative without me.  Mike, you're next up. All right, thanks. I'm not sure what I'm missing. I understand the logic, Meli, but I'm wondering since we have 2020 census numbers, and they are close, why not use the actual numbers in the 2023 update? And I'm sorry, we're not saying we won't use the actual numbers. Okay. We're just asking to keep using the 2050 forecast. Oh, OK, I'm sorry. Yeah, I understood that that you're going to keep just all the numbers you had in 2018. No, no, no, no, we're just. Yeah, we obviously have, we'll use, I think Melanie and Jeff both that we'll use whatever accurate up to date numbers we have. But in terms of the forecast, we're not seeing a real need to re forecast, which takes a lot of work. Yeah, that's correct. So, Mike, we have a whole section in the regional plan regional context that looks at all the census data. So we will update that with all the census data that's available for the 2023 Ecos plan. Perfect, I'm sorry, I missed that. So thank you. Any other questions? If if there are no other questions, could I we have a motion to use the 2018 Ecos plan forecast to be for the 2023 Ecos plan? Garrett moves, all second. All those in favor, say I or raise your hand. I, I, I, I. It sounds high there. It sounds like the motion passes. Madam chair, madam chair, I, you know, back in 18, I said I would recuse myself for many votes because of my involvement. So I'm going to ask alternate Tracy, who's on our select board from Essex, that she would vote Amy instead of me on this because I need to abstain. So I will vote in the affirmative. Well, thanks for the clarification, Jeff. And thank you, Melanie, for, you know, moving us forward on this. Thank you. Next is the discussion on the legislative breakfast, which is going to be in December. Yes, and hopefully. I feel like there's so many emails I'm not quite caught up on, but I think you've all gotten an email to save the date for December 7th at eight a.m. OK, I see a couple of knots. So reassuring. Good. Thank you. Thank you, Emma. And typically, we've just had a conversation. But this year, I decided to, like, put it at least put this first cut list on paper or some digital facsimile thereof. So I sent you there's a list in your packet. I think it's on. I lost what page it on page 20 of your packet. And I'm happy to share it. But are any any quick reactions of things that are missing from the list? And, yes, I know there are too many things on the list to cover in that one hour. So my next my next question will be, what should we focus on? But if I can jump in in our executive committee meeting, we talked about some discussion of equity and inclusion. I didn't see it on your list. Yeah, it's kind of embedded in number six, that environmental justice, equity, assessments and inclusive engagement. And maybe we should probably make that a little bit stronger. You know, and I've been kind of trying to look at things like what VLCT is advocating for. There seems to be quite a bit of support building for this environmental justice bill. It doesn't cover everything, but it's one particular piece. So but I probably should reframe that. Thank you. Any other comments or questions? Well, I think Mike's got a good point about that. Then, you know, if anything, Charlie, I would try and see if one can embed the equity and diversity, equity and inclusion in all of the items on the list. And certainly do it to the way we best can do it. It's great to have that alone. If there's an S148 that we can speak to with the legislature. Terrific. But I think, you know, part of our task this year in getting up to speed is to make sure that we're addressing it in every realm that we touch. Thanks. And so I'm assuming, should I pull this list up? Does anybody need me to pull it up or part? It may be helpful. Yeah, my only question is maybe backwards is I did not readily find the PowerPoint slide deck that we just looked through. And if that is available, I'd like to be able to share it with some folks here in our camp. Yeah, the PowerPoint that Melanie just did. Yes. Yeah, we can definitely email that out to you and attach it to the minutes. Happy to do that. Sorry, I'm going to share in a second here. Can you all see that now? Yes. You may want to shrink the percentage a little bit there, Charlie. How is it? Thanks. I'll get them all on one screen. There we go. From a standpoint of things to focus on giving given the short amount of time that we're going to have, to me, the most important issues are the COVID money and now the infrastructure money, the 2.2 billion, I guess, that we're getting and how that is handled. That's going to be an enormous focus, both of those issues of the upcoming legislative session. There are obviously issues related to our towns and how that gets shared. I noticed on the list here, Charlie, you have increasing the transportation money for the towns, which I'm sure V-Trans will do. They'd be skewered if they didn't. It's a matter of perspective and how much and what gets done and it's not an easy nut to crack in terms of figuring all that out, but you know that they will do something like that. But this is also a point in time where if we feel we need to stress other things besides bridges and roads when it comes to transportation, that would include bike facilities and other things that communities have always wanted to do that have a great impact for smart growth, but aren't usually not the kind of money that we'd like to see in those kinds of things because we're focused on bridge and roads so much. So I think there's a real live issue there and how much do you pave and rebuild bridges and how much do you do that, but put an emphasis on other things that we've always wanted to fund but could not. So I don't know where every town sits with that kind of thing. I know my town has tried very hard to build sidewalks and bike lanes in which we have a big process going on now. And there's money needed to do that kind of thing. And this is a grand opportunity for the state to figure out how much they feel the balance is because usually that stuff gets short-sighted in the balance. And I think with the new money and how much of it, which is large, I mean, hugely beyond the Obama stimulus, which was only we got but a hundred million plus in that versus what we got in here. So I'd like to see us spend a lot of time on those kinds of things for the legislature as opposed to the normal bread and butter things that are important to us. Don't get me wrong, but that we do all the time because this is a one-time opportunity. Granted, it's a five-year program, a lot of these things, but it's kind of a one-time opportunity. Yeah, can I ask a follow-up question to that? And I do not want to put Amy on the spot, so Amy, you don't have to respond unless you want. I've been wondering if this is an opportunity, if this is a lot of a hundred percent money, if we may actually have some kind of proportionally more state funds available that aren't required to match federal and could we ask that like, particularly for these bike-ped projects, kind of make them state-funded instead of federal, which would greatly reduce the amount of requirements attached and probably speed-up delivery. But that's kind of a related, I hope a sympathetic thought to what you were just mentioning, John. Sure, and it's also an opportunity and the reason you get five years is because some municipalities may not have completely planned for this kind of thing, because knowing there's really not going to be any funds. So as much as you want to do things quickly, you also want to understand where you really need to put it. If you've got to wait a couple of years to allow for a few more applications for really good projects, then that's all has to balance that way. But yeah, I mean, but this is an amazing opportunity for our municipalities. And in Chittenden County, as we all know going through the growth conversations we've all just had and most of us here, good fans of smart growth, this is a big opportunity to do things that are related to those kinds of things. And it doesn't come along all the time. I agree with John on this, but I also think that in terms of the funding, what also goes along with alternative transportation or whatever is actually, as we've just talked about with telecommuting, is the broadband issue, because more money is coming in for broadband. And Chittenden County does not have CUDs, but we also, and we have donor holes, but at the same time, we also don't have symmetrical across the county. And a lot of the outer line, well, you know, or Jericho or whatever, or some of the smaller communities, you know, have a mix, but your upload speeds are so slow that it does impact how people can telecommute. You know, so you're, the focus should be moving beyond just the 25, three, but to go with what the state wants to do with 100, 100 symmetrical.  Well, you brought up exactly what I was going to go into. I would put broadband miles ahead of any kind of paving or bridge work. I realize people here are focused on roads. That's fine. But the, we can, by spending money on broadband, we can reduce the impact on the roads and bridges and make for less work needed on them. Speaking of the Obama stimulus, Watesfield Champlain Valley Telecom took a bunch of the Obama stimulus and put in fiber. Buell's Gore has fiber. It's got better broadband than I have here in Essex at less than half the cost because they set up good infrastructure. And that can make a huge difference in not only the cost on roads, but in equity by, as Catherine said, the broadband availability and the county is all over the place. I mean, there are parts of Essex and Jericho that have terrible broadband and sell for that matter, don't have sell. But so anyway, I just, I'll shut up now and say broadband should be absolute number one. I think it's important to understand too at this conversation that these things aren't competing with each other. They're categorized. We're getting money that has to be used for transportation. We're getting money that has to be used for broadband. We're getting, you can't transfer one from another. So this isn't a matter of a conversation of we want less spent on roads and more on broadband. The money's already characterized. It's how we spend the money in those categories that the focus of the conversation should be. Well, thank you, John. You have any other comments, Garrett, before I move on to Bard? Okay, Bard, it's your turn. Thank you. Thanks. I just think there's a theme here which is our heavy focus on the stimulus, our one-time money. We have a lot of bread and butter issues that it seems to me that go on year to year.  And the opportunities that feel to me like once a generation or once every other generation to make a difference around infrastructure and economy. It seems like there are a handful of things at the top here that might take all of our focus, all of our discussion during that session for what that's worth. Oh, Amy has a question for comment. I don't have a question. I just wanted to, I went to spend part-respond to Charlie's comment and I apologize, my cat is deciding he'd like some affection at the moment, but... It's a cute cat. It is a cat, yes. Because you walk in part of these meetings, we've gotten fun for it, by the way. So I just wanted to just give folks a little bit of background. I know there's a lot of interest and information on the new federal bill. And I just wanna put a cautionary note in here. Remember, this is a bill that the Congress came up with. It's gonna take the Federal Highway Administration and all of the other federal entities that are involved in this in trying to interpret what with the intent was and then propagate the necessary guidance to all of the state and federal agencies that are going to be responsible for overseeing this fund. So I just wanna encourage you to be patient because it's gonna take probably a number of months, six or more months. And it could be as much as a year until we get a clear understanding of just exactly what the provisions that are in the new law, how they're going to be rolled out to states. And then correspondingly, we have to then figure out, okay, how are we going to administer these programs? Are we gonna expand existing programs, add dollars to them? Are we gonna modify? Are we allowed to modify match requirements? So there's still a lot of details that need to be worked out on these. So I just wanna share that with you folks so that you understand there's, we're gonna have answers, but it's gonna be a little while till we've got some really clear guidance from the fence. Thank you, Amy and Jeff. I just want us to not forget that two, three, four, maybe even as late as five years out, this bonanza of reigning federal dollars on us is going to end. And we don't often get the opportunity, Charlie, to communicate to our delegation how important we are economically degenerating the resources that are needed to support public policy throughout the state. And maybe we couch it a little differently than what we normally do because of these reigning down on our heads federal dollars, but they're gonna end at some point in time. And if we don't remind our delegation to make the point that we can't starve Chittenden County or the rest of the state, ends up skin and bones. Thank you, Jeff. Any other questions or comments? Any things on here that you really don't think is worthwhile to talk about? What is the state planning office study? Why did you go to the last one? Because I had no idea what it was. So there is a bill to create a study committee to establish a state or re-establish a state planning office. I don't know if it really has legs or not, but it was just, I guess I got a couple of calls about it that made it raise a little bit more on my radar. And I looked at it and I was just like, well, if you're gonna do it, just make sure to include RPCs. I have no idea if it's gonna move forward or not. And it's really more of a, yeah, I'm not sure it's a critical issue in this session. This was, yeah, because if you only got an hour, that's probably not necessary then. My first job at a graduate school in 1980 was a job in the state planning office in the administration of Richard Snelling. And I was there for four and a half years and then they changed the state planning office to the office of policy research and coordination during the administration of Governor Cunett. And that's when the state planning office went away. I'm institutional memory, so I feel like I gotta tell you guys when there was some institutional memory to be shared. And I did get a call from some Cheney County legislators asking if the RPC supports the state planning bill. And I said honestly to her that we haven't talked about it. So, let me know if you'd like to talk about it at some point or maybe it's something we talk about in the spring if it seems to be making progress. I think that's more the way to go, Charlie, because if it's just a bunch of nothing at this point in time, we shouldn't waste our time with it until it's needed. Any other comments for Charlie? This is part, I'd only agree with John. Like if it doesn't get out of committee, it probably doesn't merit attention. Okay, so we'll kind of keep refining this over the coming weeks and bringing back to the executive committee. And as you're thinking about this, if you're having a nightmare at night and need to pop off an email on a topic, please do. Or maybe it's a really great dream about something positive happening. That would be great to hear about too. But yeah, so if you have any thoughts, please share them between now and preferably before December 1st when the executive committee kind of re-looks at this. And I hope you do have on your calendar joining us on December 7th. Hopefully we can get a good turnout. Unfortunately, we'll be virtual again. So we'll do the best that we can. I do thank you for making eight o'clock and at 730. That's what the chair said to do. All right. All right, back to the agenda. Well, Charlie, you get to talk some more because it's the executive director report. Okay, I'm feeling the pressure. I'm seeing 730 right in front of me, four minutes. So I don't know if people do wanna have a longer conversation to debrief from the equity summit. Thank you for those of you that were able to participate. I think the participants and particularly the BIPOC residents of our community that participated really did appreciate that there were select board and city council and RPC board members there. And so thank you for that. And just in terms of process right now where the consultant team is digesting what they heard on Saturday. I'm hoping we get a summary of that within the week or two, maybe before Thanksgiving, maybe right after. And then they're taking, that is one part of the input in terms of developing a report with recommendations. So there was a summit. They also did a lot of focus groups and interviews over the summer. They'll incorporate those suggestions that came out of those conversations. And then the third thing is they've been looking at our internal documents, bylaws, policies, procedures. So we should get a pretty comprehensive report in December about what we should do in terms of advancing our equity work. So, but any people wanna share any reactions to last Saturday or thoughts? It was fascinating listening to the interpreters. Yeah, we did, for those of you who weren't there we had interpretation happening in two languages, Arabic and Swahili, which was the first time I'd really been through that. So I kind of messed it up at the beginning but I think we recovered from that. And, but I think that was just kind of inclusive, right? We had folks that didn't speak English and they were able to participate along with us. It really was, it was fascinating. All right, well, more to come on that topic. I expect in January, the executive committee will have a chance, well, the equity leadership team probably first and then the executive committee will take a look at it and we'll probably look at it at your January board meeting. And then just a heads up the annual UPWP application should be hitting inboxes sometime in the next week or so. This says the 19th, we'll probably try to shoot for Friday. There's a chance it may bleed into next week, but great. And that's all I've got, Madam Chair. Thank you. I have nothing to, as usual, the committee activities and reports are either in your packet or available online depending on your choices. Sorry, Catherine. Yeah. I forgot one thing. Dan asked me the all hazards mitigation plan is under development. I think at our last meeting back in October, we were looking for a volunteer to serve on that committee. There's probably two meetings early in 22 to review the draft plan. So it's got a final ask, is anybody interested in serving on that committee? The two meetings in early 2022. I know it's so exciting. Oh, Garrett is in. All right, Garrett. Thank you. The next agenda item is future agenda topics. I think that's on the back of your agenda, right? Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah, I mean, obviously, you don't have lots to talk about with equity and UPWP and all the good stuff. Because by that time, the state energy plan and the climate action plan will be out as well. So January is overloaded at the moment. I guess, let us know if there's anything that you think we can defer, but I'm sure the executive committee will hone that down so that January is a reasonable meeting for you. Okay. Are there members items or other business? I don't see anybody's hands. So I imagine it's time for that. I move we adjourn. Second. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Good night, all. Thank you for a good meeting. Yeah, thank you all. Have a good evening. And Mike, I got to talk to you before the legislative breakfast.


I am Stuart. I know I'm the last person on. I'm going to try and keep the energy levels up. I work at the open data institute as a software engineer. I have talked to you about some of the work we've been doing with Coma Chameleon, a desktop CSV editor with reuse in mind. I work in the ODI Labs team, which is the R&D side of the ODI. We build stuff, work on research projects to help develop standards and techniques for using and publishing data in particular, open data. I started at the ODI three years ago, and as we were a new team, we had the pretty unique opportunity to try and get things right from the start. One of the things we talked about is whether we want to do 20% time, which I'm sure everyone knows about the concept of that through Google and things like that. What doesn't exist in any real form at Google from what I hear, we still thought it was a good idea to try out. We started doing that 20% time every Friday each week, but it just quickly became unwieldy because other stuff would take over. We were like, well, we've got to get this finished, so let's not do it this week, but we'll definitely do it next week. We just found it just wasn't happening. Plus, one day a week, it was really difficult to get anything significant done. We then decided every fifth week we would spend a whole, we'd have an innovation week, although most of the time we're supposed to be innovating anyway. It meant we had a decent chunk of time to develop something significant. Some of the things we've worked on, this is from me, this is Git Data Publisher. It gives non-technical people the ability to publish datasets on GitHub, fill out a quick form, fill out some metadata, add the datasets, and as well as publishing it in GitHub, it uses GitHub pages underneath the hood to automatically create human-readable webpages with machine-readable metadata underneath, as well as doing data previews. If anyone's been to the ODI office and might have seen this, this was a piece of artwork by an artist called Ellie Harrison. Every time it monitors the BBC news RSS feed, every time there's a piece of news about the economy, it gives you some crisps. It was on a pretty old laptop, the laptop broke, we couldn't get it to work again. Basically, we rebuilt the code underneath and used the Raspberry Pi, and also added a restful interface, because why not? We made it tweet and sent notifications to Slack and things like that. That was good fun. It's recently come back to the office. It was on loan at Somerset House in London on the data exhibition. That went on tour. I liked to think that I did some art, but I didn't really. My colleague James has also built a Chrome plug-in that allows you to see diffs for CSV files on GitHub. We've also done a lot of smaller projects like internal dashboards, research on things like blockchain and small libraries that work on top of some of our bigger projects. We've focused quite a lot on CSV in the last few years. In the early days of open data, I've been plugging away at this for quite some time. There's a lot of talk about linked data, semantic web, and there's loads of potential there, but a lot of data publishers are non-technical people. A lot of open data you're going to see is going to come as CSV, which is actually great, because it suits publishers because it's dead easy to publish. You don't have to be particularly technical to write CSV, and it suits for users because it's plain text and super easy to pass. However, flexibility is not always a good thing. We've seen a lot of examples of badly published CSVs, but this is an extract from a PDF showing the 2013 New Year's Honours List published on Gov UK. Alongside this PDF, and I was looking some time ago, I saw a CSV. I thought, great, we can probably do something with this. So I downloaded it, opened it in LibreOffice, and saw this. This is quite an extreme example, but I think from looking at it, I'm pretty sure someone just went, control A, control C, control V, into Excel, file, savehouse, CSV, job done, right? So it made it difficult, if not impossible, to work with. So this inspired us to build CSV Lent, which I think a couple of people talked about. If anyone was at CSV Conf the year before last, my colleague James did talk about this. We had some funding for central government to do it. It allows you to upload a CSV or specify a URL and see how reuse ready your CSV is. There's a selection of some of the types of warnings and errors that we check for. I won't go into them all, but things like, if it's hosted on the web, things like content type, and then invalid characters, inconsistent values, blank rows, that sort of thing. So you can go and check your CSV, get your results so far so good. You can also specify a schema. We've based the schema on the JSON table schema, and include things like whether the column is required, the data type, column title, and value constraints, which is generally via a regular expression. Any of you saw Jenny talk about CSV on the web, we're just starting to support CSV on the web as well. That's currently supported in the Ruby gem that sits underneath the CSV Lent website, but we haven't yet got full CSV on the website, but that's coming. One of the biggest uses of CSV Lent schema has been the local government association in the UK. They offered funding to local councils to help publish their data, providing it met a given schema, so they'd provide a schema. People would get the CSVs out of whatever system they were using or generate themselves by hand, go on to a CSV Lent and check if it met the schema, if it did, then they uploaded it. But the main issue here is a lot of people are still using Excel to generate CSV files, generally via a save hours. The problem is Excel is designed for building spreadsheets, and spreadsheets are not CSVs, as most of you know. For some time I've been thinking, especially with the LGA project, I've been thinking, wouldn't it be great if someone built a CSV native editor? Rather than going, I've got my CSV on file savers, go into something like CSV Lent, check it against the schema, and go back and fix the problems, wouldn't it be great if you could just do this on the fly? Someone built a CSV native editor, which stopped common problems before they cropped up. This is where this wonderful bit of tech came in. Jeremy earlier was talking about Electron as well. For those of you who don't know, I've never used it before, it's used to build GitHub's Atom editor. It allows people who primarily develop for the web to build desktop applications using JavaScript basically, a node in the back end and your front end JavaScript on the front end, which is great. I'm not a JS guy, really. I'm getting there, but it's still a bit of a challenge for one person to learn all this in a week and build something. Luckily we had help in the form of free interns over the summer. Ben, Stephen, Daniel, I managed to convince them this was a good thing to do. They were 100% convinced, but I contacted them for a week and we got cracking. They put together user stories, we did it properly, tackled them one by one, and we had something. It's a simple stripped down CSV editor, removes much of the cruft you're seeing in Excel and open office.  You can add rows and columns and you can also validate CSV. Call that to the CSV and undocumented API and it turns the results straight away. If you click on the error down there, for example empty row, click on that, it will show you which row is empty, but obviously this is a very simple example. It will show you where the errors occurred. You can fix any errors in place before you go ahead and upload. Fix your errors, validate it again. We saw some talk about data packages as well. We have that support, so you can go export as data package, export as data package, add your metadata, add your license, key words, and it will also generate a basic schema for you as well. If you click generate headers, it will try and work out the schema. Export is as a zipped data package. Any problem is we had a nice desktop editor. We still had to cross the hardest hurdle of software development. We couldn't think of a name. Naturally, we reached out to the rest of the ODI team and the best name was Coma Chameleon. That was the logo designed by a wonderful intern, who said software developers aren't artistic. We didn't stop there though. I've done a bit more work with big refacts with the code, writing tests. I've got continuous deployment of binaries now, so every time we push it to master, it pushes new binary up to GitHub, new version, bug fixes, and a new website where I shamelessly listed the same template as the CSPconf website, because I have absolutely no imagination. I've also had his further support for schemers. Now you can open a schema in CSVLimp format and automatically add the correct column names for you. What I want to do further down the line is to have live validation for each column, so if, for example, one of those has to be an integer, if you try to put in alphabetical characters, it will go red until you can't do that. Also, just matching against regular expressions, that sort of thing. That's something I want to add further down the line. So that's up for you to download, install, and tinker with. Really, really happy to get any bug reports. There are bugs. So, yeah, have a look, have a look on the GitHub repo, and if there are any bugs that haven't already been reported, please let me know, and I'll try and get round to fixing them. When there's always room for improvement, I want to add an offline mode, because at the moment it calls the CSVLimp API, which isn't ideal.  Better support for Windows and Linux at the moment. I'm limited by the OS and some of my laptops, so I don't get too much testing in, particularly on Windows. More support for schemers, as I mentioned before. CSV on the web support, I'm really keen to do. I'd really like to do autof publication to GitHub, which should be a case of just file, file export. Dat support as well was an idea I had. I keep getting ideas, and it's probably dangerous. I just wanted to sort of sign off by talking a bit more generally about why innovation time works so well for us. It allows us to try new techniques and tools and build things without the pressure of having to find funding, and we can solve problems for colleagues. We've got a whiteboard to suggest ideas, and increasingly we want to involve other members of the team, non-technical people, and we're starting to teach some of them how to code as well. On a personal note as well, I've got two kids punishing homebrew schedule, and I don't really have time for side projects outside of work, so I'm really super lucky to have the opportunity to grow as a developer. So, yeah, that's quite short, but I'd love to hear any questions. You can see the website at comacameleon.io, and I'm at Pezherty on Twitter. So if there's any questions, comments, please let me know. Yes, there are. We're trying to support both, basically, is the thinking behind it. Not on a moment, but that's something that we could quite easily do. We don't want to prescribe anything, and as there's these two divergent technologies, we want to really be supporting both, ideally. But yeah, at the moment, we are very much focused on the adjacent table scheme rather than the CSV on the web, but that's something we want to do more on. Anyone else? It might, I think actually, I think there's a hard limit in ElectronJS to about 20 meg, I think anything over 20 meg will probably cry. But yeah, again, I haven't really tested it in anything too heavyweight. Again, the idea really is it's more for creating rather than editing. It's perfectly capable of doing that, and we can also import Excel files as well. That's something I didn't mention, but that is a thing we can do. Interesting project. What would be some examples of pursuing this opposed to waiting, let's say, plugins for Google Sheets, the online Google Docs spreadsheet? So anything like a validation plugin for Google Docs. That is something that occurred to me. I think partly it's out of wanting to experiment with new tools and techniques, because I've never used Electron before. And partly, yeah, I think that's mainly it. That's something that we'd certainly, because it's the right tool for the right job, right? If people already use Google Docs or whatever, then it's a good idea to get them using that. But I think, again, it's going back to the Google spreadsheets and Excel and Open Office. They're not really designed with reuse in mind. It's giving you a little bit too much freedom. So the idea was, as well as the validation, it was also giving people, removing some of that flexibility that lets you probably do a bit too much. So, yeah. Hiya. Sorry? It's pretty much do what you like. We've got this whiteboard and people do suggest things. Occasionally, it will come out of... We did some research on blockchain. That was something that was suggested to us. And other little projects like that. It's an initial match of things, really. The way it's organised, we used to do two-week-long sprints. We now do one-week sprints. We do four sprints, and then the fifth sprint is an innovation week. That's basically how it works. But, yeah, like I say, I'd like to work more with internal teams and try and solve some of the problems that they've got. Because I think developers are very good at solving problems. They're not always particularly brilliant at identifying them. So that's why I'd like to work internally a bit more with people and actually find out what problems there are that's solving. Anyone else? No? Cool. Well, you're finished, aren't you?