Hey everybody, welcome back to the program. Today I'm talking with Stefan Kinsella. Stefan is a legal scholar and a former patent attorney, and he wrote a book a few years ago called Against Intellectual Property, and he actually believes that patents on pharmaceutical drugs and even genes from companies like Monsanto causes a real big problem and actually stifles scientific innovation. So today Stefan and I talk a little bit about his book and some of the issues related to patents and copyrights and science. Thanks so much for listening. Stick around. Stefan Kinsella, thank you so much for joining me today. Glad to be here. So most of my audience probably isn't familiar with your work, so give people a little bit of background on what you do, what your expertise is, and then just a brief introduction to your book Against Intellectual Property. Sure. I'm a patent attorney and intellectual property attorney. I've been doing this for 20 plus years and have a technical background. So most of my work I do high-tech laser type patents and things like that. So I've had a lot of experience with the intellectual property field, copyrights, trade marks, and mostly patents over the last 20 plus years. I also have been interested in Austrian economics and free market economics and libertarian free market type theory for about the same amount of time. And so my interest sort of dovetailed on this and as a patent attorney and as an attorney and as a libertarian, naturally the topic of the intellectual property rights arose in my mind as to whether this is a legitimate type of law, a legitimate type of right, whether we can justify these rights under free market or individualist principles. Whether patent and copyright law in particular are compatible with a free market system and a system of liberty and property rights. That we tend to favor as Westerners and as libertarians. And you know, the answers I had seen or the arguments I had read, like from Ayn Rand and others, which were pro patent and copyright early in my education never satisfied me. So I kind of assumed that patent and copyright were legitimate, have a place in our system, but that the arguments weren't quite satisfying and maybe there were better arguments. And I searched for them and searched for them and I couldn't find any. But they all seem to have problems.  Why wouldn't they last forever if they're real property rights or if they're not going to last forever? Why would they last those amount of years? Why not 10 years for patents instead of 17? Why not 50 years? How do we know what the right number is? And so I figured, well, I'm going to be a patent lawyer and I'm a libertarian and I write on that area so maybe I can figure it out. So I started trying to figure it out myself and I never could find a good... I kept running up against the wall. You know, every argument I came up with failed, failed, failed. And then I finally realized the reason I was having trouble justifying this was because it's actually completely contrary to property rights. And I was trying to justify something that can't be justified. I was trying to justify the unjustifiable. So I came to the conclusion over 20 years ago that patent and copyright law are complete aberrations and complete abominations, you could say. They do nothing but harm and damage. They have no place in a pre-market system. They violate property rights.  They're very dangerous. They reduce innovation. They harm the human race, greatly, I believe, by slowing down innovation and the wealth that would have come along with technological developments that patent law has stifled. So I'm a complete opponent of patent and copyright law even though I've practiced it in my legal career for the last 20 plus years. Well, let's get into some of the details. So you said there's a lot of harm caused by these kinds of laws. And I've had a number of experts on the show who work in agriculture and biotechnology and despite having no problem with a market system or even biotechnology in general, they're very skeptical of companies like Monsanto patenting the plants that they develop or if they discover a gene that they can put into a plant that makes it resistant to disease. They're very, very skeptical of the results of that. So is there a history, just more broadly, is there a history of big companies using copyright laws and patent laws to keep competition out of the market and try to control the space that they're in? Well, absolutely. And look, I'm a libertarian. I'm a capitalist. I'm a free market advocate. I don't have a problem with corporations or other forms of business organization or with large companies. Whatever emerges on the free market is fine. But you do tend to find that the larger, more established, entrenched industries and larger firms, they tend to take advantage of whatever laws are available and they tend to lobby for the extension of the laws that benefit them. So, you know, just like Walmart is in favor of increasing the minimum wage because they already pay above the minimum wage and the minimum wage doesn't hurt them if it gets raised. It hurts their competitors who are trying to compete with them. You know, so everyone thinks that the minimum wage is for the little guy that really you have large companies in favor of it. You have lots of examples. Gabriel Calco, Murray Rothbard have written about this. You'll hear the mythologies put out there that patent and copyright are for the little guy, right? The small inventor or the sole artist. And these are just the result of propaganda spread by people who have an entrenched interest in the copyright and patent industries, which would either be the government agencies that promote it and they have the copyright. Copyright and the patent offices or the companies that depend upon this, which would be in the case of copyright, the publishing industry themselves, right? And the producers and the studios themselves, rather than the individual artists who, in most cases, don't benefit that much at all. But they're just stuck into this system where you have to have a publisher and you have to sell all your rights, your books and things like that. Thankfully, that's changing in recent decades with technology, which is helping to finally overcome some of the strangling effects of this. And in the field of patents, what you have is you have larger companies that will acquire massive war chests of patents because they can afford to do so because they're the entrenched incumbents already in an area. And then so they use their early advantage and their large or early large size to fund the acquisition of these patent monopolies, which they can use to stop competition. And it helps entrench their monopolistic position and it leads to sort of a cartel-like system or oligopoly system. So for example, in the smartphone industry, you have a few major smartphone makers, you know, Samsung and Apple and people like that. And they'll fight each other using their patent war chests and they'll each spend millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars on patent attorneys like me defending, fighting each other in court. And then they'll finally make a settlement, you know, they can afford to defend, they can afford to sue millions of dollars to file these lawsuits and to defend them. And then they make a settlement and they one agrees to pay the other royalty or whatever. And then the price is passed on to the consumer and then the companies can sit back on their laurels and they don't have to innovate as much because they're protected from competition from each other. And they can pass the prices on to their customers and their customers can't go to any alternative suppliers because there's only a few. And there's only a few because the small entrants, the upstars, the individual inventors, the very small companies, don't have the resources and the patent war chests to enter the field and fight with these big guys. If they entered into a patent battle with Apple or Samsung, they would be obliterated because they wouldn't have any patents of their own to fight back with. You know, it'd be like America and Russia can threaten each other with nuclear destruction, but smaller countries, they don't have that counter threat. So patents have led to larger companies and entrenched interest and slow down innovation because companies don't have to innovate as much. They can rely upon the patents which protect them from competition. This is the thing that people don't understand because this is not the propaganda that is spread about patents. The idea is that the propaganda is that, you know, the guy in his garage comes up with a new idea, should be able to make a good profit off of it. Or a large company, a pharmaceutical company or a gene company, they spend lots of money developing some new technique or some new drug or identifying some new gene sequence. They need to recoup their investment and therefore the patent help them do that. But all that means is that the patent protects you from competition in the free market for a longer period of time than you would be protected by your natural first mover advantage or your reputation or whatever. So basically, it's basically reducing competition, protecting you from competition. So it's clearly protectionist which is the opposite of a free marketing competition. And this is the reason I wanted to talk to you because even though you as a libertarian are sometimes outside of the quote-unquote mainstream view, your arguments are really similar to arguments I'm hearing from experts in biotechnology. So people that are also concerned about this and one of the points that stuck out to me and I'll link to this so people can read it. I believe he's a patent attorney as well but he says that by letting people patent genes that they discover or they figure out a new way to use the information to fight a disease, they just end up patenting whatever they discover.  And so no one is really doing the kind of work where you check each other's work and you build on what the last person did. And so we're not getting the innovation. So comment a little bit on that as far as you know. I know you're not a biologist. Well, I think that every proponent of the patent system claims that the patent system is a good thing and it's necessary because it gives a so-called incentive to people to innovate, because it protects their innovation from competition for a certain number of years. So it allows you to basically charge a monopoly price for a time on your product. So they believe that it has an effect, right? But if it has an effect, that means that it has a distorting effect or a skewing effect, which is well recognized by economists that when you have a patent system introduced, it's going to distort the market for the types of things that people devote their R&D dollars towards. You're going to tend to push your R&D dollars towards things you can get a patent on instead of things that you can't. So abstract, more abstract techniques that cannot be patented tend to get less funding and the things that can be patented get more funding. So I don't know why anyone thinks that it's a good idea for the federal government to have a system that would distort the natural landscape of where R&D dollars and the attention of scientists would go. So that's one thing. The patent system is a distraction for most engineers and scientists that I deal with because they normally, engineers and companies are trying to solve practical problems to make their products work better. They're not doing it for a patent reward. The companies are doing it for a patent reward. I don't think the patent system does actually incentivize innovation. It's just that when you come up with the inevitable discoveries and innovations that make sense in this industry, you're going to file a patent for it once you've done the work for it because you can use that patent either defensively or offensively like a patent troll later on. So the patent system simply is a distraction for these engineers who then have to meet with lawyers and give them explanations of their inventions and they have to think of them in certain ways. The patent system is basically an artificial, legislated scheme full of concepts that do not map to the natural common law property rights system that we are all used to that evolve naturally right like we have property rights and land and cars and our bodies and we have contractual rights, but the patent system, say, defines a property right in an invention and an invention is some useful technique or design of an apparatus or a machine that can be described in words by a patent lawyer who's sort of a cross between a technical expert and a legal expert and that is new and useful right and non-obvious. So these are all kind of fuzzy terms. So what you have is you have these engineers, you know, interfacing with the lawyers and getting basically monopoly protection sometimes on some of the things they come up with and then this leads to this arbitrary distinction between discovery and invention which really there's no clear cut distinction between them because in the field of science and technology in a sense you could say that all things that function and work or all ways of doing things that function and work in a certain efficient way that's different or better than what's gone in the past is a discovery. If you discover that you can use a certain material with a given property that's better than something that was used in the past, that the discovery is an invention who knows and the patent examiners don't know and the judges don't know and the juries don't know. So it all becomes a word game controlled by the lawyers and the large corporations. One kind of a devil's advocate kind of a question I suppose is that it really is expensive to develop new medical treatments and new medicines and legitimately so I mean to get through FDA clinical trials big drug companies for example have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and maybe a decade or more just so they can get permission to sell their medicine. So is there a legitimate way in your view to protect that investment without putting restrictions on everyone else that might be in that market? Well I think that we have to step back and think about this it's not the function of the law or the function of the government to make it easier for people to come up with business models that work which is what we're getting at when people say I need to recoup my investment I mean every business needs to recoup their investment every business faces competition if they're successful there's of course a desire of every company to not have competition or to stay ahead of competition if possible and that's fine and that's part of the free market process but the way the free market works is you come up with an idea of how to solve consumer desires you put some resources into it you make a forecast about the future you make a judgment with your property you make a gamble you make a bet you put your money where your mouth is and you try to make a profit with a future plan right and you put your money towards it and you know that if you're successful you come up with a new idea that satisfies consumers that's going to be usually visible to the public in some kind of way it's going to send a signal a price signal or some other kind of signal to the market hey what I'm doing works what I'm doing satisfies consumers you know if someone starts selling Model T Fords or they start selling Coca-Cola or anything or movie you know they start showing movies to citizens and they start making a profit the profit is an aberration right from the standard returns on the market it's usually temporary because the profit signal the fact that you're making a profit is broadcast to people and people say hey this guy's selling hamburgers to people McDonald's let's form a Burger King McDonald's might not like having the competition of Burger King Coca-Cola might not like having the competition of Pepsi Ford might not like having the competition of General Motors right but and they don't give away all of their secrets if they can avoid it but they have to give away some of their secrets you know to sell a hamburger everyone knows that you have some kind of company you have employees you have a factory you have a chain of product distribution you have a way of doing it and other people will emulate more or less that model and they'll make some changes trying to out do you that's how competition works on the pre-market that's how society advances so when you have companies that say you know we have to expend dollars to research to discover new genes or to come up with pharmaceutical products it is true that they say it's cost something and it is true that some products are easier for others to emulate and copy than others digital information like CDs and records are easy to copy now other things are hard to copy like a hamburger restaurant might be hard to emulate but you have to also understand that one reason the costs are so high for some of these endeavors like pharmaceuticals the costs are so high because of another federal government agency the FDA right which imposes extreme delays and regulations and costs on companies the raises their costs and so you have these companies come screaming and complaining about the high cost imposed on them by the federal government and the solution is for the federal government to add another regulatory thing called a patent agency which is going to give them a temporary monopoly to allow them to recoup some of the costs that were artificially inflated by the federal government in the first place it might be a better solution to abolish the FDA to lower the cost directly and to abolish other regulations and taxes right which would lower the cost on these companies and then you wouldn't have to give them a temporary monopoly because they wouldn't have any costs like that to recoup in the first place yeah and that's a really interesting point and I think it goes to the issue of people not seeing the contradictions in their point of views so for example people on the left who typically don't like big corporations they will criticize patents you know this problem that's caused by capitalism this is the market these are property rights then they don't see the relationship to restrictions from the FDA so like we just talked about it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to get a new drug on the market and then in that case they go oh we just need price controls or we need the FDA to speed up their process they need a bigger budget and so they don't see the connection between these two things so let's talk a little bit about that sure one of the arguments given for the patent system is that without a patent system companies would resort more to what they used to do which was they would keep things secret that's called trade secret they would try to keep things secret as much as possible which they think is a bad thing that you should publish everything I think that there's always a balance between how much information any given company wants to keep proprietary and is able to keep proprietary a lot of things especially nowadays you're not able to keep things secret a lot of things that are supposedly secret like the Kentucky fried chickens herbs and spices and the recipe for Coca-Cola I don't think those things are even actually secret I think they're known it's just they're said to be secret the point is you can't keep a lot of things secret for a long time eventually they'll leak out so the problem with the left is and the right to be honest both the left and the right have made a mistake the left and the right both accept the false idea that property rights and capitalism include patent and copyright rights and because they accept this false premise the right is in favor of patent and copyrights and the left is opposed to patent and copyrights because they believe it's capitalistic but they're both actually wrong the typical example of socialism is centralized state control of the means of production but the essence of it is basically an institutional system which erodes and intervenes with and interferes with private property rights understood as property rights assigned basically according to the simple common law principles of whoever got the thing first right that's lock in homesteading or whoever contractually assigned it as an owner to someone else that's how you determine ownership by contract and by first use those are the basic hallmarks of the of the private property system anything else that deviates from that is basically socialistic if it's done by a state or institutionalized and patent and copyright do that because what they do is a right is given to someone by the state someone who applies for a patent or someone who gets a copyright the state gives that guy a certificate basically which says we give you a certificate that you can use you come to our courts we have a monopoly on the use of violence and force in the legal system you can come to our courts and present the certificate and you can use that certificate to shut down your competitors factory that's basically what patent and copyright do I call this a negative servitude I think that's the best way to classify the law a negative easement or a negative servitude is similar to what you have in a restrictive covenant when you have neighbors who agree voluntarily that no one in a neighborhood can you know paint their house purple or something like that it's a negative right it's a right of your neighbor to stop you from using your property in a certain way which is legitimate if it's voluntarily agreed to which it is like in a restrictive covenant in a homeowners association for example but when the government just grants this to one of your competitors and gives your competitor the right to stop you from making something competing with them it basically gives him control over your property rights it basically gives your competitor a property right in your factory right because he can he can say I can stop you from using your factory to make this kind of iPhone or this kind of widget or this kind of smartphone or this kind of book so the ultimate problem with patent and copyrights is that they restrict property rights they take away property rights and so basically patent and copyright are socialistic and that's the problem with them so socialists if they had any consistency they would they would actually not be so against patent and copyright it is true that patent and copyrights are used to artificially increase the size and power of large corporations but a lot of socialistic policies do like the minimum wage and others trade lots of regulations that companies can afford to handle which put smaller companies at a disadvantage so the socialists are just the leftists are just confused we need to have a vibrant competitive pro innovation realm and the government needs to set the ground rules of property rights and stay out of it it is not the government's job it's not the job of the law to make it easier for someone with a new business idea no matter what it is to recoup their costs or to avoid competition if you think about it it's almost like the mainstream people that are in favor of IP law they like a free market they like competition within bounds of reason they don't like too much competition if you have competition that faces you after you have a successful product or service you need to have competition gradually arise and then you can adapt and compete with your competitors but if it's too easy to compete with you they think that should be illegal which they think is the case for basically goods that can be easily replicated where a main ingredient of the success of the good is the information like the composition of a pharmaceutical or a digital version of a movie of software or a song which can be easily copied and the fact that our digital age makes it easy to copy simply means that it's easier to compete so what this means is the free market is working better there's more competition right away and these people don't like that because it's too easy to compete they say well how in the world can I start a new venture if someone can compete with me as soon as I start making money and by the way back on the pharmaceutical issue the FDA requires companies as part of the FDA process to reveal the details of their drugs and because the process takes years and because these results have to be made public by the time the company gets FDA approval and they're about to sell their brand new drug all their would be competitors already know what the ingredients are and everything because the FDA has forced them to drop their panties and reveal their goodies right so they don't have the natural advantage that you would have in a free market of keeping some things proprietary for a while and having a good first mover advantage you know maybe I come up with a new heart attack drug or a new cholesterol drug and I get it vetted by some private vetting agencies but I don't have to reveal all my details to the world and by the time I hit the market you know five years later maybe people start finally competing but I have a good first mover advantage the FDA removes that and therefore the company squeal and scream and say well well then we have to have patents because otherwise people can compete with me so easily well one reason they can compete so easily with you is because the FDA has forced you to reveal the secret sauce already so a lot of these problems is the result of what means is the great Austrian economist you know he said that the problem with regulations and controls that controls breed controls because one control has unintended consequences and it's going to have bad consequences and so then the regulators and the legislators rush in to fix that with another regulation you have another regulation and it's a never ending series of trying to fix the problem which is what you always get when you try to interfere with the natural order of the free market the best thing to do would be to respect the natural order of the free market respect private property rights let people compete let some ventures succeed some fail and let technology just proceed on its own pace whatever that is one thing and I'm glad you went into that explanation to give people some background but you see these contradictions over the place so for example Monsanto is trying to merge with Bayer right now and they're going to become this big conglomerate in the biotech space and people are freaking out about that because it reduces competition supposedly but then they don't see it on the other end all the issues you were just describing with patent law I mean you have the same result that you're so afraid of so you won't let these two companies voluntarily do this meanwhile on the other side you're going to say no we have to protect property rights and we can't have people just copying medicine and so forth so it's good to step back like you just did and kind of take a holistic view and people don't do that because they're so dedicated to whatever idea they have well I think most normal decent people are focusing on their own things and they don't have time to become an expert in political theory and economics and they're going to tend to hear the propaganda spread that people have a lot to gain from these things but on the field of monopolies the entire justification for lots of government programs like the antitrust, the FTC and the antitrust laws is this fear of private monopolies somehow emerging which has always been a schizophrenic thing I believe because number one the federal government has a monopoly it is a monopoly it's the biggest monopoly the government is the only source of true monopolies so you want to empower the world's biggest monopoly to stop private monopolies from emerging but then it helps to encourage private monopolies that wouldn't otherwise be able to exist in larger corporations that would probably exist in a free market by making the regulations so onerous that only the large companies can afford to negotiate them right and to navigate them and then by granting private monopolies called the patent and the copyright I mean the patent system traces its origins to a statute in England from 1623 called the statute of monopolies the government is handing out monopolies to people with one agency the patent office while it has another agency the FTC designed to stop monopolies which it helps to encourage happen in the first place in fact it's schizophrenic that there's a doctrine in the courts among these agencies where they say that look we know that we're granting companies an extra market which means a monopoly position with these monopoly privileges patent and copyright law they have a right to charge a monopoly price in fact we're trying to encourage them to innovate by giving them this monopoly price to recoup the cost we've imposed on them with the FDA which is another government agency right but they can't abuse it in other words so we have to have a balance so the judge in a federal court is going to be the one who's going to do the balance to decide whether you've abused the monopoly you gave you so we give you a monopoly the patent you're charging a high price but then you're using it a little bit too successfully or a little bit too aggressively now you might run afoul of the Sherman antitrust act or other antitrust laws so you have to have a balance between anti monopoly and pro monopoly positions of the same federal government so the whole thing is schizophrenic and the federal government has done nothing but to corrupt and distort the we haven't talked about copyright too much copyright is also another area where the copyright law heavily distorts culture of chills free speech and threatens freedom on the internet I believe the patent system does the most damage in a tangible sense I think it slows down the course of human progress and is a huge tragedy there are millions of lives that could have been improved or saved with a technology level we would have now if the patent system had not existed for the last 200 years or especially the last 50 or 100 years in the high tech era and it's it's it's it's like it's the scene and the unseen we can see the benefits of a law but we can't see the unseen costs of it right the things that we we lost that we never would have seen we might have flying cars by now we might have colonized Morris by now we might have cured cancer by now so to me it's a huge tragedy and we need to get people thinking that we have got to get the government out of this and let science and technology and the free market alone well one way I think that this causes problems especially in education and in scientific research is you have these private journals who they they publish the results of research that the government funds and then they put the content behind a payroll paywall and they copyright it and so if you're a consumer if you're a science writer like me and you want to get into this information so you can write about it well too bad you know you need to pay us $35 to access the article for 10 hours or you can sign up for $2,000 a year subscription and so you get the situation where everything is controlled by these big institutions I mean open access journals that are popping up which is a good thing for the most part you have the NIH and these other federal agencies funding a lot of academic research and then you have these big corporations these big publishing companies that own all of the final product so people don't think of that very much do you want to talk a little bit about that if it's not too far outside what you work on well no I think that's a good example of how a lot of these government policies and programs reinforce each other so not only the FDA right and the controls that they impose and other government regulations and taxes and the antitrust system which is in conflict with the patent system but then you have the copyright system which has has led to an entrenched system of controls by the publishers right it's almost a guilt type system like we had at the beginning of the copyright system under the statute of Ann in England 1709 which which came after the stationers company which was the actual publishing guild that emerged after the advent of the printing press so it was reformed and it led to what we have now which was what we've had for the 20th, 20th century, 20th, 19th centuries so yes you do have if we didn't have copyright and then the other thing is funding of research so basically every aspect of this is intertwined and entangled with each other they reinforce each other they cause problems which gives the government more excuse to come in with yet another program to try to solve the problem that they've caused but yes I completely agree with you on that the alleged goal of the patent system by the way it's not to incentivize innovation it is to encourage disclosure of things that would otherwise be kept secret that's what the patent bargain is if you read the patent act it's basically if you disclose in a patent application you disclose the details of this invention we will give you a temporary monopoly over it so that's the bargain they're trying to encourage disclosure and yet the copyright system has established these paywalls which wouldn't exist without copyright these artificial gated communities and gatekeeper type institutions could not survive without copyright if you remember what Aaron Swartz, the heroic internet pioneer the poor victim of copyright law did was he took a bunch of these scientific and papers and released them, uploaded them to the world now look imagine that close to zero percent of those authors were compensated for those papers they didn't write those papers for money they did it for their careers and because of their passion and because it was just part of what they do but they were controlled by the publishers right they want to keep it paywalled which is ridiculous why would you want to keep this amazing funded information that we have paywalled to an elite group of people to have permission to read this it should be released to everyone especially when it's funded by our tax dollars right so the whole thing is a travesty I believe what Swartz did was he was trying to free information that would not have been able to paywall without copyright and that was paid for largely by tax dollars and are written by professors who didn't even get paid and who want their work to be read by as many people as possible and because of that he was threatened with decades in federal prison so he committed suicide it's a young man a bright man you know it's a tragedy so I would say copyright and patent feed on each other and all the patent law does more damage and tangible sense copyright law is almost more insidious because it lasts so much longer and it distorts culture and it reduces the information we can read the good thing I would say in my view is that the advent of encryption and torrenting and the internet and smart phones and all these ways of communicating in a permissionless way has basically helped to kill copyright and I think that's a good thing and my hope is that in the future with a certain degree of technological development and advancement 3d printing will start to spell the doom for the patent system I'd give it 30-40 years but you know if you can print an iPhone in your basement with some 3d printers using a design you got by torrenting it over the internet and no one can stop you or know that you're doing it then patent law will be dead too or largely dead so I'm hopeful that technology can save us from these two horrible legal systems. Yeah well a final thought and I think it's getting better in the room of publishing for example so these open access science journals they make the researchers pay the publication fee and there are some problems with that where you have these junk journals popping up and they're based in India or somewhere and they'll publish anything but there are good ones too and so if the researcher pays the fee to have this published she then has an incentive to get the information out there they're like look look at this article I wrote it cost me money I want you to read it I want more notoriety and so it's effectively starting to end run big journals like Science and Nature I mean and those are the ones that everyone wants to publish in but over time we're going to start getting away from it which I'm excited to see. I think so too I mean I've run an open source journal myself it's called Libertarian Papers but it's basically zero cost it's free online and we don't even charge the submission fees and things like that that the other big ones do and I I've looked at the PLOS PLOS journals they look pretty good to me it seems to me that they are taking a little bit of advantage of the defects in the existing system to charge the authors but I would imagine that there's a limit to how much they can do that because at a certain point the researcher could simply publish his paper on his blog if you wanted to it might not have the same prestige but I think that's going to change over time so you know you want to have peer reviews and if possible but I think all these changes are good and they're shaking up the industry I don't think that we'll see the same industry in 20 years that we see now the way the way that publishing is done I think it's almost all going to be open most scholars and scientists that I know they want their stuff to be open they want to be able to link to it and send it to people and have people to be freely able to read it even if they're not the world's greatest experts why would you restrict it to a small community artificially so I think that's going to that's going to leave the day because it will never become harder to copy than it is now the internet's just making things easier and easier to copy things and information is out there it's out there and I think all these trends are good but they're going to spell the doom of some entrenched business models like the paywall journals yeah well and I hope it happens because there's always a way to turn a profit if you're producing content that people want there's always a way to do it because people will pay for quality stuff it's just you can't lock down their computers for too long before they get sick of it so anyways where can people find out more about your work Stefan and are you have any books coming out or any articles you want people to specifically know about yeah I'm trying to finish up a book this year probably the next six months which is a compilation an edited compilation of a lot of my libertarian legal theory articles called law and the libertarian world and you can find out about that and also about my intellectual property related thought on stephancancella.com cool we'll link to it and by the way if anyone's curious you can read his book on intellectual property for free won't charge you for it just in case anyone's wondering but Stefan thanks for joining me I thought this was a great discussion so thank you yeah and in fact I'm going to do a successor to that and the title will be copy this book so it's coming up to rip off the system of a down album title yeah or yeah well there was a Abby Hoppin book steal this book but he had it slightly wrong because if you copy a book you're actually not stealing anything so why don't you just copy this book but we'll see awesome I'm looking forward to it thanks


at they could take out a piece of their day it's not the zoning we went through last year it's not that all over again these are many many small corrections and a number of pieces that really just needed to be clarified or talked about so those were the two quick updates the official map was supposed to be on the next agenda but while I'm here while we're doing updates I thought I would just kind of go through that now because the next next one is pretty your next agenda is pretty busy too so I met earlier this summer with conservation commission and a parks commission rep and we had a lot of discussion what we found was what the parks commission really bless you really what the parks commission was really looking for was a way to make their green print plan which is a specific document that had been developed in like 2011 they really wanted to make that official and give it some standing and it was adopted after the last master plan so it wasn't included in the last master plan they wanted it inserted in the zoning we couldn't do that but I really kind of misunderstood where they were trying to go with it they just wanted to make that document official and what they didn't realize was that in the end the council can just adopt that they really want to have the green print as the official parks plan for the city of Montpelier and we don't need to make an official map to do that and in fact the official map is not what they wanted to because they didn't want to take property the official map gives you the power to take property and that's not what they wanted to do they just wanted to make that the official plan so we informed them that they didn't need to go through this they didn't need to go through the planning commission so you should expect to hear from the parks commission on a review and adoption of the green print not dissimilar to what we did to adopt the storm water master plan the EDSP the complete streets plan these are all plans that we develop that we kind of want to put our stamp on that says that's our official plan going forward the green print should go through that same process we should review it and see if it still meets what our goals and objectives are and if it is then we can get that adopted and they can start moving forward on implementing it in the way they want which is to go to various property owners and say hey your property is identified on the green print we'd really love to see if you're interested in selling it to us and by the way this document has been blessed by city council so so the expectation there is you'll probably hear from the parks commission and hopefully I don't know what their timeline is for that but we probably would like to reach out to them and remind them that that was something they were going to follow up on great questions awesome yes Donna you mentioned there was going to be some follow up to the meetings dealing with the city plan they had the pavilion of all the committees has there been anything written about that meeting or any summation we compiled all the notes all the things that had been written down I think Barb Conray was the kind of the scribe up on the state we've transcribed all of those notes and we've started to pull things together the easiest place where this is going to start to come together is when we start to get the Google driver putting together and start to make that give it a public face to it because the hope is we'll start being able to collect from each committee their individual pieces and having a place where people can see what's going on and then the planning commission will start to pull those pieces into documents that we can put on the drive and try to put all of that together elements of that then will become part of the city plan yes yep we don't want to lose it no we definitely don't want to okay further questions oh yeah please go ahead Laura Rose Abbott I was just wondering about the critical changes when they go to the council it's saying it's not going to have the full review process will it still have a public hearing process yes certainly for the interim there's two different processes one for interim zoning and one for the full hearing might explain the difference between the two thank you for that clarification and I'm sorry would you mind repeating your name thank you just quick the interim zoning will have a process full zoning adoption has a public hearing by the planning commission and then there's 30 day time windows and the city council has one or two it's always confusing because they make them slightly different between the adoption of a plan and adoption of regulations but I believe there are two hearings you would have in an interim you would go through and have a meeting and then you would have one hearing on it and the reason why the shorter window is allowed is because it is an interim which means it's a temporary so all of those temporary changes would also be included in this permanent update that's going through the full process so you usually go through you make an interim change because boy we've got to fix these rules because it's making a mess of the zoning process while we go through the permanent adoption so the January proposals will be for interim zoning just to make those changes to the to the slope rules and to the landscaping rules and the first meeting we would have would be to discuss do you want to adopt them and you may decide we're willing to adopt the landscaping but not the slopes because I don't think the slopes are ready we want that to go through a full process whatever that's what the first meeting is the second meeting would be basically like a first reading and a second reading type but there will be public plenty of public comment there's public comment for the interim but there's a lot of public comment for the full adoption as you guys have experienced okay thank you great any further questions okay thank you very much okay next up is the budget discussion well Todd's setting up I'll just to tee this up we had a discussion with you folks saying that you wanted to be looped in early in the budget process so we haven't not had we don't have our full budget compilation yet we had a preliminary meeting yesterday our full team effort is next week and we'll be really putting the pen to paper and all that but what I think I hope Todd has come up with is basically it outlined the four major categories of our budget what doing same thing this year to next year looks like and then what is on the table for possible changes the things that you've suggested things that others have suggested and it's really just to give you a chance to have an early way in about what's important or if you want to prioritize things these are a lot of the stuff you've heard before either from staff or from yourselves but anyway I'll turn it over to Todd this wasn't an attachment this was not an attachment this is a work in process that Bill has not even had the privilege of seeing it I haven't even seen this this has been a work in process and we've discussed it and there is no decision making that needs to happen tonight keep in mind that this is the end of the evening I realize that I'm not putting anyone on the spot and I will send distribute copies to everybody what I am trying to present to you here is just a baseline kind of budget discussion preliminary budget discussion before we have our final sit down with department heads will work on this for a couple of days and go through and hash out different items but essentially what we're looking at here on the first highlighted item which is the core government services here that is essentially maintaining a baseline let's not do anything make any changes let's just continue our operations in the next year we're looking at plus or minus you know just a little over $300,000 of an increase that is you know increases for health insurance that's increases for wages for contractual union contract issues that's presuming you know a 2% increase for personnel plan employees those types of baseline fundamentals what that number does not include is new requests so what I have tried to do on the right hand side is just give to you an idea and a scope of what we're looking at for new items and can everyone see that okay can you make it a little bigger do I talk I'm also I'm just 25 part 9 now and my eyesight seems to have gotten exponentially worse so in addition to you know maintaining our baseline what we're looking at for various requests and requests that we've discussed here at the council level are items that enhance our existing services adding a new police officer there's been discussion of a facilities manager there's discussion of an energy manager I put an asterisk next to facility and energy manager because there seems to be some synergy between those two positions potentially and maybe we have an opportunity to merge that into one there's a request for an additional park staff person there's also a request for a tree staff person that would be dedicated more to the problem going forward there's been discussion of fuel alternatives and seeking out different options for fleet fuels so at present we don't have a really good option but there is a renewable diesel option that is coming to the market and we're not going to say it's available to us now but in FY 20 it's a real possibility so there would be potentially some premium but that is a developing story we also have to look at our network security issues our data storage I think we've all come to the realization me begrudgingly at least that cloud based solutions for a lot of our data is becoming more and more of a necessity individually maintaining networks and the infrastructure cost that goes along with that comes at a cost both in maintaining the equipment and the staff to contractual obligations to maintain it in warranty services so that's a potentially wide open item that could really jump the cost dramatically but there's some offsets as well there's also data requirements that are statutory in nature police department for instance you know as we're currently using cursor video cameras that video data needs to be backed up currently we do some of that on site and some of it off site but moving more of that to a cloud based solution is something that we should be addressing in FY 20 new building maintenance there's going to be some maintenance requirements associated with building such as one Taylor street we're in the process of building it now but creating a reserve or creating some sort of set aside for the future repairs and maintenance that need to happen on those buildings I mentioned cursor cameras body cameras is kind of a policy issue that's been discussed and I know Tony was here recently I'm talking about that that's a discussion item that we're going to be going through as well is there sorry is there a request right now to upgrade cruiser cams as well as so it's just about body cams it's just the storage piece it's the storage component of that and then from the city manager's office and I think the council is to express some interest in doing a citizen survey as well some cost in hiring that out so those are some of the items that we'll be discussing next week and what I'm looking not so much for answers from council this evening but just to get feedback if you have any that is going to direct our conversations as we go through this because we don't want to miss something that's a major concern for you can you tell us the $300,000 baseline change what is that in a percent increase that is just about 3% depending on how you play the grand list it's over here I've indicated that for discussion purposes at least and rounding purposes 1% is about 1 cent which equals about $100,000 just for round numbers debt and capital projects we have planned on increasing the capital projects budget by about $50,000 this year I've got asterisks here as well that number fluctuates a little bit because if we fund a capital project with debt once that final debt is issued that offsets the amount that's available for capital projects some of the big items that are on the list for this year are street lights there's been an ongoing need to upgrade some of the street lights downtown into LED but there's some wiring that goes along with that which is a fairly significant project portions of the roof of this building are if not an immediate need in the very near term there's need for replacement there fire equipment continues to be on the radar every single year and the reason it's on the radar every year is because it's so expensive so even if we're not purchasing anything we need to be talking and planning for future purchases because a new tower truck might be $100,000 energy improvements kind of goes along with energy manager facility manager and how much do we want to dedicate to weatherization of city owned buildings and improving the energy efficiency of each building that we have whether it be lights or heating supplies or water and sewer even moving down and Bill feel free to cut in at any time if you if I have miscategorized anything memberships that we currently have we are members of VLCT I think we've get a tremendous value for our membership there VLCT also provides our property and liability insurance and workers compensation insurance so they've been a great partner that's money we'll spend Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission we use tremendously for GIS and mapping and planning related resources outside entities are things that are on included in our budget that we raise essentially raise money for but we don't necessarily have direct control over them as agencies so these are the various agencies within that subset that are autonomous to our operation that not under direct city council control but that we raise funding for I thought our Green Mountain Transit was like 40,000 so Green Mountain Transit has there's a per capita component of 30 ish and then 40 for the circulator service or just the circulator that's and the CVP SA I know that that's historically been included in the budget but with the impending coordination of the executive director I guess and I missed the last meeting so I was not not feeling well but I that it we don't have a formal request so this is where we're at right now so we're anticipating things that have been in the budget and just trying to break out for you folks the buckets that they kind of go in that we think about them as the request comes from these agency including I guess just it would I mean if this is being sort of included in that there's been no formal request it doesn't seem as though so to your point Ashley though the that that 28,000 that's included there is not included in this baseline it is broken out separately okay so if that were to go away it would be a direct reduction if it were to increase it would be a direct increase to the overall package just want to be clear that I would not support paying that right now you noted do you know any enhancements are you know mostly Montpelier alive and those related fundamental things that we participate in you know the 4th of July celebration the welcome legislators dinner holiday lights we make a contribution each year to the USS Montpelier to help assist in the housing costs for the for the sailors when they come to visit for the 4th of July so that's kind of those small but just to be clear the top line comes from the downtown improvement district tax so it's it's separate tax and that's essentially a direct pass through and then we get into policies and relationships and things that council has taken a stance on in years past and I'm presuming we'll continue to do so the Montpelier development there was for economic development within town there was a commitment for $100,000 a year the Montpelier community fund slightly lower last year because we had some changes in one of the underlying recipients but has historically been $120,000 Miak in years past has been $5,000 I'm holding the line on that their request primarily has been not so much in the operating expenses but in in moving forward with an energy manager type position that could see some of these projects through the housing trust fund again last two years has been at last year was at $60,000 I'm holding that at $60,000 it was $450,000 I think that happened a couple of months ago so that would be a projected increase of $90,000 there was recently a request from Art Synergy and Paul Gamble at a prior meeting for $50,000 in funding for our related projects in the downtown invasive species that is of the plant nature poison ivy and goats and those types of treatments and then invasive insects and this would be in addition to staffing for treatment of ash pourers and the related operating side of that that gives you a very quick synopsis what I wanted to do as well though was kind of come back here and when I was when I met with you about a month ago we had gone through kind of person by person and just made a bulleted list of what's important to you before as we start this process and all I did here was just kind of color code things that were mentioned by multiple people so I don't need to do this and I will send this to you in a summary but you know energy and facility manager came up housing trust fund came up more than once police officer came up more than once ash pourer came up more than once so those are the kind of the highlights that I'm looking at going into our discussions as a management group and again I'm just looking to get feedback from any of you if you have it with regard to how we are we going off the rails here going in the wrong direction is there anything you want to was that at the meeting that I missed may have been actually no you weren't you weren't because you're on the bottom here hold on hold on so you had brought up whether we could bring someone in house to address the cost of studies and then clearly identifying the outcomes thank you and ash pourer was also on your list I get one sort of question that I have I know chief came and talked sort of generally about body cams I know state police are also trying to figure out what that would look like it's certainly something you know I am in favor of but I'm wondering if it seems realistic that that if we were to allocate those funds for this year if all of those sort of issues would be able to be addressed in this fiscal year this upcoming fiscal year or if that's something where you know we engage in the policy planning process because that takes a long time given the myriad of concerns and I was just curious if there had been yeah so I think you know Tony you know that's a decision obviously for council and for police you know it's a no I have some estimates of what it would cost you know initial investment in body cams $6,000 for discussion purposes annual fees for storage of all that data after you get it $15,000 it's a $20,000 year commitment but beyond that it really is policy and all the other issues that go along with having that data that is at the bigger concern and then also you know here we are it's November 28 is it realistic that we're going to want to do it in before June 30, 2020 so those are the types of like we said we haven't made any decisions either this is kind of the you know we've consolidated a lot of the information and the requests so we're about to go into our you know closed door knock down drag out to decide all this stuff but we wanted to run the decisions we're going to be looking at to get feedback from any of you as we I mean I know this is always a little strange but to me and I know that we as a council right now can't find the next council into things but you know I would certainly I am in favor of you know MPD adopting body cams as a sort of standard practice but you know the policy planning and coordination piece of that needs to be not just with MPD but it's on a much larger scale especially since the legislature may be taking the issue up and so I am supportive of that although it strikes me as someone who's you know sort of been doing law enforcement policy development over the years that that's something that's going to happen in a very quick fashion and so I wonder if it might make sense for us to as a council if everyone is willing to commit to that like you know sort of adding that to the next fiscal year's budget plan rather than I mean earmarking funds now and then not using them and I know that you can't sort of marry the next council to that but it just seems like there are other ways that we could be using some of those dollars now rather than just as a placeholder and allocating them absolutely and that's those are the types of discussions that we'll have in our and some of those newer positions like a facilities manager and things like that like really drilling down with city staff what that job description would look like rather than sort of you know allocating something then realizing it's not enough money that we've allocated to get the the person with the skills that we need you know and so maybe prioritizing those things you know in terms of what is going on right now right we could hire a police officer right now all of the things exist for the training you know the academy attendance all of that stuff the emerald ash borer you know we have the resources to tackle all of that and then sort of spend the next year making sure that we're putting plans in place to do these other things that are really important things but can you go back to that the spreadsheet with the the different categories okay so I there are some things on this list that I really want to push for and there are some things that I want but don't cost very much and so like for example like I love the goats right like but that's two thousand four four thousand dollars like that's not very much money so I'm gonna leave that on the side so the things that that are rather big that I want to push for I just want to tell you like I have a list of priorities for things if I had to choose an order for things on this list what would my my priorities be number one is the police officer the extra police officer number two is some kind of a combined facilities director and sustainability coordinator number three is taking care of money for the emerald ash borer which I think maybe that I don't know how the parks fits in for that for me but emerald ash borer is right up there number four for me is the housing trust fund and number five is art synergy money there we go I challenge you all do you have a priorities list I would agree for me the police officer is probably one of the highest priorities I mean you've got officers who are working a lot right now having oh sorry and I guess the facilities manager piece is really important to me but I want to make sure that we actually put together a comprehensive job description and make sure that our salary you know our salary matches like what we're looking for because I don't want to set this position up for failure because I think it is an integral part of how we move forward I also agree with the emerald ash borer and the art synergy plan I'm assuming that's the $50,000 ask yeah that's on my list too so I don't think our lists are too far apart great I also want to echo what you were saying Ashley about the they're done we just figured it out sorry before we get too much further and then I do want to hear other people um I also have hesitations about the body camps for this fiscal year like I think that is a worthwhile goal but let's do some more research that's where I'm at with the okay sorry other other thoughts so I guess this is a little late and like this is we're almost at 10 o'clock at night and the staff haven't done their work yet so I don't want to say this is my absolute priority and I don't know if that's appropriate right now but one of the things I did want to point out on that list that we kind of assume is this $1000 for the USS Montpelier for their hotel rooms for the crew to come and it's fine but I'm also not sure that I would spend that on them rather than spending it on say the teen center or some of the other um opiate addiction work or you know there's we have to make choices every time we decide to spend money here and I don't know that that one is a priority for me so very good $1000 okay and in all fairness the the BFW does support I actually had a discussion with Bill about this already done there is a committee very much involved in that group so I think you would need to hear from this senior group of our community that's involved with that I'm really relieved that you're willing to put the body camps off I think that's a huge discussion that'll be put off for many many years just it's terrible for us to leap there just I mean if Tony's there too all the issues the policy issues let alone the mindset just drives one thing I don't support but within this there are a couple of things of which we can talk about housing and I assume that if we're going to put facility manager just like housing that we'll get numbers from the staff and they will tell us what they need and what the cost will be so it'll be appropriate you know for what you want to do the housing has given us a number the arts have I really appreciate that I don't know we really have a number for the police officer I mean that position but I don't know that we have a number yet so that would be good to see yeah okay well I didn't see one up there maybe I missed it but whereas the housing yeah and honestly I purposely didn't assign specific numbers or costs to positions I mean I have some very reasonably good rough ideas but at the same time I also don't want to be in a position where I scare everybody out of the room because I throw a number at every single position that's proposed before we've even made the decision so I think if you're if the consensus is that you know police officer is important to the bulk of this council then that's something that we're going to firm up well I don't know that everyone I didn't see it doubled in your list but I'm really interested the one thing I'd add here is park staff we have two people one who has so much comp time he doesn't have to work for months on end if he doesn't want to and rightfully so because they've been so overworked that we really need a third person in our parks it's just and they double dip with their job with the tree board so in both of those sort of arenas parks and trees we need a third full-time staff but I'd like to see some numbers on that if you're going to look at facility and police officer costs and they are sorry right here Donna I call I want to see some costs that's all yep yep other thoughts yeah I'd like to just see overtime numbers by department thank you just a thought as we're looking at the I know it's good for our buck I can't support VLCT for spending $1 lobbying against minimum wage or paid family leave the state house is here using taxpayer dollars to do that so I think maybe that's just a message to back to the board there that we'd like to see their position on that I would anyways before I approve anything there and I think I'm with Ashley between Paco quitting after the last meeting and having another member of that board come up and say would you put us out of our misery I felt guilty when they came in here and did all this work you know they suffered over this work and I don't feel like they got clear direction on what to do next so I'm inclined not to appropriate that money without giving them clear direction if you want you don't have to I don't think I have much to add I think I was captured pretty well in your your list I had two items and those are those are still my priorities I think and I am certainly very interested in all the other things on the list but I don't know that I've made a mayor suggested prioritized order of all the other ones I can safely say I've hit 100% of the requests of at least one councillor absolutely yes totally satisfied thank you anything you want to add if not that's fine I think the list captures my what I mentioned three priorities housing trust fund which I would say is number one police officer and emerald ash borer it I could may wind up needing to recuse myself on the issue of the emerald ash borer and staffing for that I'll have to think about that a little more why would you recuse yourself for that because my son just got I hired as the arborist that's that makes sense part-time arborist yeah there we go and get your further thoughts another time unless you want to add anything neither one of us is supporting I want to see some numbers and I want to see what the staff want what the staff are willing to fight for before making a call well I think what we we just want to make sure to do is nothing that was you don't want that's on the list or where the high points are I think what you help I'll just say and I it's no surprise that when we total up even the mayor's list with with the things we're going to be probably higher than what you had all indicated was your level of of tolerance but at least it gives us a place to start and so while you know so I think you want to be thinking about at what level do you support these priorities if we have to make tough decisions because you know we're and and I guess that leads me to how what you want to see from us you know we talked about this a little bit in terms of you know years past we've had a hard target this year you know we opted not to do that in lieu of this process and so I think we'd be happy to put together a detailed operating budget detailed numbers on these kind of things and just leave these open and then you can work down to where you want to get or we can do it in increments of this is what you know but again you know we're prioritizing our own two versus their own versus what the council wants so you know I mean I think the next step is just to see what the numbers are associated with all these things and then I mean I'm not sure that that's much different than what we had talked about sorry I'm starting to like lose it no I got it so unlike I mean the staff positions other than going part time are hard to negotiate but how much goes into housing how much goes to the art we could start increasing those in a more smaller level than requested but at least have them present so I think that's important to see it great one final item of business CIP we exchanged emails a little bit at least for Ann Glenn and Donna Monday still good for everybody and 5 or 5.30 do you have a preference and I'm going to vote for 5 sure and I will send an invitation out in the morning great I'll just make a request I don't mean to single you out but there are people watching these meetings who don't know what things like CIP mean so I just want to encourage all of us to remember to say what we're talking about we take those things for granted but CIP is the capital improvement plan and it is the committee that will be meeting on Monday will be going through to look at the FY 20 initial proposals for infrastructure improvements to streets paving sidewalks and building repairs and maintenance so it's a fairly significant and equipment yes the big dollars okay thank you I'm going to assume anyone else any other comments just assuming we're having conversations with Bethany church sir about the warm shelter just the pressures that puts on us I know there were a number of calls that went out both from the police department and the fire department last year so I think this is a really important service that they offer our community I'm sure it saved lives I just want to make sure we're doing what we can to support those guys okay and Donna I may have just said December 5th Monday December 3rd Monday the 3rd at 5pm CIP capital improvement plan meeting thank you okay amendments to the sprinkler ordinance what do you think? are we okay team? well we've got to do two readings of it so I think we could go ahead and get one of those readings done tonight I think you're right I can go ahead so as you know we made a bunch of significant changes to the sprinkler ordinance last winter spring and Glenn and I serve on the building appeal committee that is basically known as the sprinkler variance committee where we hear the request for variance from the ordinance and it came to the attention of the committee that one of the weird things that happened as a result of our changes is that under effectively under the zoning and under the zoning ordinance and the sprinkler ordinance let's see how to put this we effectively treat a a duplex as a single family home under the new zoning and the state requires that you are allowed to add an auxiliary dwelling unit under a single family home so effectively we treat triplexes as if they are single family homes in both the the zoning and then once you get up to four units or more then you really consider in a multi-family building so the way that this ended up working was that there were exceptions and two requirements for sprinklers if you had up to three units because we consider you a single family home and there were exceptions above four unit no, above five units if you met the state level requirements to have direct exits to the exterior but there was if you went from a three unit to a four unit you would be required to have a sprinkler added and there wasn't really any way for us to there wasn't an exception so the staff suggested a change the wording change that would allow you to go through that and that's what we're proposing so I'm sorry that I've not articulated it very well it is 10.05 but I did in writing so hopefully you read the memo and I will attempt to articulate it better at the second hearing and Bob you're okay oh yes so we're going to officially open the public hearing on these amendments and Bob you're okay with these changes they came from us Chris actually came up with the wording change and I know how concerned you all are about safety so that is very comforting well if we have to have it then I agree with the change fair enough I hear you I don't agree with the initial change I remember neither did we anyway so comments from either the council or the public council and the public going once going twice okay I'm going to close the public hearing on that and we'll set the second hearing for the next meeting yes while we're on this topic just flag another issue I suppose we could amend this as a second reading but I think that wouldn't be appropriate but came up in light of the parking garage discussion which was that our ordinance requires all new buildings to be sprinkled ordinances for free standing open air concrete parking structures requires certain stand pipes but doesn't require the full dry sprinkler system and it's got $400,000 in the project cost which isn't isn't necessarily that much of a benefit to public safety obviously if it was a true safety issue that would be a concern and whether it was us or any private person building a building of this type to spend money that isn't getting the value for you know that makes sense so we propose that we one choice is we go and seek a variance through the committee but what's the real basis for that under our ordinance and the second would be to simply amend the ordinance for structures like this you know like I said we could do it as an amendment at second reading I think that's not necessarily in keeping with the spirit of the process of having two meetings where this hasn't been warned so I'd recommend that if people are interested in taking that up that at the next meeting we do a first reading on that one and Bob how do you feel about such a proposal obviously I like sprinklers in every building but you know there's some you know there's some common sense in an open air freestanding parking garage great okay I would suggest that the ordinance variance process does really allow for the city to make the argument that they've taken x additional steps to protect public safety and therefore I like how we structured the variance process to put the onus on the developer to prove that they've done other things that will protect public safety so my inclination would be to just let it go through the process although I'm there's three members of the committee and two of us are city counselors and so that seems a little yeah I mean I think conflicted and I don't know how we would deal with that properly but I think you know I'm we talked about both options and I think I felt it was more straightforward and honest to just say here's you know this is the way it is and you know it's not out of the realm of possibility that someone in the future could build another one of these structures somewhere a private person and again why I like the chief I strongly favor sprinklers and the investment sprinklers for safety but you know the cost versus the benefit in these particular cases where they're not occupied you know I mean seems you know personally that we've backed off on the residential sprinkler requirements and those kind of things that insist on them in a parking garage seemed silly so that's not flammable particularly and no people you know so I think it's just more straightforward to say here's our intent here's what we're going to do and that anyone in the future would not have to go through the appeal process but I think we should be up front about it Donna would you be proposing the same language that's in the state rules yes oh yeah no yeah absolutely we couldn't we can't we can't be less restrictive in the state anyway but I think we would probably just say parking structures would follow the state code and that's what and then refer to it and we haven't actually a good way to go yeah do we make an amendment tonight no I would wait on that I think we should propose and put on the agenda and let it be clear that's what we're doing okay is we would like I would like an opportunity to add some different some more wording to that also in yeah we haven't drafted anything okay if it wasn't sprinkled have protected stairwells things like that okay is there any other opinions about which direction alarms for example well but if we made a change it would also be posted and maybe would that not get the same attention between now and then versus waiting until you know that's your call I it doesn't get posted until the Friday that our agenda gets posted yeah I get it I guess I'm just subject I'm conscious of some of the comments and and things that we've received about the parking process the parking structure process and I think if however well intended if we were to you know we had an argument I think warned about changing two and three unit buildings and suddenly we amended it to include the parking garage I think it would be could be construed inappropriately as we were trying to slide something through and I think we ought to just be straightforward and put on the agenda that's what we're talking about and I think it's more public notice to put it in and then we'll still have public notice and I think that's good we should have more public notice it'll be an ordinance change so it would be two public hearings once we make the notice we caught it in time we could have added it to this but we didn't is that okay with you? okay great so we'll go ahead with that plan yes can I make just one more observation as I was going back through the language of the sprinkler ordinance I was realizing that one policy decision that we made without really thinking about it which is an okay policy decision potentially but I just wanted to draw our attention to it is that in our rush to in our desire to allow for more units to be added to existing buildings without throwing up additional burdens we did basically allow assuming you weren't expanding the building of the footprint by more than I believe 10 percent or a thousand square feet 50 percent 15 percent anyway there was a small addition that you were allowed to make without having to add a sprinkler for somebody who owned a multi-unit building an existing apartment building say of two units or two bedroom units there is nothing in the state law or our ordinance that would prohibit them from breaking that up into much smaller units without adding sprinklers and right now we haven't really seen that as a problem happening but I could foresee an instance where you know you have a landlord who decides that they're going to make a quick buck by breaking these up into really tiny units and in old building without sprinklers where we haven't been able to kind of come in and add some of these additional life safety requirements you could have a bad situation where people are you know in unsafe apartments basically that aren't protected so we kind of we decided that it was more important to be able to add additional units but that is a decision we made and so I just want to make sure we all know that and it's just kind of on our radar is something to think about if we do see you know there's suddenly a lot of landlords trying to squeeze more units in or something that could be a problem so thank you okay well I've already closed the public hearing on this ordinance and we do we need to vote to set the next do okay well is there a motion to set the second reading for the next meeting so moved for discussion on paper please say aye aye opposed great what can I have one more yeah you made me wait to last so I know right and I just want to remind people of Monday nights we had a fire at five state street on Monday night and that building is standing today and there's people living in it and working in it because of the sprinkler system that was that building we all know there's only one you can only see the front of that building you can't even get to the back of that building it's surrounded by buildings and this fire was in a fourth floor apartment in the back corner it would have been extremely difficult to get to that fire extremely difficult and extremely dangerous to the firefighters if that fire had if it had not been for the sprinkler system we we calculated based on the amount of time the sprinkler ran and the size of the head that probably 450 to 500 gallons of water flow to the building cause a little bit of damage but if that had not been sprinkled we that probably would not be here today that maybe some of the adjacent buildings could be adjacent buildings yep there were people sleeping in that building when the fire started the birds the birds want to have made it but it's the importance of sprinklers you know that that's a very valuable building that's still there today and occupied because oh it wasn't because of me or the fellas next door it was because of the sprinkler system the fire we got there in under two minutes and the fire was out when we got there well and if we need to be having any further conversation about retrofitting buildings I mean that's kind of a scary prospect well I mean that's the policy decision we made is that we wanted people to be able to add to existing buildings add units we wanted more housing units and so we took away a lot of those requirements to sprinkle in an existing building it was the policy decision we made you know but it's true so I'm going to continue to talk about including single family homes including single family homes because as we talked about 85% we had in Somerville, Indiana today a family of six mom and dad and four children lost their lives in their home it burned and they lost their lives that was this morning it happens every day and we need to continue to think about that thank you Bob okay council reports who would like to start I won whatever Ashley you want to go next sure just jumping around I would just like to remind everyone who is listening or watching or however you are participating in this meeting that there are resources for addiction support and recovery here in our community and our surrounding communities that are critical life saving things we've had a number of overdose deaths in the recent weeks here in Montpelier and the Barrie area and I would encourage anyone who is dealing with any sort of substance use or abuse issues to reach out to community supports we have a number of them available law enforcement actually Montpelier police department here offers rides to anyone who is willing to get ready to go to treatment they will take you there, no questions asked there are also lots of service providers here in the Montpelier and Barrie area their door is always open the turning point center is a great resource and I would just encourage anyone watching this who knows anyone to sort of pass that on because there have been an alarming number of deaths recently and it is entirely preventable thank you I'll say something the other night over at the Barrie granite museum there was a great event for people to come over and see the finished product of the series sculpture that's going up on the state house there was a good turnout, the artists were there I thought it was a great celebration of public art and the whole public process of the artist being there doing the work and interacting with the public as he was chipping away at the mahogany was a great thing for the public maybe 10 or 15 years ago my wife and I had Jerry Williams who made the clay model for this do a bronze of his previous iteration of that sculpture and so we brought that with us and so if you've seen any of my facebook page photos you'll see a picture of Jerry with the clay model that he made which is about 4 feet tall and the bronze that he was reunited with and I think that if people don't know about it it's going up on top of the dome I'm not going to be able to be there but people should try to make time to be there it's Friday at noon it's being hoisted Friday at noon I was going to say it's like 10.30 that people can see it before it gets lifted yeah so I wanted to let you all know that I have decided not to run for reelection so I'm going to have my one term and I feel like I've put my all in for one term but I can't continue to do it at this level and I feel that even at this level I'm just constantly in awe of Donna and your ability to go to every meeting and participate so much and Glen your ability to listen to constituents and interact with constituents I'm constantly amazed by the level of work that my fellow counselors put in and feel like I can't continue to do that and still give to the rest of the parts of my life so I've learned so much from the staff and from the fellow counselors and I don't want to waste that so I I'm hoping to be able to serve on a committee or something going forward but I don't disappear from Montpelier Civic Life but I wanted to give folks plenty of notice so that anyone who's thinking about running in District 1 will have time to think it through and I would be so happy to talk to anybody about what it's been like and what the commitment is and to help you through that thought process and deciding if this is something that you can do I'll really miss you thank you wow so just before we go any further oh my gosh Rosie I am so grateful for all of your energy and time that you've been putting into being the best counselor that you can be because it really shows and whoever runs in your place big shoes I think that goes without saying but we're just so grateful for your great questions and great thinking I told Bill I'm happy to continue sending annoying questions please do you've got to be on the ordinance committee woman I think you've got to be I guess it's me I am strongly tempted to say that I've just decided to talk Rosie out of quitting you've got time yeah but I don't know that sounded like a pretty well considered decision and I don't want to disrespect that but I would challenge anyone considering running to try to do it as well as you have and I would totally open it up to the public anyone who would like to try to persuade Rosie to I would encourage that and I will be at baguitos tomorrow morning 8.30 to 9.30 if you want to talk about that or anything else thank you Donna did you go? No I haven't I've gotten comments from constituents concerned about street lights and at one point we talked about a committee that eliminated a lot of excess lights but maybe we've gotten it too dark in some places so I'd like to bring that back up and also a couple emails about deer and deer yards and there's a committee that DD who was here Marsh is leading dealing about Montpelier deer and then there's the commissioner of wildlife a porter who wants Montpelier to allow hunting for deer inside the city limits so I think we need to become part of this conversation so I'd like to put it out there as a future agenda item. So one thought about the street lighting if we want to get the committee back together that's certainly a possibility I do know that we will be considering it's on the budget list to do the LED's downtown which would make a big difference so well we haven't got that many most of the complaints we've received have been about downtown and there's a couple of reasons we removed lights out there sidewalks people who use sidewalks a lot it's just one light maybe we can pop it back so I mean they should contact us so I had hesitated about getting the committee back together because there was this proposal that was on the table so what we should talk about what's the best for the city I think it's a good idea to consider this as a kind of a draft but I have constituents I have more than one that we would definitely like I mean open to either way I've also mentioned crosswalks particularly are not lit well and it's been on front porch forum a number of times in the last few weeks it's been so dark and the other thing I'm just really excited is one thing to add which is that some time ago as we were considering the charter change regarding sustainability and we ended up narrowing it to single use plastics part of that discussion was also around energy efficiency and just want to update you that I'm continuing to have conversations with our lawyer and doing some research as to what might be necessary to have some level of energy efficiency ordinances implemented and so I just want to put that back on the radar that we might be having that discussion again in the near future so hope to have more information to you all about that soon but not yet so that's it for me City Clerk Real quick speaking of the Charter Changes Speaking of the Charter Changes the City Clerk's office has started to take an active role in trying to make sure that the legislature hears the voices of the citizens of Montpelier on the two Charter Changes that we voted to and act on November 6th so I will be reaching out to all of you to ask for help. Thank you Just a couple of very quick things one just to follow up on what Ashley said there was a rash of break-ins in downtown over the last week or so there's a lot of talk about that in businesses in some homes and while that person has not been apprehended by us they may have been apprehended by another agency for a different cause but there's a strong suspect and my main point is it was directly tied into substance abuse and addiction and heavy issues so we have our budget what we call Budget Congress next week so that is if you hear us referring to that that's just the staff gets in a room for a couple of days and that's all we do for a couple of days until we come up with a number and one thing I just want to mention quickly we've come up and we've we're talking about this but we had somewhat of an extensive goals or a strategic planning process this past year that I think most people liked and we talked some about doing it again next year and possibly also at least including some members of other committees or at least tying into the master planning process somehow and I know we're talking about something after the date of which at least one council member will not be a member but there will be a majority of you returning assuming good health and to the extent that we want to make some kind of commitment or try to start scheduling that ideally with Julia again I could do that. I just happened to have a conversation with her and she said she's booking up fast so I thought I'd at least run it up the flagpole before we I think I'd even sent you a note about that. Sounds good. It was great. That's all I have. Okay, then without objection we're going to consider this meeting adjourned.