Thank you guys for tuning in to the first episode of The Prince of Investing with myself, your host, Prince Dykes. Today our topic is going to be something that you've been seeing in the news and the markets all over the world, the stock market is reaching new highs. We've been in a bear market now for, not a bear market, but we've been in a bull market now for the last couple of years. But to talk about this today, I brought in a very, very special guest, got the editor and chief of Yahoo Finance, Mr. Andy Sory here. He is live with us. Right now he's in Silicon Valley. Usually he's probably out in Wall Street, but today we're glad to have him. And Andy, how's it going? It's great, Prince. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. Definitely, definitely. Thank you. For people that don't know who Andy Sory is, can you please tell us a little bit about yourself? For sure. And like you said, Prince, I am the editor and chief of Yahoo Finance, which is the biggest business news platform on the planet with over 60 million monthly unique users and people come to us to check out their stocks and business news and all kinds of financial data. And I've been here at Yahoo for about two and a half years. Before that, I was the editor of Fortune Magazine and Fortune.com, which is of course a great old school business magazine. I was there for 29 years. And at the same time, I was a TV anchor on CNN for a number of years on their morning show American Morning and appeared on television radio from time to time all over the place. Awesome. That's a magnificent resume, I would say. Thank you for taking your time out to come see little, little Prince Dikes on the Prince of Investment. I'm glad to have you. I've been watching you for years across the globe on TV. All those other good stuff.  Thank you. And as you see, you spend a lot of time on Wall Street. The Dow Jones today, finally, all three major indexes, finally cooled off and the Dow Jones stop from his 10-year consecutive day run. Right now, we see a lot of young people. We see all this activity going on until the market, all this bull market is running a while.  What do you have to say about what is your state of how the economy is? Is this the real market right now? Well, taking kind of a longer view, Prince, I mean, this is the long, slow recovery from the great recession of 2008. And, you know, that was the worst financial downturn that we had since the Great Depression in the 1930s. So that we knew the recovery was going to be something that was stretched out over a long period of time because things were so weak at that time. And it's been stretched out over this nine-year run. And lately, you know, I would say the stock market, the gains have sort of accelerated and people are really putting all the bad times, the last of those bad times from 2008 behind the view mirror. And that means we start to maybe hit something that's a little dangerous where people become complacent. They think good times are going to last forever. They think things are going to continue to get even better. Now, I know before you catch me on this that, you know, things are not great for all Americans everywhere. But in terms of investing in the stock market, it has been going up and up and it's been, you know, really red hot. That's true. So, like, you know, my platform before I started here on this show, the investor show, we have people that are brand new to the world of investing that, hey, I never heard of this concept, but I see this red hot market going on. And I'm thinking, hey, should I jump in right now? Or should I be a little cautious right now? Because, you know, we all know the market runs by emotions, a fear and greed. People are looking a little greedy right now. So, what advice would you have to them? Would you just sit on the sideline? Or would you say, hey, you know what? You need to go ahead and jump on this grenade. That's an excellent question. Well, when you say jump on a grenade, I'm going to tell you, heck no with that. But no, it's a real question and I know there are a lot of people struggling with it, including myself. So, if I've got some extra money on the sidelines and, you know, I see a stock or see a mutual fund or an ETF that I want to buy and I wait two weeks and it goes up and I'm like, oh, man, I missed it. So, a couple things, France, first of all, I think it's probably unassailably true that we're closer to the end than we are at the beginning. Right? I mean, it's just a fact, right? So, but that doesn't mean that there's more upside and it doesn't mean you shouldn't get in. I would not, however, at this point, mortgage the farm and put all your cash in the market because, you know, at some point, they're going to take the punchbowl away and the party is going to end. So, I think it makes sense, you know, particularly if you're under-invested, you know, to put some money in. Suppose you had $100 of cash, you know, when you put $10 or $15 on being sort of metaphorical. So, 10 or 15% of your cash into the market at this point. Sure. Would I put all of it in? I would probably caution against that.   There's three kinds of animals on Wall Street. Bulls, bears and pigs. And pigs get slaughtered in the end. Wow. Okay. That's a good one. I never heard about the pig. Be careful not to be too greedy. You said that yourself, agreed that.  I want to get into investing. I want to do it for my kids, but I'm always told to buy low and sell high. So if I went into, let's say, Walmart, for example, today, and it was a box of cereal was 30 bucks, you know, I'm probably not going to buy it. I'm going to say, wow, this thing is the outrageous price. So some people are wondering, hey, am I really going in here? Am I behind the $30 box of cereal? Or should I just wait? Should I just wait for this next economic collapse that happened in 2008? And that was a question that, you know, I was, that was a question I was having last year. I thought, hey, we're going into a presidency and, you know, historically during election season, we run into a bull market. But I thought that after we elected our new president, President Trump, I thought that, hey, the market is going to go through a very bearish moment, then we're going to get new policies and then it's going to slowly uptick. But all we saw was after the election, in the futures market, we saw a bearish trend, but then it didn't translate when the market opened. When the market opened, it started down, but then it went up. And then from the election to now, we're seeing this thing continue to go up. So people are kind of saying, hey, well, why is this coming from? And we just had a jobs report last week. Unemployment is at an all-time low. But you made a statement earlier, where you just said that, hey, you know, it's not a good time for everyone right now, but we just looked at the lowest unemployment that we've had in forever. How could that be? Well, you, okay, you touched on a number of points. Let me address a couple of them. Number one, yeah, the box of cereal was probably closer to 30 bucks than 79 cents, you know, or something like that. One of those real dirt cheap store brands, things you like to buy in at the cereal. But the problem is, Prince, I'll be honest with you. I don't know, if I don't have the fortitude to buy in in 2008, I mean, I get scared. I know that I'm supposed to like, oh, here's my moment. But all I do at that point is feel really kind of lousy, you know, and I'm like, okay, I'm not gonna do anything. Now the smart people, the great people, and you know, we met at the annual meeting of the greatest investor of our time, which is Warren Buffett's annual meeting, the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting in Omaha. And when he sees those down moments, he's like, I'm in, this is like my time. And it's hard to do. I know it sounds easy, but it's hard to do. So that's my first point. Another point I wanna make, and we can talk about this forever, because everyone loves to talk about this, which is President Trump. Everyone wants to talk about President Trump. I tell you something, I go to China and people wanna talk to me about President Trump. And everyone in China, it's just like America, they all have opinions. Some people love them, some people hate them, but everyone wants to talk about them. I think it was surprising initially.  He's so out of control, he tweets. The market's gonna go down. But if you thought about it, and the market responded to this notion, which is he's all about businesses being able to do their thing. Now I'm not passing judgment on that because business taken too far can cause excesses. But he wanted to deregulate, he wanted to cut taxes. Now the interesting thing is, so far he's, well, I guess to be fair, he's still working on it, right? Like none of this stuff has really happened particularly. I mean, he's got a new Supreme Court justice. There have been some movements on trade. He's done some things in terms of having companies build factories here, but in terms of cutting taxes dramatically and dramatically deregulating, repealing Obamacare, those things that he said were gonna spur the economy. He hasn't done yet. So my point is, again, not to pass judgment, but my point is to say that the market has moved up a lot, Prince. Thinking these things are going to happen. When we talk about what could make the market go down, I will tell you that if these things don't eventually happen, tax reform, deregulation, repeal of Obamacare, again, for better or for worse, whatever you think about it, if they don't happen, it's likely the stock market will respond negatively because it's moved up in anticipation of those things occurring. So I think that's something to really pay attention to because everyone asked me like, oh, okay, the market's gone up so much. What's gonna make it go down? And right now there are no immediate catalysts, but I think these things are out there. And then the third thing that you brought up that if you don't mind me rambling on. Is that right? Okay, the third thing that you brought up had to do with this point about jobs. And it's very interesting what's going on in the economy. And there's some places, and let's face it, this idea of people not having jobs and feeling disenfranchised had a lot to do with why President Trump was elected. People were disillusioned. They were unhappy. They didn't have jobs or they didn't have good jobs or their jobs were going away. Whether it was in a factory or a coal mine or whatever. But at the same time, as you said now, the unemployment rate has gone to a low that we haven't seen since before 9-11, to give you an idea, a very historical low. And there's states like the state of Maine all the way in the Northeast, for instance, the opposite side of the country from where you are, where the unemployment rate is so low they don't have enough workers to fill jobs. The governor of Maine has just released prisoners from prison, non felony committing prisoners who are near the end of their terms. In other words, people who haven't bought checks or haven't paid parking tickets enough so you gotta go to jail and they're coming near the end of the term. He's letting them out of jail to go to work. Number one, number two, there's a program in the state to find people to come to Maine to work. They don't have enough workers. So the whole point is that there's two points. One is geography, you gotta be in the right place. And two, and most important is skills. As you mentioned, I'm here in Silicon Valley and this place between San Francisco and San Jose right here in Northern California, the San Francisco Bay area is absolutely booming. They are building, I'm surrounded by, there's Googles putting up six or seven buildings, Apple's new headquarters going over there, Facebook's got a new campus. I mean, all these incredible companies that you hear about are booming, booming, booming. And all the people here at Yahoo and these other companies, what do they have, Prince? They have skills. Many most of them have computer science skills, engineering skills or at least skills in human resources or in marketing or in sales. So it's people who can navigate through the digital economy and you don't have to strictly speaking be a computer science or electrical engineering person although those people are the cream of the crop. You just have to be able to deal in this world in the same way that we are. I mean, pat ourselves in the back, Prince, here we are talking on Skype. You know, we're doing some stuff and we're using technology.  Wow, nice, nice. But Andy, I'm glad you said that before I speak to you about a couple of things. We're gonna take a quick break right here on Think Tech Hawaii to look at a couple of things. You guys stay tuned as we give you more analysis of the current market and investing. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Hello, I'm Helen Dora Hayden, the host of Voice of the Veteran, seen here live every Thursday afternoon at 1 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. As a fellow veteran and veterans advocate with over 23 years experience serving veterans, active duty and family members, I hope to educate everyone on benefits and accessibility services by inviting professionals in the field to appear on the show. In addition, I hope to plan on inviting guest veterans to talk about their concerns and possibly offer solutions. As we navigate and work together through issues, we can all benefit. Please join me every Thursday at 1 p.m. for the Voice of the Veteran. Aloha. My friend, mother, what big eyes you have. She's saying all the better to see you with my dear. That's so cool. What are you doing? Okay, cool. Research says reading from birth accelerates the baby's brain development. And you're doing that now? Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is the starting line. Posh. And this is over. You're dead. Read aloud 15 minutes. Every child, every parent, every day. Thank you guys and welcome back to the Prince of Investing right here with your host, Prince Dykes. As you guys already saw, we have the amazing guests and the story on the line. And if you haven't heard what he said earlier, I'm gonna give you a little bit of a recap, right? So Andy was speaking about, yes, we met in Omaha, Nebraska early this year at 2017, first shot halfway. And he was speaking about the fear and greed cycle. And I was very intrigued to hear someone of Andy's fortitude of the financial markets, he said, hey, when 2008 came, I was pretty fearful. It was hard for me to jump in and invest unlike some of the greatest investors that we've met, the greatest investor of our time, Warren Buffett, when he looks at an economical downturn that happened in 2008, he jumped in. Myself, where I was at in 2008, I was just learning about investing, right? I was just coming onto the market. I was just giving this thing a try. I was just trying to learn and educate myself. And when it happened, I said, man, you know what, my parents was right. They was right that I should have left this market thing along. But now learning and learning the cycles that we go through in the business cycles, I learned that that was a great opportunity. But Andy pointed out that, hey, it's not a great opportunity for, he said it is a great opportunity, but it's harder to do than to talk about. Then he spoke about the unemployment rate. We have historic lows unemployment rate that came out last week, and that he spoke about up in Maine, it's probably too cold. That's probably why they can't find people about how the governor has a program of allowing inmates to come out of prison early, non-threatening inmates to come out too high. And he's right now in Silicon Valley, even though he's based out of New York, he's in Silicon Valley. He was saying how it's booming there, how all these companies like Google and Facebook, but he was speaking about the skill set because we've seen a very low unemployment, but people are not feeling happy about the everyday job. And he said, yes, we know about the whole buy low, sell high, but it's easier said than done. Right now if we, like President Trump, he tweeted out or he said that, hey, if North Korea was to make any more aggression towards the United States, they'll be faced with fury, fury, don't quote me on that, but he was saying, hey, you know, if you mess with us again, we're gonna do something. And some people kind of attribute that to the market kind of reacting to that to fear of a possible war. If we were to possibly go to war, and you're looking at companies start to go into a depression or a recession, it's hard to sit back and say, hey, you know what, let me invest into this company. When Ford stock dropped down to a buck or something like that or less than a dollar when it was going through his hard times in 2008 and automobile crash, it was very hard to just jump in. So a lot of us right now, we're looking at this opportunity as like, hey, where are we right now? Are we getting close to the peak? Cause we know we have four cycles, right? We got the trawl, which I don't think we're in a trawl. Then you have the expansion phase, which we very much so looks like we're in expansion because of, you know, your low unemployment, your uptick in your housing sales, and all these other leading indicators. It kind of points that we're in expansion, but right after that expansion, you have a peak that's followed by a contraction. So right now we're like, okay, how close we're in this expansion phase, but how close are we in this expansion phase to the peak? If this is an expansion and this is the peak, where are we at right now? So a lot of you guys want to know, should I be investing right now? But my thing is, if you don't invest right now, what is your alternative, right? What else can you do if you don't invest? And do you want to chime in on that? If people don't want to invest right now, they're trying to almost time the market, something that the most elite professionals that I know you've known and met and spent time around, you spent time around the greatest investors of all time, and people are trying to time the market.  I would just say, hey, invest consistently on a consistent basis. And if we keep going in expansion and we go to a peak so big, and we go into a contraction, you continue to invest to dollar cost average out in the long run. Because what about the people who was bearish of the market two years ago? Look how much opportunity costs, look how much they missed for the last two years. Am I right on that, Andy? Yeah, you mentioned that phrase and I want to just jump on that principle. It's a very important concept, which is dollar cost averaging. And I have done that in my life and with great success, that I'm not smart, I'm not good, but I just, I'm trying to be consistent. It's like a baseball player. You just be consistent with your swing, hit your pitch, just have a system. And dollar cost averaging, which means taking the same amount of money and say you want to buy one stock, say it's Facebook or whatever, and the stock keeps going up, you keep killing yourself, but if you just buy $100 of it every month, and some months you'll buy less shares because the price goes up and some months you'll buy more as the price goes down, but you're always putting money in and you can see your cost of Facebook will change every month because the stock goes up and down, mostly up right now, but at some point it may go down. And so you are not trying to time the market and you're sort of, you're putting your emotions out of the equation. See, that's what's most important. It's like, I believe in this company and this stock over the long haul, I don't know when the best time to get in is, but what I'm doing is I'm putting my money to work all the time, every month consistently and over time I feel that's going to pay off. And speaking of Facebook and these kind of great growth companies, I just want to say a word about that if I might, Prince, and that is these companies are always too expensive. The stocks are always going up, you're always killing yourself. You're always like, shoulda, shoulda, shoulda. So that's why, and I had this with Starbucks for many years, and then I just said, I'm just going to jump in, make the plunging and kind of dollar average a little bit on it. And it worked out over time quite nicely. And one of the best things, people are going to tell you this stock, this stock, I think one of the really, and it's hard, but one of the most important core fundamentals of investing is great American growth stocks. Like if you strip out, like, oh, I like to buy turnaround stocks or I like to buy European stocks or Asia. I like the Chinese market. I am telling you that stuff is way too hard. It's complicated, you believe me, you may get lucky and buy the Chinese stock market, make a million dollars and more power to you, but I guarantee you, you do not understand the Chinese political system because people in China don't. It's very opaque, you know? So, but what you do know is I'm going to Starbucks all the time, sir, my friends. Everyone's on Facebook, Amazon, I'm buying all my stuff in Amazon. You know, this gets back to Peter Lynch, the portfolio manager, Fidelity Magellan, another legendary investor. Buy what you know. If you see it, I mean, this is one, and just one last point here. When I have this little thing, when I start shelling out all my money to something, I'm actually getting a little mad. It's like, wow, I set up a prime account on Amazon. I'm just buying all my stuff there now. That's like, well, why shouldn't I be back on the other side of the equation and be kind of an owner? You know what I mean? Like when I see a company that's taking all my money, that's when I think about buying that stuff. And, you know, I think those kinds of thoughts, that kind of thinking may be beneficial. Now, I wanted to hit onto something that you said earlier, Andy. You said that, hey, that kind of indicates that you quote me from, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but it kind of said that, hey, we're in the speculative market right now because everybody's expecting Donald Trump, or President Trump, to do such great things with these policies, reform, Obamacare, repeal, Dodd-Frank, all these great economical policies, cutting tax reform, all these things that are supposed to be great for business. So people are kind of cooking the market and kind of saying, hey, when these things take effect, they're going to be great. But you're saying, so people are kind of speculating that, hey, when these things come, great things are going to happen. And if they don't happen, that's when we can see an economical downturn. Am I correct on that, Andy? Well, I wouldn't use the word speculating. And I think maybe they're expecting. I think there is some speculation, but I wouldn't say that, oh, it's all based on a hope and a prayer because businesses in America are doing really well right now and earnings are improving. And that's one of the fundamental things that drives stock prices is earnings. When earnings go up, stocks go up. And so companies are earning good money right now. So I think you combine those two things, Prince, that they're pretty good earnings. And then people are expecting, have this expectation of President Trump's policies to be beneficial. But I do stand by that point that I think that there's probably more downside than upside, say with tax reform. If tax reform does not go through, I think there's downside. Clearly, if tax reform does go through, I think there may be some upside, but I think a lot of those gains have already been realized that the people have been anticipating that. Maybe I'm wrong and maybe the stock market goes up a lot more and that's why you should dollar average. But that's my feeling. And I think just to maybe expand on a point I just made a little while ago about American growth companies, the real story of our time is the digital revolution. And that's why this year I'm here in Silicon Valley and I know maybe I sound like I'm drinking the Kool-Aid a little bit, but let's face it, these companies, like my parent company, Yahoo, like Google and Facebook and Amazon, they are changing the world. And that is a story that's been going on for a while, but it's not stopping. It's not going to be over in the next two years. And I got to close out here and I want to say, what is your final thing? Would you want to wrap it up and let everybody know out there about this market and about investor? What's the best advice you can give them? All things in moderation, France. Like I tell you, although, as I said, I don't always follow that my own advice.   I mean, listen, that's a story for a whole other day.  But I think that being a little cautious here but putting some money in by dollar averaging, moderation, I think is always a good plan. Okay. Definitely, guys. Hey, that is Andy Sory from Yahoo Finance. My name is Prince Dix. This is the Prince of Investing. Guys, as you already heard Andy Sory say, dollar costs average. Take away the emotions out the market. Don't try to time the market. Pay it like it's a bill. Put a little bit of money to the side every single month.  And if we do cut it back, you just continue to buy it and you just forget trying to time the market. But anyway, guys, my name is Prince Dix. Thank you guys for tuning in. Until next Tuesday, I'll be right here on Think, Take, Hawaii. Coming to you guys live. And I appreciate you guys. Thank you. Peace. Be safe. I'm out. Thank you.


This video will talk about simple interest applications. So this is a simple interest, probably the simplest ones we can have. I is equal to P times R times T.  And then we have T, which is going to be time, and it's usually in years. So we have a finance company that offers a payday loan, a small $75 loan, to help people get it by a payday, usually no longer than two weeks, but we're going to do time in years, so that's going to be important right here. If the cost of this service is $18.75, determine the annual interest rate of interest charged by this company. So let's see what we have. We have a small loan of $75, and this is going to be RP. That's how much we're putting in. And then we have this two weeks, which is going to be our T, but we've got to think about the weeks. And then they tell us this $18.75, and that's going to be our I. They want us to find R. Determine R. So let's write our formula. I, we said was $18.75, is equal to the principal, which is $75, times the rate, which we don't know, times the time, which is two weeks. We know that there's 52 weeks in a year, so since we're going into years, we can write it with respect to weeks. So we have two over 52, so two per our 52 weeks, or it's 126 a year. So it's really going to be times 1 over 26. So what do we have here? Simply make it look a little nicer now. 75 times 1 over 26 would be 75 over 26 times R, which we're trying to solve for. This is our unknown. So we would want to multiply both sides by 26 over 75. When you divide by a fraction, remember, you multiply by its reciprocal. And if we take that, I have not done that in my calculator, so I'll have to pull that up. And I'm just going to literally, I can have a decimal answer, I want a decimal answer. But I'm literally just going to say 26 divided by 75 in parentheses, times my 18.75. And we find out that that answer is 6.5. So R is 6.5. But remember, we have to move the decimal two places to be able to figure out what the percentage is, so that is actually 650%. What does that tell you about getting a payday loan? So now we're going to talk about the total amount accumulated, that's this A, accumulated value. And to do that, you take your principal. But then you add to that the principal times the rate times the time. So this is our interest, okay? This is the principal plus our interest, if you think about it. But we wrote it this way so that you could see that we have a common factor of P. So we wrote P out here, and then we were left with 1, P times 1, and RT. So that's, we're going to use it as A is equal to P times 1 plus the rate times the time. So our problem. Business in strip mall, MS Custom Card Shop borrows $50,000. So that's the principal of this, in this account. From a group of investors at 4.55%, that's our rate, although we have to make it a decimal. And the business booms and blossoms enabling Emma to repay the loan fairly quickly. If she pays $62,500, which is the accumulated amount, how long will it take? How long was she using this loan? So we have, let's write it again, A is equal to P times 1 plus RT. It's simple interest, so it's just RT. So A is the $62,500, and we said we were investing $50,000 times 1 plus. And then we've got our rate over here, 4.55%. Remember you have to divide by 100 or move the decimal 2 to the left. So here's tens, there's hundreds. So we're going to have 0.0455 for our rate. And then for our time, we're going to have a T, because we don't know how long that is. That's what they're asking us for. This is a pretty straightforward problem. We have something in parentheses where our T is. So we have to clear everything away from the parentheses. So we're going to end up with $62,500 divided by our $50,000. And that's going to be equal to 1 plus 0.0455T. Now we have a linear equation, and I'm just going to leave it like this. Because I only want to get my calculator at once. So $62,500 divided by $50,000, and I'm subtracting my 1. Well, AB equal to 0.0455T. And if I move to where I have more space, the last thing I'm going to do is take my $62,500 divided by my $50,000, subtracting 1. And all of that, I will divide by 0.0455. And now I'm ready to look at my calculator, because I need to know that as a time. That doesn't really mean anything to me. Literally, like I see it, parentheses $62,500 divided by $50,000, and then minus 1. Order of operations will divide before I subtract. So I'm okay there. Close my parentheses divided by 0.0455. When I press Enter, I find out that it's going to take about five and a half years.


Okay, not that I necessarily need the mic right now, but there's people that are watching this at home, so I'm really excited that you all are here. This is great. So thank you all for coming out to the final reveal, I suppose, of the Huntsman Park design. So I'm excited to see what you all have and to have a conversation about it. The way that this time will more or less be structured is we're gonna hear from Vermont River Conservancy and MacBroom and... Milona McBroom. Milona McBroom, about the plans. And then if there are, you know, sort of just clarifying questions as we go, I assume clarifying questions are probably fine, but we'll have more time for more in-depth questions at the end, and I think that's pretty much it. Does that sound, any other comments? I'll do a little intro. Okay, great, so that's it for me. Awesome, thanks all for being here. Thank you, Aya. And when you all speak... Oh, is it that mic there? I don't know, it probably is both. This one here. Well, welcome everyone, thank you for being here on what feels like the first night of fall. Isn't chilly out there? And thank you also to Orca Media for recording this, it is live streamed now, and then the recording will be available tomorrow on their website and YouTube. And I'm just very appreciative of all that Orca Media does to keep our community informed and engaged, so many thanks. And I was thinking to, we'll do a presentation. I'll do a brief introduction here and then hand it off to Milona McBroom. And it would be great to hold your questions and comments to the end. And then when you do, if you do wish to come up and have a comment or question, if you could do so in the microphone so that those listening at home can hear you. So I wanna introduce myself. I'm Ricardo Erickson with the Vermont River Conservancy. And also from the Vermont River Conservancy is our executive director, Steve Libby, here tonight. And VRC is a nonprofit land trust protecting land along rivers throughout Vermont for public access, for conservation, and for encouraging flood adaptive communities. And a year and a half ago, VRC started an initiative called Face the River. We wanted to facilitate community discussions to think about how we relate to our rivers in a new way. And all too often in our cities and town centers, we have built structures around our rivers. And essentially, we don't see them, we don't interact with them or relate with them, and we have turned our backs to them. And so through a series of public outreach events and presentations in Montpelier, we heard from many of you in and around Montpelier about your relationship to Montpelier's rivers and how you would like to improve the way we see and relate to our rivers, how we as Montpelier can turn and face our rivers. What we heard from you was excitement and potential of what could be. And more specifically, we heard from so many people that you want a riverside park in Montpelier at the confluence of the North Branch and main stem of the Winooski River. And we personally loved that idea. And so did Mayor Anne Watson. She was listening in and she loved the idea too. And VRC loved this idea of a confluence river park, so much that we decided to apply for some grant funding to see if we could get a conceptual design for such a park. We received that grant funding. We went to the city council, we got their approval to go ahead with this work. And the first thing we did was we created an advisory group comprised of 17 people from a variety of backgrounds and professions. Many of them are here tonight, so thank you to our advisory group for helping us along the way. The second thing we did was put out an RFP to initiate this step of creating a conceptual design for the park. And out of several very qualified proposals from throughout the country, we hired Mylon and McBroom to do this work. And the team is led by Roy Schiff, the water resources engineer from Montpelier and Regina Leonard, a landscape architect. And it has been our pleasure to work with Roy and Regina and that they're capable and creative team and they have far exceeded our expectations in creating this vision, this conceptual design of what a confluence river park could be. So I'll now hand it over to Regina to describe to you the process that they went through to provide some background and ultimately to reveal to you tonight the final conceptual design for the confluence river park. Hi, I'm gonna back up a little bit and I just wanna talk about the context and as you all know, there's a lot of exciting things happening right now, which goes kind of hand in glove with the whole vision to reorient your community toward the river. With the Clean Water Act in the 70s and the rivers getting healthier and wildlife coming back, communities all through the country are reorienting themselves to the river. And I think by way of the development and some of the other investments that are happening in your downtown, it just makes this project really, really integral to that whole opportunity and making that happen. So what we wanted to show is just the context of things that are happening. And so if you look at this visually, you can see the green star is where the confluence river park is proposed. And so when we're talking about that, you can see that's where it is. Just to the east or on the other side of the river is Shaw's just to orient everybody. We have Main Street sort of diagonal across the right hand side of the slide. The new transit center is just to the west. And if you look at the dashed line, that's approximate location of the new shared use path. The red stars indicate places that are in transition where there's been some community discussion about what's next and opportunities for revitalization. And so there's a lot of exciting things that are happening and confluence river park sits right in the middle of all those exciting things. So when we were brought on board, we were told there were certain design considerations that should guide this effort. One obviously is river access. It sits right on the river, but one of the things that we wanted to do was look at river access and what level was feasible to provide river access. We also wanted to look at accessibility so that we could get as many users into the park space enjoying the park space and possibly enjoying the river as possible. We wanted to look at expanding recreational opportunities from this site. Flood storage and resiliency were also important topics as you all know, this is an area that floods every season. And so we were thinking as we were moving through that ways to increase flood storage and resiliency. The context and history, this is in the capital city, it's right downtown. There's a certain flavor that Montpelier has. And so as we were developing the designs, we were constantly thinking about how to fit it into place. And we relied on the community and input from the community to help us. And finally, creating this exciting public space. We weren't sure when we started out what the community was looking for for public space. And I'll talk about a lot of the community input that we went through in order to find out what the community wanted in that public space. And finally, the integration of the shared use path. There were a lot of ways in which the space could react with, interact with the shared use path. And so we investigated that through design and I'll talk about that a little bit. So just to orient people that, you may know where the project site is, but it's wholly different when you go down into the project site.  Thanks. So here's a drone photo of the site. You're all probably familiar with it. The North Branch is running right to left on the screen. Joins the larger Winooski River. You can see at the bottom of the screen the shaws in the back parking lot. This photo was taken a couple months, couple months before the new bridge went in for the bike path. And a couple things to discuss. One of the prominent features in the river on the North Branch is the trestle dam, also known as the rock dam you can see on the right. It's a very low head dam. What you don't see is under the trestle bridge, the railroad bridge is a bedrock grade control structure that crosses the river. And there's actually several bedrock grade controls that are all around the Main Stem Winooski. And it's a really magical spot. There's a lot of wildlife still there. Excuse me, could you say what is a bedrock that every year? Pieces of bedrock that are sticking out of the river. Is that because they're bedrock sticking up or because people have put them in there? No, it's natural. Sticking out of the ground, yep. And what that does is that kind of controls the bottom of the river elevation so it doesn't dive down. So you can go on to the next slide. So that's the river setting. One thing that's really obvious when you get down here and when you look at the site is there's a very small area of vegetation around the rivers. And that's a long-term vision is to re-vegetate these rivers. This is the actual bank, the corner where the Main Stem and North Branch meet. And it's a lot of, it's ages of construction rubble, industrial rubble, concrete, metal, glass, automobile parts from some of the land uses that were taking place right in this area, some train parts it looks like. And a lot of invasive or maybe non-native vegetation is located on these banks right now. There's actually not a lot of vegetation as you can see in this picture. Now here's the shot right upstream of the Trestle Bridge. This is the new abutment for the pedestrian bridge. And I took this photo as I was going down to look at river water levels. And what you see is that the old stone walls in the back are all flooded. This is April 15th. We had quite a wet April and May in the area. And the water levels pond up through this area. So you'll see the water level rise five or six feet. In this area. And if you've been down there, this is the same location but under lower flow. That's the stone wall on the right. That's part of the Trestle Bridge. And these are two stream gauges we've been looking at to monitor the water levels and help us place the park elevators at the proper elevation. That's an ongoing water level study. We can talk more about if folks are interested. And this is looking back upstream. You can see the Trestle Bridge and the Trestle Dam, excuse me, in the background, the long parallel line in the river. This is looking up the North Branch. And the stone there is the protection on the abutments of the new bike path bridge that's now been installed. Here's the bridge looking downstream from the parking lot, the farmer's market parcel, and again, looking at the confluence. So an interesting thing about this area is that the two water levels go together on the main stem and on the North Branch. And those are dictated by very different things and different watersheds in the state from up in Worcester and from up in Cabot. Those all converge at this spot. It's a really amazing natural spot that people don't get to enjoy right now. So just wanted to take a minute to talk about the public or the whole process that we went through. And I know a lot of you participated in the outreach. A lot of you were on the committee or on council. But initially what we did is we gathered all of the prior community input. You had started this conversation about the riverfront a very long time ago. And so we gathered all that information and we started to try to understand it. And then we went out into the community and we started meeting and getting input. We developed three concepts. I'll take a little bit of time to talk about those and the important features of them that assisted us in decision making. Once we got those three concepts, we went to council and we had a few more meetings and we thought we understood the feedback. So we prepared a fourth design, concept D. And I'll talk about that too. From there, we continued with the outreach and then to where we are today. We've had a community survey. I'll share the results with you. All of that input led us here today to what we're calling the concept E or the final concept. So along the way, we met with lots of people. When we met back in May, I think we presented the three initial concepts to city council and at that time, they asked us to continue work but to really meet with more groups, more user groups. And so you can see that we really picked up and we started meeting with all of the interested parties. So we met with the people that take care of the park. We met with the fire and safety people. We met with the train people, the river folks. So we tried to reach out to as many people as possible to get feedback and input on the design process. We had a community event at the farmers market which was a blast. We talked to a lot of people. And then we also had a couple of public workshops as well. The latest one was back in July. So when we started the project, we started with three kind of main approaches to the park design. We thought we knew what people kind of wanted. We had a big laundry list but obviously we needed to prioritize what would fit on the site. And there were different ways that we could integrate the bike path. There were different levels of accessibility. There was the balancing act between is this more of a river park or is it more of a park at the top of the river? And so these three initial concepts were really asking those questions by way of design. So in concept A, the strategy here was to really create more of a larger public space at the top of the park. And so the bike path winds through it. There's a big performance area. But what that does is that compresses the slope. And so the access down to the river was limited because there was less space to get people down there. The second concept, concept B, was really focused on integrating the park experience fully with the bike path. And so in this design, we had a slightly smaller park space at the top of the park with a big central focal point and some cultural elements but the idea was that we integrated traffic calming and moved bicycles right into the park space. And then this one also integrated an accessible ramp to provide accessibility all the way down to a fishing platform about four feet above the water level. And then finally on the third idea, the concept C, the focus there is okay, what if we had the bike path that segregated the two spaces? So West of the bike path, we had more of a seating area at a place for people to come eat their lunch maybe, but it's more of a passive rec space that had more to do with the bike path. And then the other side, the river side became more of a riverine park and we had smaller gathering spaces. We had ADA access all the way down to a fishing platform. And so we had these three concepts that handled the design program in different ways and we were interested to see what the community would tell us about what they wanted, what was their priority. So essentially what we heard from people was wrapped into concept D at the time. And so what we heard from people is, I really like having open space at the top but maybe not so much open space but I really want the small niche spaces. Those small little seating areas at different levels all along the path. People really liked those. They liked the idea that they could find a private space to go sit and have their lunch. We heard from people that we want a boat launch and we want fairly easy access and so we really want you to really think harder about how to get boats down to the riverfront. So with this concept, we established an offloading area and accessible parking space and we oriented that toward a boat launch area. We also tried really hard to get accessibility all the way down to the riverfront so that you had an accessible path and along the way the niches. So this concept really balanced all those things. And so the next thing we did is we sort of grouped all of these concepts and then we went out into the community and we met with people. This is at the farmer's market and we timed that with a community survey and so this was sort of our launch where we went and talked with people. We had the community survey. We pointed more people to that and this was really helpful to us and the community survey was open most of the summer. We closed it at the end of the summer. We had 112 responses but what we did is we really looked hard at, we had a lot of what's called open answers and so we would say, what would you be most likely to do at the park? And people would answer and then what we did is we went through all the answers and we created this typology of groups of answers, the themes of answers and then we crunched those numbers and so what we found is that most people that were responding to the survey, the common denominator that most people said was a top activity was really just sitting and relaxing at the park. Picnicking and eating was really popular. A lot of people said that they would go and sit and have their lunch but also the idea of using it for recreation so using the bike path, walking, running through the area, that was also really important so we were able to really better understand what was important to people in terms of how they would use their park. When we asked them what's the most important activity or what's the most likely activity, you can see this is the trends of the answers so people sitting and picnicking and walking and just enjoying the river, just sitting and relaxing and enjoying the river was very popular and people said that they would do a lot of that but interestingly that's very passive, those activities. We also wanted to know, well would you be likely to do active recreation so would you use this park to swim or kayak and a resounding percentage of people said yes, they would. 69% of the survey respondents said that they would recreate actively from the park so they would swim or kayak, fish and we thought that was very interesting so it really told us that we need to create a balance of spaces for people. And then finally, remember the question of we were trying to balance this park spaces when we looked at initial concepts? We floated that as a question and we said, what do you think's the most important kind of balance of uses in the park space and it was rather almost tied when people wanted a larger space down near the river's edge and they also wanted those small niche spaces all along the way so smaller private seating areas and then also more space at the river and this just shows the trends and the answers for the question what elements of the concept designs were most important. As you can see, the river was high and spaces near the river, park spaces, the designs, people had favorite design approaches but essentially it was river and river access and park space. And then finally we asked what design people liked best and fairly overwhelmingly people chose D which told us that we had listened when we were talking with people and trying to integrate comments into a refined design which we were calling concept D. So those were the results of the survey and the outreach and what we did after that is we refined the design program. Again, we knew that the refined design had to kind of have that balance of spaces. River access was really important but it needed to be balanced with the other uses that people wanted there. People really liked the idea of the bike path being somewhat integrated but they didn't want activity or movement on the bike path to be impeded in any way by a park element or feature. And accessibility, we heard from a lot of people make it accessible. We wanna get people all the way down to the river. We also heard that in river recreation was really important and passive recreation, seating, picnicking, eating, reading, watching. The balancing of those activities was part of our refined design program.  We heard from a lot of people that they wanted a softer park environment, something with native vegetation, more grass but at the same time, people did care a lot about the flood resilience of the design solution and the water quality. We also heard from fire and police safety that the integration of visibility into spaces and not creating hidden spaces was really important to them. They needed to have their eyes on spaces. And so we took all of these into consideration as we refined the design. So the final concept is really, this picture really shows it's prominence right at the confluence. So it's got the main stem of the Winooski and the North Branch. And the point of land is at the confluence and that's where most of the park features are. That's where the wide point of the park space at the river is. And as the river gets improved and restored and the health comes back, activity in the river will relate to the features and the access that is provided through this space. So just kind of a large overview of this concept and certainly we can answer questions but the crux of what this design does is it balances that upper open space. So it provides an open green space at the top but it's oriented and shifted the seating. It's got tiered bench seating like steps. Like you'd sit on the steps of city hall. That's the kind of seating. So people can come and sit and have their lunch and look out into the river. They've got a berm with plantings at their back. We retained the easy boat launch access and accessible parking. We've integrated as with concept D an opportunity for people that are biking through the area to park their bikes or fill up their water bottles and really enjoy the park space. We provided a little performance area. One thing that we heard from people is that we know that the upper area is not that big but we'd really like to have some kind of performance shelter so that maybe it's temporary but we might wanna have it covered so that if we wanna have a band or there's an event that we have a covering and so the orange on the plan just shows where that performance space may be. It's an informal area but you can put up a canopy and the idea is that you could have small events at the top of the park there. This integrates small niche spaces and overlooks throughout with big boulders set in for seating or set into the sides of the wall so that throughout there's opportunities to just sit and enjoy the environment. There's an accessible path which the entrance is at the top of the site on the right just to the top of the temporary canopy and that's where you would access the path and then you wind down and you come into a series of small niche spaces and if you keep winding down around you've got these small planting areas with native plants and trees and you can walk all the way down to the river so we've tried to hit an elevation that's slightly above the normal river line and we've also provided an area for the kayak and boat launches to get into their boats from the offload area and again the larger space is at the water's edge and we've integrated some of those natural features so to get a better sense of what this looks like we cut a couple of section elevations so that dashed line at the lower image kind of we cut the site and it's you're looking to the east in this picture so if you start at the top of the cut line that's to the left and you can see what you're looking at is a small planted berm that provides some separation from the railroad corridor and then the long area is that bench seating that I was talking about the tiered seating and then boulders in a planted space provides a little bit of separation from the shared use path and we're showing here the there's a small little waterfill station and the shared use path which is bordered by a retaining wall and this is an area where if you figure that you're entering at the top of the site by the time you get down to where this cut line is on the path you're going down quite a bit in grade and so the height of the wall is actually the highest at this point so you can see that we've used boulders to soften the wall and you can see the if you look at the dashed line that's the existing grade so you can see that in order to make more space at the river's edge we're actually cutting into the slope so the idea is that we've got this tiered pathway that winds down through and that's stabilized by big boulders and plantings until you get down to the river and then there's a wider open space with seating opportunities and water access areas to fish and areas to kind of pull up on your kayak and then just one more cut through this is looking through the actual thickest part of the site and so the upper left of the section line if you look at this is where your temporary parking and your unloading zone is for the kayaks and again you can see the cut line you're seeing part of the berm that provides some privacy and separation for the park seating and then the open lawn area and the path that winds through that area and then you start your terracing down to the water's edge so just a little bit about materials and stabilization we would envision and the next phase of design really starts to look at the technical details and it would start specifying materials but a couple of considerations for materials is we were told that natural materials is what people want and so to the extent possible we've integrated lawn at the top of the site but we've inset large flagstones to provide accessibility accessible access to some of the upper areas and to the path and then I'll show you some examples of different sites that have been stabilized that are very similar in use just so you can get a feel of what those materials might feel like but we did hear loud and clear from people that they wanted a natural feeling to the park so we're at about a 10% level of design right now conceptual design is really about establishing the vision of what's possible, what the community would like to see the next phase of design is gonna get a lot more detailed the other thing to know is that the site is in flux and in transition and so in the middle of us doing this project there were a lot of things that were happening contextually so the new transportation center was being built and the new bike path or the shared use path was being built and so there were a lot of conditions that once they're built would have to be verified for elevations and exactly where they ended up sometimes when sites are constructed they end up a little different than the design drawings so it's just to say that this conceptual design is at about a 10% level of design but we thought it was important to show you the breakdown of what the costs are likely to be you can see that the bigger costs really have to do with the amount of earthwork and the terracing and the stabilization of materials and the amenities would also be fairly expensive if you want to have nice amenities that feel reflective of your community things like your overhead shelters or some of your lighting or some of the seating if we went with some normal bench seating so the breakdown really is the most expensive cost is the earthwork and the terracing and the stabilizing materials I wanted to end on just the design piece with showing you what's possible in the long range and these are river parks that were established the Confluence Park in Denver the Truckee River Park in Reno and also show you the Brooklyn Bridge Park all of these parks are fairly recent parks they were all installed fairly recently and as you can see the treatment of these parks down in the flood zone uses a different varieties of materials so there's concrete is utilized, big boulders are stabilized with mortar or concrete and so when you get a park feature like this that's going to be flooded those are the types of materials and as you can see here those materials they feel at home in the park and you can see that they provide the access down to the river so these are long term visions as your river gets restored and as your recreational opportunities get improved by that restoration this could be the future vision for Confluence River Park and here's just another view and I wanted to show you if you look at the lower right corner the reason I want to show you this is that's a material that's like a stabilized granite shavings and it has a look and a feel of a stone dust surface but it's a hardness of concrete and so there's a lot of new exciting materials and treatments out there that would give you that natural feel without having to go to concrete for stability and so these are the things that as the project goes forward technical design and more information those are the decisions that the community will weigh in but there's a lot of choice of materials and developing the detailing and you can see that upper left hand side is the kayak launch at the Brooklyn River Park so lots of exciting stuff and with that I just want to hand it to Steve so he can sort of wrap up the big picture for you. So I think one of the things that we learned going through this whole community process was we were really focused on the Confluence Park area and that relatively small area with a lot of kind of intensive design thinking but as we talked to the community and learned I think about ourselves about what's the context that this park is going to be located in and so there's it's an urban area so there's all the kind of like aspects of urban life that get focused on this particular park but it's also in a river setting where you have the North Branch and the main stem coming together and it really got us thinking about the rivers themselves and how this project could kind of like energize some thinking about restoring the rivers and restoring water quality and really thinking a lot about the flood aspects of this the flood resilience aspects so part of this end of this presentation is kind of like looking forward to the larger context of the rivers in Montpelier and we've heard from a lot of people about you know having a canoe access or kayak access site here really implies you can get to that place from other access points along the river so we know that there's other opportunities upriver downriver for kind of using this central collection spot as a place to like connect for other river access areas the whole idea of bringing people down to the river really includes the responsibility of that river being clean enough for people to be there so really focusing and working with other groups like Defensive Manuski on you know what is the existing water quality what do we need to do to get it to the level where you can feel comfortable in being down by the river and in the river itself so I think from our organizational point of view it's really exciting to have this conference park kind of energize this larger conversation about river restoration on a larger scale in Montpelier so that's kind of like the next challenge is get the park built and then let's have this be a great river for that park to be part of so so that's essentially it and you know if you have questions or comments you can welcome them and I think it would be best if if you could go to the microphone up there with your question or comment something that's perfect thank you and wake up okay one if we're going to have a canoe kayak what have you access I think along with that we need some sort of a portage to get over the dam just next to Shaw's a safe portage area and that will give you access to the river further up another thing that I'm kind of I'm ambivalent about is your fishing area it doesn't look handy capped accessible because it's a bunch of steps I would rather see maybe a ramp with landing for people to fish off of the landing which would be a lot safer because you wouldn't have people flinging lures over the heads of other people and things like that and the third thing I want to comment is the concept of native plants native plants being different things to different people and I would like to see the planting list come from plants native to Washington County if you need a way to figure that out you can go to Go Botany from the Wildflower Conservancy formed with the New England Wildflower Society and they have maps that show you what's you look up the plan type it into the search and that'll show you what is native Thank you, great. Thank you, thank you and I just want to those are all great points and to your point about the portage this site is actually just below that dam so the portage wouldn't be an issue for putting in at this site you could actually put in at the Confluence River Park and paddle to the next dam is in Middlesex I believe on the Winooski however, good point and in the broader thinking about rivers in Montpelier that dam is certainly a consideration if we wanted to have people be able to access the full stretch of the Winooski If you went upstream you've got trouble also if you went upstream in the North Branch there's a little dam there just above the railroad bridge and something might be done with that too for a portage although it's not nearly so dangerous from the Parks Department first of all, thank you so much for that I have too many questions maybe you can and I apologize I know I've had many questions throughout the process and I'm always thinking more what would be the what's the scope of our discussion tonight as far as what would be the most hopeful questions I mean are there any changes to be made to this or is it things to inform City Council about tomorrow night or questions or ads? Yeah Well I would say from a design standpoint it's never too late to give comments because the design is only a 10% and so your comments get recorded and then when the design gets picked back up those can get integrated and refined as the design moves ahead so I would say share them and we'll make sure that we they get integrated in the next phase of design All right I guess my first question is what has the data on the river shown as far as for our lowest point here is it five to eight with your river gauges how does it correspond to that and I'll just keep it to that with a little niche which is I'm curious about what you found or what you know about what we might be facing year to year at that lowest level as far as is there gonna be a layer of sludge oh look at that is there gonna be a layer of sludge to clean up or what's the process? So work in progress river was at 513, 512 this spring pretty high probably semi-annual type flooding occurred however in June we were at 508, 46 so the actual elevation of that platform is proposed right now I have to say these are all approximate so we do believe that the bottom layer will get inundated annually both by ice and by a flood and the balance is do we connect people to the river do we leave them five feet above the river and talking with Parks Conservation Commission the sentiment is that we'd rather have some mucking out to do periodically and have robust materials down there that the thing's not gonna shift but we're getting connected to the river because the base of the river if you see 75506 we're probably at 505 now like the river's way down well prior to this rain so we're three and a half feet above the river but if we start to design for 510 11 we're gonna be like six six, seven feet above the river pretty disconnected now you see in the concept there are stairs down and that accommodates and there are some bolder features on the edge that may have platforms so they're tiered so you could walk down according to the water level and go down and be connected with the river so this is really a work in progress we got the gauges in after the spring high flows you can see the dates there we're gonna try to get a good handle on the ice level these have been referenced to the elevations on the dams but we're gonna get a surveyor out there and really make sure the gauge elevations are all properly surveyed so we can make sure those numbers in the right column there are exact so good point love to hear your feedback on where to put the bottom because it's either a little more maintenance or a little more connection to the river it's a balance can you tell me for context what the river might be at right now? I would say 505-ish, 506 it's really low well it was right before the spring I mean today, like after though I didn't get out today but I can probably go out tomorrow and tell you like where it is it's coming down because it was a short intense rain on last night so if we're at looks like June 20th, we're at 512 and let's say there's a pretty thick layer of mud that gets deposited on that lower part would we just wait for another flow to flush that out or would that be like people down there with shovels? so we've had some through this public process some ideas have come up have volunteers around the city I mean it's not gonna we don't expect 10 feet of silt in there but it might be a layer so we'd go down and wheelbarrows shovel it out throw it on some gardens probably have some nutrients in it get it out of the floodplain annual maintenance, YCC type crew or let it run and flush I mean there's some options there for maintenance doesn't the thinking was that it's a volunteer level half of an A job that it doesn't require the city to make a big maintenance investment annually if we want to keep it on the lower side that was sort of the thinking I hope you're right and my last question would be just to keep it all within this time frame what I saw in the previous slide about the CSO overflow there is on the three to five year time scale what would the experience of the park be like with the CSO still there right across the river in the North Bridge? well I guess the first thing you're bringing up some great points ice, really high flows, CSO overflow there's gotta be a way to close off the river access while it's not safe to go into the river that said we've been looking at the water quality the overflows are not very frequent but if they did you would maybe smell and see some things you don't wanna see in a river and you wouldn't be able to swim in it not shown here there's some E. coli issues on the North Branch that would that are not safe for contact friends of the Manuski is doing some some recon work to try to identify the sources of that so I think as Steve mentioned and Riccarda and Regina like the park sets the stage there's still work to do to really enable that contact and creation down in there I'm Sulebar and I live up the hill the first thing I noticed when I walked in the room is I was disappointed in how few people were here I just think this is such an exciting project next I'm so glad to hear your consideration of the rest of the riverfront because it's hideous you know the the decrepitating remains of industrial development that some of which are probably over a hundred years old or maybe more I just love to see it just expand all the way up you've addressed some of the things that I had concerns about one is the water quality I mean I'm not sure I want to go swimming in there or boating if it's level to tip over you know you know I think that's an important an important thing you said a little bit about flooding but my concern is a lot of what I see looks like riprap and I'm concerned about the riparian science behind that and whether we are doing damage either at the confluence or downstream in terms of a rigid unmovable bank so I am concerned about that and I'd like to see something I'd like to see that address I've watched one of the tributaries up in Worcester back and forth deposit tons of river rocks on my son's yard so I would like to see you address those issues appreciating what it does when you constrict the channel what it does downstream did I have something else oh yeah the pictures you know that the concept drawings of the park and so forth and down to the riverfront oh no it looks pretty formal and artificial to me I'd like to see a riverfront that looks more natural I appreciate you probably using some I don't know kind of icons sort of things to plug in there and so forth but I'd like to see it look a little more natural and I think that goes along with my concern about the rigidity of the bank thank you thank you yeah I just wanted to maybe comment about the water quality transition and one thing that I think was really encouraging to us was to look at these other cities that have gone through this transition I mean you know in downtown Denver you know you can get in the water down there and so I think that's you know a hopeful sign that you can make these turnarounds for these rivers that you know historically have been used as dumping grounds it's going to take work it's going to take you know a while to achieve that but if there's any place to me in the state of Vermont we should be able to do this it's in the city capital in the capital city so I think that rallying the interest and the funding to really you know address the water quality challenges is something that is very feasible here I mean other places have done it and I think we can do it here too so I'm not sure I'd want to get in the water under the Brooklyn Bridge yeah well but it is pretty amazing there's many many other urban areas that have it's amazing what they've done to recreate that kind of high quality experience in the river so we're hopeful I guess I might add something on the rigidity of the banks because in Montpelier we're unfortunately stuck a bit you know with the development you know the the history has really led to more and more stuff closer and closer to the river so creating a soft spot at this corner would really actually create a hazard to a lot of the stuff including the new one-teller development and I mean there's a giant flood of wall and a gas station across the river but all that said so that that just implies we can't do a full naturalistic design like at your son's property where the river can spill and move no they got rip-wrap all the way so not naturalistically that but we can we can imitate nature so it may be rigid to a flood or an ice scouring event on the corner but there can be plants that belong on a riverside planted all around those rocks we call them joint plantings it's not that will actually serve riparian function for invertebrates and birds and things seeking cover and shade the water a little bit there's very little shading all the rip-wrap along and the walls along the rivers that you're seeing on the screen here heat the water and impair it for for all the aquatic life so you know you're right the more we can vegetate even if it's rigid and we vegetate it and cover things it's a step in the right direction and we're going to try to make a first step in the right direction on this corner but it's not going to be I just want to be clear it can't be naturally functioning because this will migrate and move into the railroad and everything else good evening I'm Richard Amore I'm served on the advisory committee so I'm very familiar with the project but I just want to say thanks for VRC the river conservancy to leading this project the design team for actually making it so it's a challenging site lots of things already in play with a full to use path topography it's a really small site to be able to provide ADA access down to the river so commend you on the design commend you on the outreach you did with the community and the only question I have when can we build this thing thank you I have a couple questions I was really grateful that you had in there the existing slope like with those cut-throughs so I could see sort of where the natural bank exists currently I was sort of shocked just in looking at this design I thought well surely this would include like adding material out into the river when the river is low because there's no way you know it goes out that far but I suppose if you're if you're removing some mass from the bank that it's the that space is really there which is pretty exciting and it's it's just shocking to me like how much we can do with the space that is there even though it is small it's like there's a lot going on there and I think that's pretty exciting one of the things that I I was really grateful for the question about the sludge or potential maintenance and sort of in that same vein I mean we we pave a lot of things in Montpiler and we repave a lot of things and so just thinking about the materials that we're going to be using and I know that's not the level of the design that we're at right now but you know I think about this as a space that's gonna probably experience some significant freeze thaw temperatures and so are there examples of places with freeze thaw cycles like ours that have infrastructure like this in or near the river that has lasted or if not like what is that maintenance like to maintain it and maybe that's the you know the VYCC sort of thing where they would you know come and if we need to move boulders around fine but does it mean like repouring cement for stairs or or what I don't know and and so is it safe to assume that like that just as an example well actually all of it like so the pathways in that lowest level there the like what people would be walking on is more or less concrete or something like it like a poured sort of substance I think that those are all the questions that we've been grappling with too and what I would say is that what we've been thinking about is thinking where the flood waters are likely to be those areas would be we'd have to stabilize those in some way so it would have you know a harder material so whether it's flagstone set in and mortared in place or whether it's a pervious concrete or something like that that's that's kind of the next phase of design that we start grappling with that we start calling communities that have their riverfront parks like this and saying what are you using and how's that lasted there are a lot of the park examples that we showed are all relatively new but they've been in place for a few years and so I feel that we've been thinking about it especially down in the flood zone we know that that needs to be resilient to floods freeze and thaw as you move up in the park that's going to get a lot of activity so we know that you know using like something like what I was talking about the stabilized granite shavings or something similar to that that has a more natural feel but it's going to be stable enough they're using that material at the Brooklyn River Park they're using it at botanical gardens and so it's a still a relatively new product but it has a lot of hope now how far down we can take that material is a question but those are all things that we really really in the next phase of design that's going to be what we're really trying to figure out what are those details you know the other thing I think you commented on it looks like a lot of riprap and that's not what we want to do we we want it to feel more intentional so we want we want to use like big rounded boulders and in river stones and so part of the next phase of design is figuring out how to fit those pieces together and how to detail that so that it has the outcome and the look and the feel and the longevity of all the things that that we're trying to achieve in in park and now obviously that's going to be more expensive than just dumping riprap over a bank but we all know what that looks like and nobody wants that in this park so to your point I think that's going to be one of the major major things in the next phase of designs is really really doing a deep dive and looking at that John Snow with the tree board among other things and it looks to me like you're really talking about a major construction of the entire site not just adjusting things or putting things in but you're really building it from the ground up literally right is that right yeah there's a lot of excavation happen there yeah and in that process let's make sure we consider the trees because it's really easy to draw these trees on here they look great but you know to get a tree to grow successfully and stay growing is a whole other thing and it can be done but it's it is significant investment Paige Gertner I'm at the conservation commission and I'm wondering it's not a huge area but I'm wondering about stormwater management and what happens with all that concrete if there's totally impervious surfaces with water coming off the Taylor Street parking lot and the bike path and that whole area I don't know how that's designated but I'm assuming that's going to be considered as well yes okay yes is there because Taylor Street supposed to have a lot of mitigation right stormwater management along the site okay so yeah is it possible to have pervious surfaces down by the river or would that just wash away in a flood situation I think these are all the questions that will get addressed in the technical design but certainly your point yeah certainly your point about you know integrating stormwater absolutely especially where we're creating the ramp system the accessible path that could be a nightmare so yeah we definitely we need to consider that and that will be considered in the next phase of design during technical development I actually with that one exception I really like the way you did the accessible path I think that was because it's pretty creative getting it to go all the way around because otherwise it would have been like this it's nice so something else to think about thank you thanks Paige one thing we had talked about above the higher flood levels of possibly doing some pervious along the path to sort of as the crown on the bike path sheds onto the site then maybe that will infiltrate on the first layer but that would be well above the flood levels and then we transition it possibly to a more rigid surface on the bottom where we know the ice level is going to be more frequent flooding so that's kind of the thinking we have right now is actually having different surfaces for the similar elements but guy based on the results of the water level study so storm water treatment on the top flood resiliency on the bottom and there will be yeah and you know along both your couple comments there is quite a bit of fill removal here so we're going to create some flood storage in this area if two major rivers coming together so it's not going to appreciably change the flood levels per se but you're going to not further and croach out into this system which is exactly what we we really can't do that here there's too much stuff going on in the river so it's a step in the right direction for sure. Hi Gary Holloway I'm also on the the steering committee I just want to say you know thanks to the river conservancy for taking the lead on this project you know and getting support from the city but really being the lead and driving this kind of project forward you know it has a real impact on you know the community and potential economic you know opportunities you know this is this is not an easy site to work with it makes it look so big when you look at it in these pictures and maps and then when you actually go there and realize how small the space is the fact that you were able to incorporate so many elements into such a small space is really impressive so I just want to say you know thank you for having a really thoughtful approach and you know the level of public engagement throughout the entire process has been tremendous so I feel like there's been a lot of input from a lot of different people I agree with John it's you know before you plant a tree talk to this guy you know and it's you know living in Vermont you know no matter what material we choose you know we continue to pave streets with asphalt and it just doesn't work in this environment but yet we continue to do the same thing over and over again so looking at a park I appreciate the comments in terms of you know maintenance and looking out how we've been kind of trying to create something that's durable you know for the long term one question I did have was in regards to the access drop-off area kayak area because I've been I remember this came up in the past that you know that's really one Taylor's parking space you know will will there be access into that area as it's shown on here which is a question that has not been answered yet okay yeah remains yeah and as far as whether it would be allowable for boaters to drive in you know with their boat on their car drop it off and then drive out that ingress egress of the transit center it not still do to be determined and permission has not been granted yeah I think there's other ways but this is curious so anyway thank you all just so you know we're aware of that question but also ourselves don't have an answer in some of the great so it's all great right off yes thank you you need more care yeah I'm Michelle Braun from Friends of the Winooski River this is a super exciting project I'm really glad that you guys are doing it and I'm really glad that you brought up water quality I just want to say is that organization responsible for monitoring the water quality in the north branch it has never yet met the standards for swimming we are we've been working for years to eliminate source by source by source as we discover them then we continue to work on that to be clear we started working on this before I had children and my daughter's going to college it might be a little while before but I hope that with this as inspiration the community will get behind that effort so yeah thank you Michelle, could I ask you what about water quality in the Winooski River is that swimming? no if if you want to well you know it does not meet the EPA standard for E. coli a good place to swim that almost always meets the standard is at the north branch nature center but not within a day or two of heavy rain but in clear weather the nature center is the place to it it changes over the has changed over the years essentially from coming street down the the way the standard works is it's essentially a risk level so your risk your likelihood of becoming sick from ingesting the water increases as you move downstream it spikes really high right under state street where we think there might be a source there but you can check there are water quality reports on the friends of the Winooski River website with really detailed data for yours and these guys have been checking that out for the question and I also think this is a great project I don't get wrong but if you there's a plume of stuff under the Taylor street area right or has that all been remunerated the the the the the the the the the contamination of the soil yeah are you going to run into any of that in the excavation process we believe we will that's why that the project is that's reflected in the range of the project okay okay okay so and just to let you know we have met with the people who have dealt with the soil remediation aspects of the one Taylor project of which little piece is connected to it so we sort of have a rough outline of what needs to happen to this the Crack of Action action plan the plan for the site in terms of the remediation that's sort of on the radar okay because it's a question that I've asked the city on a couple of occasions and haven't ever gotten an answer but if you plant trees and maybe it won't impact maybe you'll do full remediation or whatever but if you plant trees and they go down the roots go down into this contamination does that contaminate the leaves that so slightly fall into river or anything else so how does that work depends on on the contaminants in the area some will stay on the soil some might move into the trees this is sort of down the road but you know if it's a revegetation we may over excavate remove the contaminated soil put in clean soil and then plant in that there's a bunch of different ways depending on what an environmental you know quality professional will say is is there and and how and what the level of contact is with people what the vegetation is and all that so that's a part of the remediation that will take place on this site you know as part of the park design I don't know if anyone else has questions but if you do I'm just going to open that up one more time anyone else have questions great thank you again this site in my mind is somehow the center of the city and I know it's small but it's really important and I'm really excited that that we're having this conversation that thank you for all of your work thank you for being here and I look forward to the next step so thanks thank you


7. Things ESL teachers should avoid saying to students. ESL classroom is quite a sensitive place. Students can quickly get excited about what they learn if a teacher finds the right key to their motivation. However, sometimes ESL teachers may unconsciously use words that could hurt students intensely. Read on for the top 7 things that ESL teachers should avoid saying to students to make sure your students feel comfortable. 1. You are not good at English. This phrase is very unpleasant to hear and irritates many students. Nobody wants to hear that they are bad at something when they spend a lot of time on it. Hearing such words from their teacher is even more frustrating. Instead of demotivating your student with this phrase, try saying if you keep learning consistently, you will master the four language skills and become proficient in English to communicate in different situations. We all know there are different types of learners in every classroom, and it's essential to be patient with all of them. A teacher should never favor students over others. 2. Stop. You're doing it all wrong. Such a reaction is common in ESL kindergartens. It's quite frustrating to explain the same thing many times and losing one's temper is easy. However, it can hurt a child so deep that they may even get real trauma, and become unwilling to make attempts to continue their studies in the future. The problem is that you can get involved in an unpleasant situation with the parents of your students and school management in such cases. Simply put, you'll look unprofessional and ruin your rapport with a student. 3. Good job. You tried your best. It may sound positive. However, this phrase means that you accept a less than optimal performance from your students. Do not encourage your ESL or EFL students to stick to average. Always try to motivate them to strive for excellence by asking relevant questions. For example, you can ask, so, what can you do next to grow your understanding even further? 4. Don't give up. Keep trying and you'll understand English grammar. You need to pay attention to the strategies your students use when doing different tasks. They may confirm that they understand everything during the lesson study phase, but when it comes to practice, the students might put in a lot of effort into something that won't work because they misunderstood the rules. If you say such a phrase of encouragement, it won't work either because the problem is actually in your explanation. Ensure your directions are clear, provide learners with as many examples as possible, and always ask for feedback. 5. Have you noticed your mistake? This question isn't that bad in and of itself. However, it might confuse students and they might get upset. If your student made a mistake, don't correct them straight away, and at the same time, don't be too pushy when it comes to self-correction. Try to guide them through their work, show correct examples, and help to find the problem naturally without even stating there is one. You'll get impressed by how students react when correcting their mistakes on their own. Another idea would be to ask for a peer check. If you teach a group, encourage students to exchange their works and check their mate's work and vice versa. 6. It's okay if you can't do it. Again, if you use such language in your classroom, it means you encourage a fixed mindset. You might be bothered and frustrated to explain one point many times, but that's how it works. Repetition in TEFL is an actual teaching approach. Simultaneously, students also tend to say, I just can't do it. Keep persistent and encourage them to train their language skill. If it doesn't work this time, get back to the same topic next lesson and be patient in explaining everything once again. 7. Someone is better than you in English. Parents are often using this phrase. They tend to compare their child's results with other children. Unfortunately, teachers do it too. When students hear that they do worse than someone else, their motivation worsens and they feel frustrated to continue their work. Never use such language with any age group to avoid this kind of situation. Do you want to teach English abroad? Take a TEFL course. To conclude, in the ESL classroom, there's no place for a fixed mindset. To help students grow as motivated and encouraged learners, you need to make sure your actions don't hurt anybody, and you use the correct language at every stage of your lesson.


So I got a great question and it's about body work in healing and the question is Why is the body so important in self-realization? so I've heard that to identify with my body is a problem and I've been doing a lot of body work But ultimately if I'm not my body, then why is body work important? So the ultimate self-realization is to know the true self is to know who you are and There's a lot of ways you can conceptualize that. It's the ultimate capital s true self Who is that? There's also what is the authentic personality that I have Which is another way to think about it, but the the big capital s self that people talk about is this awareness this sense of What is observing and what is aware of all these changes Maybe changes in the body over time changes in the rules that I occupy in my life that maybe I identify with falsely So why is the body so important in self-realization if we're not a body? Ultimately, why is it so important? Well, the way I would say this is answer this is If we don't go through the body Which is to go in and start doing body work and to feel into the body and all that entails the whole process of if it is a it's not really a process even but self-realization becomes a very intellectual endeavor you could say and You can't achieve self-realization or self-actualization in a book. You can't read about it. It's not conceptual It has to be experienced Directly has to be known so The body is particularly important in this because okay, ultimately, maybe I'm not a body. That's what we have to find out for ourselves But In self-realization there has to be a point where we become less focused on the external world and all our roles and things we identify with and Doing and being busy and all these external things and we start to look inward more to the source of all these experiences and It's in this going in That we will encounter the body So you could say the body is important because the body is the the passageway Through which we do find the self capital S self And the healing in that is important because you know, it's hard to come to Be in that observer or to the rest in that awareness When the body screams at us, you know traumas or any kind of emotion I've talked about many Almost did the process that we go through there. There's numbness. There's fear. There's there's guilt. There's sense of abandonment all those emotions. We will encounter those and those can be very very active and Of course another thing that we discover when we turn our external our focus from the external to the internal is how busy this can be How busy the mind can be preoccupied planning past future to do lists everything else so Those are really two of the things you could say that we we start to watch the thinking mind more Also, when we turn inward but one of the things is to bring our awareness back in here It's to become aware of what's more intimate. What's closer to home and the body is very close to home so Really what we're talking about here is the message for today is If it's not through the body that we're going to find self realization or find the self It can only be true the mind and the mind Can only conceptualize it can't experience it first-hand it can't really know anything it can think about it It can have opinions about it. It can theorize about it It can even think it knows What the self is but until the self is contacted directly which only happens through the body That's all that'll ever be it'll only ever be intellectual Now that's not to say that the mind isn't very important in healing the mind To to question the mind to observe and watch the mind is a very very important part of this Very important part. I typically think of working with the mind is more of a masculine modality and working with the body is more of Feminine modality. That's not male and female now. That's masculine and feminine So both of those modalities are very very important and have a place very important place and not one is not more important than the other But ultimately the body is Something that has to be taken into consideration So it is through the body i'm working with the body and feeling into the body feeling the sensations feeling the emotions all those things And i mean all the bad ones We we like you know, we're looking at our fears. We're looking at our There's something wrong with me that effective story coming into contact with those Feeling them fully. That's one of the ways that we will actually let them pass and go deeper And then we rest in a place where there is no conflict emotionally and what dawns on us is this stillness or this Presence That is watching everything and has always been watching everything and been aware of everything And it's true that peace that we actually come peace in the body that we become we become aware of the real self so I guess what i'm advocating for here is Work on the mind work on the body Because it's true doing this that there are big goal of self realization Finding the self experiencing the self knowing the self will be achieved So i hope that answers that question and uh You know keep looking inward Engage with life fully Step into a role that's necessary But take that time to step back into Self intimacy to look into me into the self and you will find the self But it's found through the body not by denial of the body