one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. The next item is instructions on exiting the building in case of emergency and review of technology options. Great, thank you. So for those in the room, there are two doors on either side of the rear of the auditorium. You can go out either one and turn right or left to get outside. For those participating online, if you are interested in making comment, you can message me in the chat and we will call on you. Or you can just turn your cameras on and we will know you would like to participate. We are not monitoring the chat for content. Thank you. Alrighty, thanks. Item three is the agenda review. Are there any additions, deletions, or changes in order of the agenda items? Seeing none. And by the way, Tom Chitenden will be here in about half an hour, 45 minutes here to conflict. Okay. So, seeing none, we will move on to item four, comments and questions from the public that are not related to anything on the agenda. Is there anyone who is here in person who wishes to do that? There are a couple of people, but all right, is there anyone online who wanted to make a comment? All right, seeing none, we will move on to item five, councilor's announcements and reports on committee assignments and the manager's report. Megan, do you want to start? I don't really have anything to report. All right. Matt? Sure. I just would like to report that had multiple conversations with staff and the committee for common area of dogs and continue to have that conversation tonight. So it's more my neighborhood and Tim's neighborhood, but there was a concern about the movement of construction traffic on Summerfield Lane, Insider Mill Drive, Paul Conner stepped right up and provided an explanation to the residents. And just another example of great customer service that we have, explaining why those trucks were there and making sure that they didn't continue on that path. Green Mountain Transit Authority, I've been appointed chair of the operations committee, so they're going to double my pay, just kidding, zero. Well, they're going to double your pay, right? And V-Trans has been awarded, speaking of Green Mountain Transportation Authority, V-Trans has been awarded $9.2 million for the purchase of low and zero mission vehicles and GMTA is going to use that to purchase more electric buses. So that's exciting. Excellent. Great. And that's it. Good. Okay. Thank you. Tim? Yes. I was the only city counselor to attend the grand opening ribbon cutting of the Samansky pickleball, resurfacing, painting, and the basketball courts. My sister from Canada, Teresa, was here for a few days, and I took her down there, introduced her to Holly and Adam, and took pictures, lots of pictures, and what a great facility, and what a really exciting group of people out there just whacking the heck out of that ball. I was, they were like, Tim, come play. I'm like, no, first of all, I'm not dressed for it, and I was wearing shoes for it, and I don't want to get sweaty right now because it was a warm day. We're really glad to see that work by Recreation and Parks, a nice facility, good resurfacing and painting. I also went to the bridge design meeting last week, and unfortunately, they decided not to adopt my idea, which was a huge square topsoil-masted schooner with huge metal masks and, you know, sails as you come through the interstate. Oh, cool. Yeah, but they said, no, it wasn't affordable. But I thought I'd try, at least, and I talked to the lead designer, and she said, no. I also visited Portsmouth, New Hampshire, over the weekend, Labor Day weekend, and was, happened upon the Portsmouth Prescott Park Arts Festival, and they had a huge, like, soundstage built with lighting, and the park was filled with probably, I don't know, a thousand people, and a folk band from Canada called Wild Rivers was opening their American tour there, and it was really, what a great crowd, what a great night, and we just stumbled upon it because we heard music, you know, and we just walked towards it and then found that, and it was a really nice, small vacation to spend there, as well as going to the beach and having two good beach days. But on our way, we witnessed and were part of the problem with that V-Trans has at the Richmond Merge site, where, you know, 89 requires people to go into the left lane ends, you have to merge to the right side, and on both ends of that area, on Friday of Labor Day weekend at 4.20, when we were traveling, we saw people blocking the middle lane, straddling the line to prevent people to use the left lane to fill up both lanes to get to the merge point, and that's why I saw a VT Digger article saying that the V-Trans is going to have to reevaluate that area and then ask people to do the zipper merge. So I just want to ask the general public, yeah, use both lanes, if you use both lanes to get up to the merge point, and you're going nice and slow, guess what, you can alternate, and then you only take up half the distance that you normally would if you didn't fill one lane, and then there's less animosity, and I just want to urge everybody to be courteous on a highway at merge sections and use both full lanes and be nice. That's all I want to ask. Well, I think you should do a PSA. I think I just did. V-Trans. Well, but let's get it spread more broadly. Pardon me. Oh, see, actually, you can use it as a little spot somewhere else. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Anyway, that's all I have to say. Well, I'm glad you went to both those events, because I would have, because I love pickleball, and I'm really interested in the bridge, but I was gainfully employed, I guess. In Texas, welcoming to this world a new grandson, and so everyone is doing really well, and it was just always fun to see it's my youngest daughter, it's her first child, and she's just such a natural mother. It was just lovely to watch and oversee, so it was great. So that's where I've been for the last two weeks. So I haven't done much except meet with a number of people about the dog park and a few other conversations, but Jesse. Thank you. So I have a number of updates tonight. One I shared with the council earlier today, the announcement from UVM that they'll be investing $22 million in housing here in city center. It's about 500 beds, 295 new homes on this block right next door to City Hall. This is a huge commitment of UVM to our downtown, and I think really capitalizes and realizes some of the success and hard work this council has taken over the last decade with the community support. So I want to thank them for their investment and look forward to bringing those new homes. Can I ask a question to the city? Is that considered nonprofit and lower property tax than market rate housing? No, it's a good question. It will all be market rate housing. It will be majority owned and operated by Snyder Braverman or their entity with UVM having access to those units. So if they're not full with graduate students, staff, faculty, residents, they will go out onto the open market. It will be market rate housing. That's probably unlikely. And they will be maintaining the required commercial space on the ground floor with some interesting partnerships in the works. I look forward to that. Yes, I think that was terrific news. Thank you. It's also just to preview very good news for our, I think for our TIF Bonvo on town meeting date to be able to demonstrate to the community that this community vision is really being realized in advance of that final TIF Bonvo. Some comings and goings on the staff level on September 1st. Our senior firefighter Roger Pigeon retired after 20 years. And we had a lovely event celebrating his service. And we also welcomed Marty Gillies to the role of development review planner with the planning and zoning department. So he's very excited, interesting young person. And I think we'll bring a lot of energy to the team. Marty Gillies. I also want to thank Tim and our neighbors who attended the Bikeped Bridge community stakeholder meetings over the last week. We are accepting community feedback through September 12th. So here in the hallway, there are post-its and surveys. There's also a QR code on the website that folks can go to look at the three different options and provide their comments. So again, that will be open through September 12th. And then on November 7th, the architecture team will be here to present the final recommendation to the council. As you likely have seen, Doris Street is being repaved. That may be creating some consternation for folks. They were out there as of this morning. They will be out there for the next couple of weeks. The bad traffic days right now are scheduled to be today and tomorrow. As they do the milling and then the 29th and the 30th as they do the paving. Between that time, there will be interruption but it won't be as much lane incursion. And then a couple other upcoming events I just want to make sure is on the council and communities radar screen on September 20th at five o'clock. The public art committee will be having their long-awaited dedication of Goose Park. So it's five o'clock on the 20th. Apparently it's called Gooses. That's the name of the park. The state auditor will be here next week, September 12th, to kick off our next TIFF audit. That will be a big heavy lift for some of our staff for the next couple of months. But a very important part of the TIFF oversight process. Additionally, VEBSI, which is the Vermont Economic Progress Council, will hold their monthly meeting here on September 29th and then tour the district. So that's exciting to be able to welcome them in. Violet Nichols and I from the school have been working on the school impact fee request and I anticipate that coming to council for future consideration in October. And then finally just confirming what I said in an email earlier today that on September 27th at seven, we will be holding the Joint Planning Commission and Council meeting about the complaint values. You'll be able to answer that. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you. Moving on to the consent agenda, we have three items. The disbursements, ratifying an execution of the Third Amendment to the closing assumption and priority agreement for the Farrell Street senior housing limited partnership, and authorizing the city manager to execute and submit to the city clerk for recording a replacement irrevocable author of dedication related to Garden Street. So I'll move that we approve the consent agenda. Second. Is there any discussion? Okay. All those in favor then signify by saying aye. Aye. None opposed, it passes 4-0. Item seven then. Can you? Paul is here, but I just texted him and I think he's probably still upstairs. Do you want to go to eight? Sure. Is that okay with everyone? Yeah. We'll move on to item eight then, receive an accounting of the current American Recovery Planned Act, ARPA, the allocations and expenditures. And Andrew's going to take this through that. Sure, thank you, Helen. So we thought before we had the larger discussion about ARPA planning for the future, it would be a good time to take a look back and see, just give it an updated accounting of what we've spent and what was allocated so far outlined in the memo to you that we've already allocated a little bit over $2.5 million of the 5.5 that we initially received. The very first allocation that council took was a little bit over a year ago, and that was to fund three unfunded positions in the FY22 budget. At the time we gave you numbers based on if we filled those positions immediately, what ended up occurring is we had one position, particularly the finance support, the finance officer role that did not get filled until sometime in March. We also had the new city planner that was unfunded that also didn't get filled until later in the year. So we had some salary lag savings in the FY22 allocation. What we're recommending we do with that savings is number one in the FY23 budget council allocated $310,000 for a new ambulance. The numbers as we've seen throughout, again this was, you know, we budgeted this back in October, seen significant cost increases and that number came in about $58,000 more than the approved amount. So what we're suggesting is that council buy formal action just to make sure when we are audited for under the ARPA spending that some of that salary savings from FY22 be allocated for that purpose. Also when we came forward with the initial projections for the salary for those three unfunded positions in the out years, we were looking at somewhere around 3% cost of living increases as we've seen both with a collective bargaining agreement that was unsettled at the time and CPI since then that final settled number was a good deal higher than that. We're probably looking at similar increases for next year. So a recommendation is to use the remainder of the salary lag savings in FY22 to be placed towards those additional increases for those salaries. So there's a formal recommendation to sort of officially make those changes in your packet. Thank you. I certainly appreciated being reminded of how we had spent that money. And clearly when you read through it, I mean, we really used it exactly the way it was designed to really make sure that our staffing remained as robust as possible. So I really appreciate that. Are there any comments or questions? Tim? One question is, why is the ambulance so much more expensive? I know that lots of things are more expensive today. I'm just curious why that is. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was supposedly version 310 and it kind of came in at 368. Yeah. From what I understand, we're not going to even receive the ambulance for another, I think it was 18 to 20 months from when we ordered it. There's just such a bag log. There's such a so much more demand than supply right now. Oh, OK. If I get just that, Andrew's absolutely right. It's a really interesting thing that's happening with municipal fleets right now. They have almost all municipal vehicles have between a year and a half and two year waiting list to receive them because they weren't generated for a long time and parts weren't generated and whatnot. So it's something that we need to think about as we're doing future budgets. If we're budgeting for a vehicle that we're not going to receive into the future, how do we account for that within our CIP? It's a real interesting COVID response that is kind of new to the field. I can anticipate, perhaps, if it's two years out, a slightly larger cost. Question about all of our city vehicles, are any of them moving toward electrification? Yeah. We're trying where there are efficiencies with moving to hybrid vehicles. There's sometimes a little bit of a higher cost. We're taking all of those opportunities that we can right now. We're also, Lou Brizzi is working with Public Works on our fleet replacement plan and ensuring that those vehicles operationally that we can have electric and makes most fiscal sense to be electric now that we do it sooner rather than later. That includes building out charging stations at DPW, which he's working on right now, to make sure that we have the infrastructure needs to make that happen. And I mean, I would just be curious to know, and I don't know, so I asked this truly from a place of not knowing, because the acceleration is very, very strong on electric vehicles. Would emergency vehicles ever become electric? So what I understand as far as the big vehicles, fire trucks, plow trucks. Or police cars. Yeah, ambulances. Those larger vehicles, the technology isn't quite there yet. There are some pilot programs out there. Just the cost is two, three times what we'd see for a typical vehicle. But on the police side, I know Richmond is doing a pilot project with a Tesla. Chief Burke's been very engaged with his partners to sort of talk about how they're working functioning operationally. And as of right now, he does not believe that technology is there, but it's getting there. Thank you. Thank you. And I would think that, I mean, just for example, I think there's one of those big Ford trucks. It's all electric. But it's two years out to get one, or three.  Did you plan? You can plan on it, yes. But in the interim, if you need a truck, you may have to purchase a gasoline model or a diesel model or whatever they buy that would be relatively new and not need to be replaced for many years.  But the city does have a clarity right now, right? At least one pluggable hybrid vehicle? Yes. Is that just the only one that we have? Yeah, we just have the one fully electric vehicle. That's a city staffed vehicle here. Which vehicle is that? That's the, we call it EV. Is it the Honda? The Honda, yes, yep. It's fully electric or it's hybrid electric? I believe it was fully electric. Is it at Clarity? Is that what it's called? I don't have to get back to you. But I do know, I mean, the chief has put in his order. Chief Burke has put in his order for the hybrid police cruisers that are coming in. I know those will go a long way, particularly with idling is such a main source of carbon emissions for our fleet. So that'll go a long way on that front. Very much. Great. OK, so I would entertain a motion to accept this recommendation of the use of the unexpected, unexpended funds. So moved. And I'll second. And it's approving the reallocation, yeah. Yes, do you want to just read the motion? Yeah, go ahead, Matt. Go ahead, Matt. It's at the. I have it right here if unless you don't go ahead. I moved to approve the reallocation of FY21 spent ARPA funds as presented to pave the overage on the new ambulance purchase and beginning in FY23, the balance to fund salary variances in the three refunded city staff positions. I'll second. Is there any further discussion? All in favor signified by saying aye. Aye. So that passes. Good. Well, thank you. So we can go back to item seven. And that is receiving the LDR2205 and 2206 proposed amendments to the LDRs for the expansion of transfer of development rights, program applicability, and legal technical corrections, and considering setting a public hearing for October 7th, 2022, at 7 PM. Howdy. Hey, Paul. Paul Conner, director of planning and zoning. I think you all know me. That was a joke. Do you still have a beard, though? I do still have a beard. Yeah. So I'm here tonight to, as the warning describes, to present to you for your consideration of warning and hearing on an expansion of the transfer development rights program. As you may recall, this was one of a study of the program was one of the four studies established by city council as part of interim zoning. The task or the committee that worked on that did complete their work during interim zoning. The Planning Commission received it, and they identified a series of sort of four policy priorities that they would focus on. Ultimately, they decided that the timeline was critical on the planned unit developments and the environmental protection standards, and so provided those to you first, provided the general PUD as a cleanup second, and then this is the third piece of the puzzle. What it essentially does is it retains the same functionality in the Southeast Quadrant. There are no policy changes taking place there. There were some shifts in the round of amendments adopted at the beginning of 2022 around how much land is in the natural resource protection district versus the other ones, which shifted a little bit the sending and receiving areas, but there's no policy changes in the Southeast Quadrant from this round. What this enables is more receiving areas, so more market opportunities to use TDRs, specifically targeted to our higher density residential and mixed use areas. So largely the Shelburne Road corridor, lower Swiss Street, lower Allen Road parts of Kennedy Drive. The Planning Commission intentionally chose not to tackle the lower density residential districts, understanding that identifying how, whether, in what manner to explore any infill in those areas is a pretty substantial community conversation, and at the same time, identifying opportunities along the Shelburne Road corridor would not necessarily be at the same kind of community conversation, so that's why they chose to do this first. What it does is along the Shelburne Road corridor in the C1 and the C2 districts and a little bit of Williston Road near the intersection of Kennedy Drive, it allows for essentially unlimited density from the current cap of 12 or 15 dwelling units per acre up to, with the purchase of TDRs, an unlimited amount. What does cap it, and this is important, is the building bulk remains the same. The building what? Bulk, so the height, the size. So part of the discussion that the Planning Commission had was today along Shelburne Road, let's say somebody could come in and they'd say, I'd like to build a five-story office building, and they could do that. They could also build a five-story residential building, but there could only be 15 homes per acre within that building. At some point, we reach the point where there's more building available and the artificial cap is on the housing itself. So this removes that artificial cap and says, you still have your five stories, you still have your maximum lot coverage, your minimum setbacks, but you're not artificially held back on the number of homes that you can put in that space. So that's essentially what this does. In the medium density areas, Allen Road District, Swiss Street District that are both sort of a transition into other parts of the city and the Long Kennedy Drive, it caps the density increase out of 50% bonus, which is the same as the inclusionary zoning maximum that if you chose to provide more affordable units, so it's an either or in this case. So you could choose to, once you've met your minimum affordable, you could choose to make more affordable or to purchase TDRs. It creates a little bit more flexibility for folks to look to what they want to do. The other changes in here are technical and matter. I'm happy to go through them, but they're little technical corrections. Yes. Yes. That point that you last made was really important, and I want to make sure I understand it. Sure. Someone purchases TDRs in order to increase their density in the new receiving areas. Yeah. The 15% inclusionary or affordable housing requirement is based on the new TDRs, or excuse me, the increased density allowed by the TDRs or is that 15% based on before the TDRs are purchased? Or the 15% is based on the underlying, but on the, hang on, I have to think about the math on this. If it's a, what was your example before? The 50 unit. Units purchased via TDR do not pay for inclusionary. Say that, I'm sorry. Say that one more time. They do not. They're bonuses. So if you, it's based on the base number of dwelling units that you put in, not the additional that you buy via TDR. So if you bought 10 more homes in TDR, you don't then also have to have them be, a portion of those be affordable. You do not? Got it. Do not. So in other words, you are not required, let me just say it one more time, make sure you have this right. You're not required to purchase, you're not required to build more affordable housing if you purchase TDRs in order to expand the density on that new receiving. Correct. So once you've, right. You can if you want though.  Right. Correct. Okay. I think I got it. And I just had a quick question. Looking at the orange part. Yes. Now, is some of that the O'Brien development? I just, I'm curious if it sort of will apply going forward to them. So it does include portions of the O'Brien hillside neighborhood, which is largely built. Yes. Well, there's a good, yeah. Right. In concept, they could make use of it, but it's drawn based on the zoning district. And so we weren't, the planning commission wasn't adjusting zoning districts. Okay. They could conceivably take advantage of it, but they in the hillside neighborhood have essentially laid out all their final plans. Okay. And if they did decide to do that, would they have to go back to- That would be an amendment to their- The DRV to say, hey, we want to build 50 more because we have these. Yep. Okay. So they potentially won't, but they could. But they could. Yep. But it doesn't include that. Okay. Just as any other neighborhood that is built or mostly built like Feral Street or something like that, there are portions. The neighborhood along Feral Street made use of some office space, for instance, as part of their total area. They could convert some of that office space to housing now, because they had maximized all of their affordability, all of their dwelling units before counting the office space so they could now in theory convert some of their office space, for example. Okay. So it would- Go ahead. I had increased how many individual office spaces, because I saw that commercial districts were included. So I just was- One of my questions had to do with how that was going to- So one of the sort of oddities of our regulations has been that as I was describing before, we have a maximum building size, a maximum height, a minimum setback lot coverage. There is no cap on the amount of non-residential. It's just whatever you can put within that space. On the residential side, however, there is this supplemental artificial cap that goes alongside the maximum size of the building. So this essentially removes that to allow for if that entire building could have been office, that entire building could be residential. I see. Okay. And the other question I had had to do with, did you discuss incentives with the Planning Commission? You know, the cost versus the revenue. The Planning Commission did discuss a couple of different ways in which they could adjust the market. So for example, the big one that they discussed was could one in certain zoning districts let's say along Shelburne Road, have one TDR count for two or maybe even three dwelling units. So you buy one TDR, you could build three homes with it, which would essentially say that in that district, it would potentially tip the market to invite somebody who's thinking about buying a TDR to buy it and use it there, instead of somewhere else. They ultimately decided that there's a fair amount of unknowns about what impacts this will have in the market. It's hard to know until people start using it. And they felt that they could always adjust it upwards if they felt that there was an advantage to the city to making a transfer development right worth two homes in a certain part of the city, but it would be very difficult to turn it backwards if they had essentially overheated it. So they decided to just have it be one to start with, see how it goes. Okay, all right. How much per TDR is the going rate? I can say prior to 2020, they were ranging somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to $13,000 per unit. I couldn't tell you what, just like I couldn't tell you what a home goes for now, I couldn't tell you what a TDR goes for. The markets are all sort of all over the place right now. Thank you. Sure. And just for some clarity for me in terms of the TDRs, once you sell one, does it, is it included in your deed so that the next purchaser of your home and your 40 acres or whatever it is can't resell it and keep? That's correct. So what goes in the land records associated with your deed is a, it's technically called a density reduction easement. Oh, okay. And so you have, there's a plat, there's an actual physical drawing of these, physical area that you have sold it from. And then the easement essentially says that you have given up the ability to develop this for X purposes. It may still be used by the landowner for agriculture and silviculture and general enjoyment, but not for development purposes. So they're not selling an undevelopable plot as a TDR? Like the wetlands or something that you could develop. So one of the changes that took place in February of 2022, this, the prior, prior round of amendments was that density is calculated based on the developable land, excluding wetlands. And the same thing now therefore applies to TDRs. So that was one of the other recommendations that had come out of the TDR. That is law. Okay. Thank you. Matt, did you have a question? Yeah, let's him go. I did, but I'll let him go first. Well, you're younger. You can remember it. Tim couldn't remember his questions. We gotta have him go right now. He's right after you. So that plat you're talking about has to be filed. That would require the seller to do a survey? Yes. Okay. It does have to be surveyed per state law and it goes into the land records just as any other survey would and is recorded permanently with Donna and company. Okay. Thinking about how this would work if somebody wanted to build a housing, let's say in the reddish zone on Shelburne Road, they had a certain number of, they had some land, a certain number of acres, which means they could only build a certain number of units depending upon what the average size of that unit might be. They might have a footprint for their building that might not reach the setback rules or reach the height limits either, right? It might be smaller based upon whatever they wanted to build. But by buying TDRs with no limit in that no maximum density, right? They could build out to a full, you know, all the setbacks to the maximum height and they could conceivably have really tiny apartments, right? If they thought they could sell them, right? Or rent them, correct? Correct. There is nothing in the regulations that says that units need to be of a certain number of bedrooms, et cetera. It does say that if you're, that your inclusionary dwelling units have to have the same average number of bedrooms as your market rate, but it doesn't say that you couldn't do all one bedrooms. For example, the Planning Commission did discuss that and talked about the possibility of, is it time in the city to require for developments over a certain scale to say there must be a minimum of X percent, two bedrooms or three bedrooms or something like that, regardless of TDRs, regardless of inclusionary, they were intrigued by it, but felt that that was taking a little bit of a tangent from the purpose of the TDR, but they recognized that that could have, there could be that effect on the market. Additionally, looking at a property like the Bartlett Brook Apartments, for example, that was a pretty large parcel in which that was built and there's now the CCOM Bank in front of it. With the building of that residential building, they used the entire density for the entire property. So had they wanted to do another residential building where the CCOM Bank is, they were not able to previously. But they could now. They could under the TDR. So that could be a different option, a different choice that somebody makes. Then my final question so far is in that orange, the orange little area in the southwest corner, which is probably a mostly along Allen Road, there is a lot of wooded area in there. Are those known habitat forest blocks that are not to be disturbed? There is a habitat block along the Shelburne line. And also I think there's a stream in that area too. And so that land would be discounted from the base density and is not a buildable area unless the property is 70% forest in which case they're allowed to build on 30%. Okay, thank you. Yep.  Oh, that's, Paul clarified it. Thank you, which is just to reiterate the green area, the sending area in the SCQ, that has shrunk because we're no longer allowing you to sell TDRs in the NRP if it's on your land, right? The NRP physical area itself grew a little bit last winter, a little bit in the Highland Terrace area, a little bit around the Great Swamp as a physical area. The number of TDRs available has shrunk a little bit though because hazards, which are wetlands, floodplains, et cetera, are removed from the calculation now. But just the blue area in the SCQ, which can still be receiving, that hasn't shrunk at all, has it? That, it shrunk a little bit, as I said, in the winter, last winter, when the NRP expanded a little bit, it took over a little bit of what is the blue. Okay. Not a large number, but some number of acres more than 10 and less than 60. But obviously the big change is the red and the orange area, which are now able to receive TDRs and we can increase density in those areas this plan. Correct. Got it. That's the policy change here. And each TDR buys you, it depends. If it's in the red, you can, So it's always, from a housing perspective, it's always 0.83 acres of conservation. So the 1.2 dwelling units in acre of the Southeast quadrant inverted. So that's how much land is conserved for one dwelling unit. Whether that dwelling unit is a single family home or a unit in an apartment building. It's one regardless. A year and a half ago, the council did approve one other use of TDRs, which is to increase lot coverage a little bit. This was something that Bill Shearer had inquired about. And so that's another way that a TDR can be used to increase lot coverage a little bit in the urban design area. But in terms of housing, it's one, one is one is one. It's, as I said, the commission thought about making it worth more in the Shelburne Road area, and they may still decide depending on what happens in the market to do that or recommend. So to really increase the density enormously, you have to buy a lot of these TDRs. Yes. Well, that's what the owners want to have happen, right? So people on the land want to sell the TDRs, which is in part why we did this, right? To make sure that their investment, they were made as whole as they could, even though we shrunk some of the area. Right. I mean, there's two fundamental purposes of a good TDR program. One is to conserve that which are seeking to conserve, which in South Burlington is open land. And the other is to identify areas where you might want to, where you would want to see and you would see a benefit from increase, an increase density. Alrighty. One minor correction. I think we talked about October 17th, Jesse. I was listed as seventh, but the second meeting in October for the hearing. It says October 17th. Oh, okay. I think verbally it was announced as seventh. So I just want to be. Maybe I said October 7th. I could have. Can I ask one more question? Yes, you may. So from past experience on the right side here, on the DRB, we certainly had the TDRs challenge, the legality of the TDR challenge from those that didn't want increased density, Supreme Court upheld our regulation that TDRs are in fact legal, despite those motions, which is a good. On the other side, has anyone purchased a property that the prior owner sold the TDR and then try to develop it and challenge the legality of TDRs? Can you pose that question again? On the other side. So if someone ever purchased a property in which the prior owner sold the TDR, making portion part of that land of that parcel undevelopable and then try to develop it and challenge the legality of that TDRs that the prior owner sold? Not in South Burlington. I'd have to look check in with our legal counsel and be happy to do it in advance of the hearing of whether there's any case law at all on that. I would doubt that there is case law in Vermont because there are very few communities that have adopted it, but they can do a broader search also if that's something that counsel would like to know. I'm just curious if we've had that experience here because certainly having been through on the development review board, the concerns from our neighbors that didn't think TDRs was an actual policy that could be upheld in court, I just wanted to affirm that it has been upheld in court. It has. Okay. Well, I would entertain a motion then. We have a motion here. Do we have the motion? I have a motion. Does anyone make it? Go for it, go for it, yes. I move to warn a public hearing on amendments to the land development regulations number LDR 22-05 and LDR 22-06 for Monday, October 17th, 2022 at 7.30 p.m. That can't, 7.30? That's what's marked. Okay, you know, our agenda says 7 o'clock, but 7.30 is fine with me. Whichever you would like. Do we, is earlier better? Probably, for Paul, what's your current? Yeah. Depends what else you're doing on that night. Well, that's true. Yeah, but this takes precedence, right? If we set up, why don't we do 7 o'clock? So I amend the motion to rephrase it from 7.30 p.m. to 7.00 p.m. on October 17th, 2022. And I'll still second that. All right, any further discussion? One small thing. Yes, one last thing.  And nobody wants to park their bike right on Shelburne Road. They want to park it behind where the sliding glass doors are, because it's a little safer there, you know, Wellington separately. We've got some bike theft problems going on. So anyway, just making a comment about locations of bike racks should be around the back of the building where most of the foot traffic is. That's all. Oh, is that a TDR issue? No. Oh, I think we do a TDR on the sequitur. It could be an amendment. Yeah, right. We could fix that up too at the same time. Okay. So we have a motion that's been made and seconded. No further discussion. All in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. So that passes. So we'll see you on the 17th, if not before. We might even see you before that. I'm sure it might be before, if I'm wrong. Thanks, Paul. Thank you. Okay. So we are now down to item nine, receiving recommendations. This is so exciting. From the Affordable Housing Committee and Housing Trust Fund Committee to allocate ARPA funds to incentivize the development of affordable housing and to provide direction to staff on the next steps. So Chris Tromblay, Chair, is going to present that. So just as Chris, I'm mute, so I also do want to call it. We have a number of representatives from both the Housing Affordable Housing Committee and Housing Trust Fund here, as well as I think all of the developer represents from almost all of the applicants, if you want to hear from the applicants. Oh, yeah, I would think we would. Okay. Chris going to lead off and then, okay. Well, welcome. Ellen, thank you. Hi, thank you for the opportunity to present our proposal to the city council. So back in April, we first came to you with a statement of values for the RFP. And after your generous approval, we were excited to find that after the RFP closed, we received six applications and the committee was allowed by this response and also created the tough discussion of how do you evaluate some strong proposals? And so today, I'm here to talk about our recommendation. In total, the six proposals exceeded $3 million in request. And if we were asked to come in around $1 million, some decisions had to be made, but we were excited really by the number and the quality of the responses. So really after exhaustive committee discussion, we had a full half, or excuse me, we had a half day meeting joint with the Housing Trust Fund to review the applications. We did both quantitative analysis to compare the applications to the RFP and the values that we reviewed or submitted. And then we also had just kind of a larger discussion of how do we want to, how do you make this tough decision of where do you allocate and what's the best outcome for South Brompton? At our follow-up meeting, we unanimously approved with one extension, the committee proposal you have in your agenda today. That proposal was ratified unanimously by the Housing Trust Fund. So what you're seeing here today is shows, I think, our dedication and commitment to these proposals. The first one is $300,000 to Cathedral Square. This is the gazebo property on the Wilson Road within the Transit Overlay District. And we were excited to learn about some of the residential rental housing for long-term care staff. For those who are more involved in that area, housing is a challenge for staff and they're experiencing historic staffing challenges. So that'll certainly meet a need in that community while it's also redevelopment of an existing property. The next is for $300,000 to Champlain Housing Trust to renovate and convert the Hoham Motel on Wilson Road. Again, within the Transit Overlay District, it's redevelopment and it serves the largely almost or transitional housing for folks. And this money will help with upgrades to that particular building. And the next proposal, $500,000 to Champlain Housing Trust and Remount Habitat to develop the Dorset Commons plot that currently is near 577 Dorset Street. And there is a plot of land owned by the, that was owned by the city that became identified as a potential to build affordable housing there. And so we were excited to see that that would have a ownership as well. And so the three proposals here serve within or below the area median income levels that we were hoping for. So we set a ceiling of 80% with the hope that we would be able to really build housing for lowering income levels as well. So with these three proposals, that's 34 units of residential care, 28 market and eight inclusionary rentals, just at the Gonzego, 16, three bedroom home ownership opportunities at Dorset Commons and 21 bedroom really renovative apartments for the former homeless at the Hoham Hotel. So we're really seeing a broad spectrum of residents that would be served. And it really starts from transitional to rental to home ownership and it's all within the 80% AMI. We also were impressed with the application from Summit and they had come in and made a request and we supported an additional 300,000 on time. On top of the additional three. So we're asking first consideration for the first three and also recommendation to consider the 300,000 also for the Summit property. As you know, it's a project that has both coats, excuse me, cotton rentals below area median income and market rate housing. And this certainly was designated as a worthy project, but we were hesitant to over commit our allocation. There were two other applications that were received. We were, I think your first reaction is we want to approve everything and at three million, that's not what we were tasked with. So there was a prioritization that we made a dedication to shovel ready projects that would help a broad spectrum of residents in the area. And we're excited to continue to work with the other applicants about future opportunities and engage them about, what can we do to make their proposals a reality here in self growing. So I'll pause there. If there's anybody from the affordable housing or housing trust one that wants to speak by all means, otherwise, Helen, I'll turn it back over to you for questions. Thank you. Okay, I have some questions. So I don't see anyone raising their hand to speak. So you were, we had a million dollars and you're asking for 1.1. So is the expectation that we would use the money that we have in the affordable trust fund to cover that additional 100,000 or do we pare down some of these proposals a little bit? That's one question. Sure, there was an expectation of where that gap in funding would come from, whether that's from the ARPA pool, it's our understanding that the housing trust fund money that is available has other applications to consider and we can speak for that group of. Okay. So you would like us to increase the ARPA designation for affordable housing. And we don't make that recommendation lightly. No, I'm sure you don't. I'm just trying to get the clarity. That's okay. So the three proposals that were the priority was 1.1 and we're asking for additional consideration that would exceed our original allocation for the summer property as well. And that would put it at 1.4. Oh, okay. So there's that as well. Okay. And then I just have a question in terms of the collaboration, I guess, between Champlain Housing Trust and the Green Mountain Habitat for Humanity. Typically they sell the properties, they use a lot of sweat equity and some of their own workers to build these structures and then they sell them and the money kind of becomes what, a revolving fund of some sort and they can go out and buy the next piece of property and build them. And is that how this works or is the sale of these, does that go back to the Champlain Housing Trust to help support this whole project? It looks like the fortunate to have- So Amy can answer that probably better than anyone. Yes, thank you. That's what I was gonna say. Hi, thanks. I'm Amy Demetruits with the Champlain Housing Trust and Dave Mullins is here as well who is with Green Mountain Habitat for Humanity. He can speak to this issue as well. So thank you so much for considering our applications. This project in particular is to, really it's to pay for the infrastructure that's needed to then allow for the construction by Habitat for Humanity of these homes. The cost of the homes, even with the volunteer labor and with some donated materials, we still need to subsidize that sale and so this ARPA funding will stay with the property as a subsidy to the buyers. Okay. I can, David can respond to that as well. Yeah, thanks Amy. Yeah, so together, Champlain Housing Trust and Green Mountain Habitat would make these homes possible. As Amy said, the money is to enable that infrastructure to get done and then on top of that infrastructure, we would have to raise money and seek out funding for those 16 homes, eight duplexes I believe. And so we would raise that money. So what we're doing is leveraging that 500,000 into those 16 homes. So we certainly are making good use of those funds. And on behalf of 16 families, I wanna say thank you. I think that's a great decision. Okay, thank you. Other questions by council members? Yeah, I'd like to know more about where those 16 homes are in the Dorset Commons area. I'm looking at a map of it and I, you know, I don't understand. Is it behind City Hall? Do you remember what we call when we carved out what we were gonna sell or lease to the school department? We had identified a possibility of development back there and we made sure that the line didn't include that, that that was at least developed, continued to be city land that we controlled that would be available potentially for development. But does that extend like behind the fire department and then along between Ocean Avenue and the interstate entrance ramp? Is that what that area is? I think so. Okay. Just curious. That's why I think there's some suggestions about some noise mitigation, right? Okay. Because of what? The highway as well as the fire department? I see. The school's probably pretty quiet, but. Yeah. So it's not on currently developed, or it's not the current Old City Hall. It's the area behind it. Yes. But it's new. We had carved that out. We had done a fair amount of, as I recall, a fair amount of site work for, you know, stormwater and stuff, but I guess even more is needed. But we had already invested, I don't know how much. It was a lot of money, wasn't it? Like a million bucks or something to bring it up to speed. I have another comment. Sure. I'm not making a judgment.  So if these get sold to a nonprofit, then the assessed value might stay the same, but the tax rate's gonna fall for them because they would be part of a nonprofit, just like we have with Allard Square next door, right? Is it like 20% or something? It's not... I believe it's... Is what they pay the taxes? I think so. I believe it's 75% of the assessed value. 75% of the assessed value. Amy, you can correct me if I'm wrong on that. And that's for nonprofit affordable housing. Okay, thank you. Is that right, Amy? It's 70% for owned home ownership units because those are, you know, they can only be sold for a reduced price. For affordable rental housing, it's a formula based on income. And so I think you're probably right. It ends up being 75, 80%, but it's actually not just a set percentage. It's based on the income approach to assessing property. And that income obviously is restricted due to the rent restrictions. Is that reassessed every year or is it just done once at the beginning and then just based upon a normal reassessment schedule that the city undergoes? You know, that's a good question. I'm honestly not sure about the answer to that. I believe it's done annually, but I'd have to check. We can figure that out. Is that true for Habitat as well? Because that's ownership.  The homes that we developed, the Champlain Housing Trust, and certainly the ones that we do in partnership with Green Mountain Habitat, they're shared equity homes. And so what that means is when somebody does decide they do well, whatever happens in their lives, they decide that they're ready to sell the home. They're gonna sell the home for what they paid for it, which is that subsidized price, plus 25% of the increase in the value while they've owned it. So they're making a commitment to sharing the appreciation in their property with the next buyer. And that's why the state decided that it was necessary to restrict the assessed value of shared equity homes, because the owner shouldn't be paying tax on the value of the home that they'll never be able to realize. It's really a community asset to assure that there's always affordable homes for sale. And so the assessed value is 70% of the market rate value. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, thank you. Yeah. Are there other questions by the council? How about some of the members? Does anyone else wish to speak in support or opposed to this? Yes, Sandy, please tell, okay. Sandy Dooley, affordable housing committee and vice chair. The money would pay, there is still stormwater concerns that have to be addressed. So that hasn't been. Plus streets or driveways or whatever, and sewer and water. So as I understand it, maybe David and Amy, this money is not for the cost of construction. Yes, I understand. Yeah, I just want to make sure that's clear. Thank you. Zeke from summit would like to make a comment or comments, probably more than one sentence. Yeah. Hi, Zeke Davis and Summit Properties. Is the light on at that? Press the little green button. Oh, not light enough. Thank you. Zeke Davis and Summit Properties. First of all, I just wanted to thank the city council and the affordable housing committee for the commitment using the local art for money for affordable housing. Sounds like you had $1.6 million worth of worthy projects. And with the $1 million early initially allocated. And we appreciate the consideration, but just wanted an opportunity to talk a little bit more about our project and hope for allocation of our request as well to be heard by the city council. It sounds like there were these four projects that really fit the RFE criteria that the affordable housing committee was excited about, including ours, exceeding the inclusionary requirements, really deep affordability, 71 affordable homes. We're hoping to build as soon as possible, 20 of those at deep affordability, less than 30% of AMI set aside for formerly homeless. Energy efficiency, we've always exceeded the high performance track, all electric HVAC, and I think readiness and track record, this project was an example chosen by VHFA, we did a press release on the site recently with our congressional delegation as one of these really, truly transformational, impactful projects in the state of Vermont. And readiness, we are trying to leverage $20 million worth of subsidy already received to build 71 affordable units, all of which are affordable for people less than 60, to make less than 60% of AMI. That's a really low, our $500,000 ask was a really low per door request to really get us to the finish line. This has been a two year process, putting this puzzle together. A lot of these awards, VHCB, VHFA, started about six months ago. I don't think anybody needs to be reminded about the construction cost environment, the interest rate environment we find ourselves now in at the end of this process of putting together the financing and it was really this, this is the last piece of financing we're hoping for to be able to get this project to go this fall as soon as we can. And so as you have the conversations about how we're leveraging resources, how your town, ARPA money is leveraging resources, we really do hope you consider including ours in that mix and I would, you know, happy to answer any questions about this project specifically. So just to be clear, the final gap of funding you need is $500,000. Yeah, so this is our business. And then it's a go, you could just start. Yep, we're pulling construction permits and working to a closing, hopefully in the next four to six weeks.  Okay, and Tom Gatz is. Yep. Tom? Hi, all, yeah, thank you. And that's, yeah, Zeke really hit the nail in the head. We are finalizing those construction bids and pushing hard towards closing.  We got every allocation and it's the cost increases since then that leaves us with this gap in the project. And, you know, Zeke mentioned the energy efficiency. We've gone ahead with an all-electric heating and cooling building, you know, that efficiency Vermont high performance tier is demanding and we've met it on our last two buildings and we'll be meeting it here. I think our last two buildings that this was based off of had airflow leakage based on the lower door tests of less than 0.07, you know, CFM that's approaching passive house standards. So, you know, and I think as we've talked about before the council, we've at this point built over $2 million of offsite solar to offset our use of, you know, of usage in Vermont for our other buildings that were also all electric heating and cooling. And there's no onsite solar as part of this project but that commitment continues. So, in terms of checking every box, that, you know, of an ultra high impact project that this sort of gap financing helps get to the finish line, it would be, you know, we were very careful not to over request early on when our application came in at about $300,000, $290,000 per unit to develop when we originally came to you. That has gone up to $310,000 per unit to develop. That sounds like a lot, but when you compare it to the rest of the state, the average project, new construction this year, all other affordable housing projects was $380,000 per unit. So, we are all still very, very efficient and we were able to achieve that efficiency by building this dense, high impact project, $290,000 per unit. The O'Brien brothers stepped to the plate and are providing, they paid the Act 250 costs, they're paying all the offsite infrastructure, so they're paying for the stormwater ponds, they're paying for all connections off our site. And that's the only reason we're able to come in so low on our cost per unit and able to say that if you can give us this $500,000 to help us get to the finish line, we can leverage this additional 20 million to bring 71 units of affordable housing plus another 23 market rate units to this community and we'll be ready to start this fall. So we really just appreciate your consideration. And obviously we didn't have the chance to talk to the affordable housing committee ahead of time as part of this process. So I totally understand where the initial recommendations come from, but I do think there's a lot of context that we can provide tonight about this project that was not available as part of that initial application. I have a question. Yes, okay, go ahead and then, Matt, thanks. The all electric, does that include the stove, the electric ranges? Are we electric ranges? Yes. I'll have to remember if we get all electric ranges. The only thing that's not electric is the domestic hot water. Okay, that's what I was gonna ask. My second question, thank you. Matt. Yeah, just a clarifying question. I think for Chris, which is in the memo regarding the summit of O'Brien Farms by Summit Properties, and maybe Tom can fill in, but you're saying supported with 300,000 of the 500,000 requested. I'm hearing from Summit that they want the 500,000. What am I, I'm sorry, I'm slow on the uptake here. Are you saying, because we said the number was 1.1 million with the three other projects and then another 300,000, but I'm now hearing 500,000. What am I missing with the $200,000 gap? The Housing Trust Fund, I think. The original summit asked was for 500. The committee after discussion in consideration of other contributions with the Housing Trust Fund and CDBG funds, the committee came back with a recommendation of 300,000. Oh, okay. We're not nullifying Summit's request that they need the 500,000, but it was the consensus of both committees that the 300,000 was our recommendation. Okay. Confused, the 500,000, there's 300,000, 300,000. Yeah, let's get it, let's get it. Okay, thank you. Because I asked her. So in Summit's RFP response, they have requested 500,000. Somebody mute. Chris, I'm gonna mute you for a quick second, because I think we're getting a little echo, but unmute. Summit, in Summit's proposal, they requested half a million, 500,000. When the two committees discussed, they recommended moving forward 300,000. Summit has also made a request to the Housing Trust Fund, of which there is 150,000 balance through this fiscal year. So there's a, and the Housing Trust Fund has met and members are on here today to think about, we actually have two requests to the Housing Trust Fund Summit and another developer who's also not here tonight. So that's not necessarily a public application at this point. So I think the question for council, if you want to support at some level, is do you take the recommendation of the committee and leave that other application with the Housing Trust Fund? Or do you leverage these one-time dollars to Summit if you want to fund at a higher level and leave the Housing Trust Fund for other projects that may come in later this year? We already allocate a million to Summit? So that was a CDBG application that we co-signed. Those are our dollars, those are state dollars. Those are state dollars, right. So this is a separate request. Yes. Did that clarify? Yes, I understand that. So I have, you know, later on our agenda, we have a discussion around dog parks. And I'm just curious of the three proposals and now potentially the four. Do you do anything about responding to your residents who have dogs and provide any kind of area for them? Not a dog park per se that's open to the public, but just, you know, around the building, what? Amenity.  Is that part of affordable housing lexicon? Yeah, I think I'll speak for our project. You know, it's within the master plan of the Summit at O'Brien Farms, which does build in, or sorry, Hillside at O'Brien Farms and the O'Brien Farms Master Plan, which does include a lot of amenity space, a lot of park space, I think a dedicated dog park. So again, one of the benefits of this project is that it fits within that. One of the reasons it's so efficient is because it's within the scope of that. And that's one of the type of amenities that is included in this development. Okay, Amy, can you respond to what, if anything, that the Housing Trust Fund does? Sure, so at our Dorset Commons project, that'll be ownership and their duplex units. So people will have their own yards and they can certainly fence off those yards and have their dogs available, you know, to run free in those yards. There is a lot of space, open space at our Dorset Commons apartments. And so there's plenty of room to walk your dog. There's no place for off leash dogs running. I have to say on any of our properties. And then the ho-hum conversion, there is also common green space, but dogs would need to remain on leash. Thank you. Other questions or comments? Well, I think, oh, go ahead, Tom. Yes, please. Sorry, I'm late. My apologies, and if this was already covered, but I'm a little slow on the uptake as well. So I see the three projects you're recommending, a totaling 1.1 million. The 300,000 for the summit property is on top of that for a total allocation, recommendation of 1.4 million from ARPA. Is that correct? Yeah. And it's correct. Thank you very much. But summit is asking us for another two. Okay, 300 plus two, I understand. Pardon me? 300 plus two, I understand. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's what they would like. That's what they need is $500,000. And if we want to offer it, they wouldn't say no. So we could use some other ARPA money potentially. So that's the conversation or the policy decision for us. And then we'd have to use some additional ARPA money for the 100,000. That's the recommendation of the affordable housing and trust fund. And champion housing trust already administers Dorset Commons, is that true? Yes. Yeah, I mean, I do believe that housing is a major need. And I think that this is a very compelling request. So how to provide direction to our staff is we're gonna have further discussion on the community survey. And so taking those priorities as well as this as a major priority, I would just like to see the numbers and creative thinking on how we can meet the needs, when we can meet the needs to just make this the most optimal use of these funds, right? I mean, it's, you've served us well so far. So I have confidence that we will get there, but it's hard for me to say without a list in front of me to really kind of parse through, but I see this as a really important investment that we could make. I would agree. We have Ariel who wants to speak. So why don't you come forward? Thank you, Z. Oh, my name is Ariel Jensenbergas. And right now I'm speaking, although I'm also on the Housing Trust Committee. I'm speaking as a member of the Affordable Housing Committee. So as you may have noticed, there was one abstention vote for what we voted on. We voted on all three projects and we were all very excited about all three projects. But what happened was after the meeting I had second thoughts about the CHT Green Mountain Habitat for the Humanity Project. And the more that I thought about it, the more I felt that we should not be building residential housing behind a firehouse right off the highway. In my opinion, noise pollution is becoming an increasing problem in South Burlington. I've spent basically the entire year shopping for a condo or a home. And any residents that is not right off Kennedy or right underneath the wings of the fighter planes or right by I-95 is Slim Pickens. And those are usually mansions. So I'm actually seeing this as an evolving issue and I'm seeing that we might be kind of offering what might be kind of substandard housing, not just affordable but substandard in if people are living with so much noise pollution in and there is one part of the discussion was about mitigating sound pollution and existing buildings. And to me, this is a distinction between building new housing where we know that there will be noise pollution. So I did abstain from the vote after all, but I would do nothing to prevent the project for going through, but I think that is something that the committee might weigh in your deliberations. Thank you. Were you aware that the Kirby houses that are near the airport that were built and we had to give up our support for them to the FAA and as it turned out, the airport was able to save them and now beta owns them, but they were, we were told were extremely well insulated and the noise they could deal with the jet noise inside the house, obviously not outside. And the reason we come to Vermont, the reason we wanna live in Vermont is because of the great indoors, right? Yeah. Well, right. We are indoors, some of the time. We are, right?  Right. Well, I guess I just bring that up because that construction as I understand was really very sound proof as well as energy efficient, but I don't know what the plans are for these houses. So probably just start. And I appreciate your, ultimately, even though I did, it was not well received, the other members of the committee were saying, listen, we all agreed to this. What are you saying? We can't just restart from the beginning. And I said, you're right, but I just don't feel right about supporting that. I mean, unless we're talking about some kind of sound mitigation, which is then, of course, adding to the cost. Sure. The secondary reason was that I was in attendance to a city council meeting where there was an accident for a young person crossing Dorset from the South Burlington High School. There was a discussion about how that section is tree lined and very dark at night. So then now we're talking about more children, possibly other people related to the school living in that complex, more crossing, which I think ultimately would add a cost for the city to make sure that that walkway is safe. So I think that there are some hidden costs associated with that project. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Tim, did you want to? Yeah, I want to point out that I think South Burlington is a little bit unique in the way that it's crisscrossed by Interstate 89 and 189 and 116. And even though Dorset and Speer are not high speed, they can become high speed. So there's a lot of crisscrossing of rather high speed traffic and Sheldon Road as well. And so like, I think almost every neighborhood has some impact by some sort of noise, some more than others, I agree with that. But when I lived on Meadow Road, right, if it was warm out, I had my windows open and there was a South wind, I could hear all the trucks coming down 189 to Sheldon Road with their Murphy brakes on, you know? And that was a lot of noise and it was bothersome. And then other areas, you might not have traffic, but then you do have airport noise. So I guess my point is that there probably are very few areas in the city that are totally absent of any noise. Even where I live now, I get the 555, the six o'clock, the 605 and the 610 flights, they come up and they come right over to Shelburne South, right in line. And it's, you know, the GE engines are just winding away. Wow, wow. I was like, oh, it's time to get up. It's six a.m., right? But you also hear people with, you know, those awful mufflers or, you know. Leaf blowers. Modified motorcycles on 116, when the conditions are just right, it just rolls right over, you know, the Edgewood, you know, development and over Butler Farms and comes right across into the Dorchester area. It's just amazing. But I acknowledge what you're saying, yeah. I thought Emily Krasnow would like to speak. You have the floor. Hello, can you hear me? We sure can. Okay. Well, great. Well, I'm a member of the Housing Trust Committee and I just wanted to thank everyone. We work very collaboratively and I'm new to committees. This is my first committee in the city and I really enjoyed the experience and I really appreciated hearing everyone's ideas. And as someone who often almost daily connects with people who are in dire need of housing in our city and want to stay here, I just can't thank you enough for your consideration and just the council for recognizing the housing crisis that we're in. So thank you very much. Thank you. Yes, Carol? No, go ahead. No one's scheduled on this topic. Yeah, yeah. Wait and come up to the. Thank you. I'm Carol McQuillan with Common Roots tonight but also as a teacher in our schools and just having spent time at our three elementary schools. I'm aware that I'm a proponent of affordable housing. I was on the founding board of Green Mountain Habitat in the early 80s and spent eight years on that board. My concern about affordable housing of this magnitude is have you, Jesse and the team, talk to the schools about how we will have room for this many more families in our community because our schools are at the seams. Yep. So that's a very. Is that a fair question? It's an excellent question. Thank you. So that's a very active conversation happening right now between the council and the school board and specifically looking at implementing school impact fees to address that needed capacity increase. Could I? Sandy? Can I see it? I'm sorry. Is there someone? I think Dan and I. Oh, David and then Sandy. Thank you. I would like to address the sound issue and our houses are extremely well insulated and the fourplex, for instance, that we built over on Heisberg Road. That was about 15 feet away from the edge of the road. And when you were inside that house in the front bedroom, you could barely hear the cars and trucks that were going by. So today's housing is entirely different than it was five years ago and certainly 10 and 15 years ago. So sound inside the home is not an issue. And I would say that if you say for the sake of sound and not the best environment won't have this type of housing then all you will have are those folks that can afford to buy that land and other land in South Burlington. They will put up with that sound as you can see by the number of homes that are being built there. Evidently the sound is not a big issue on Kennedy Drive and over that way. So I would hope that you would see the value in creating more affordable housing. I appreciate the concern on sound. I certainly hear those jets myself and I live in Williston. So I would just say that this we felt was a great proposal central for those families getting to stores and schools and everything else. So I believe it's an ideal project for affordable housing. Great, thank you. Sandy, did you have a comment? Sandy, Julie, I can just say one thing. I attended the open house of Green Mountain Habitat on Hinesburg Road and was in the upstairs front bedroom. And I was amazed, as it has a big window I was amazed at how little traffic I could hear. Virtually none in that bedroom. My second thing is just to address the issue of spending more than a million. And when I look at the survey, income disparities comes out as very important. It's right up there with childcare. And also in terms of the results of COVID housing vulnerability was stated. So I do think that providing more affordable housing is a way of addressing income disparities and the housing vulnerability that people felt because they lost jobs and all kinds of other things during the pandemic. So I think there is one of the things about the survey is affordable housing wasn't one of the options you could check. And so, but I think it fits under income disparities. So that's all I'm gonna say. Okay, thank you. Matt, you had a curve? Just lift up the comment that Carol made for the gas question staff. Is it assumed that these impact fees which we've previously discussed for discussion later on this year would include those big A affordable housing what we used to call big A affordable housing permanently affordable housing would also pay the impact fees much like market rate housing. So that's a policy question for the council when you get the ordinance draft like Lee in October often impact fees often a big A affordable housing is exempt from impact fees but that is a policy decision. And so you will have to weigh that. Great, thank you. Just one comment. So in creating a more affordable housing, right? Does that actually have an impact on the demand that we're gonna see later in the results of the survey for demands for childcare? And is there a dependence there? So if you had more, if you had affordable housing would there be less of a demand for more childcare where there's no childcare at all perhaps? Well, potentially you could afford childcare more easily because your housing is more affordable. So less of your income is going to housing but that doesn't make childcare affordable. No, no. That's what I'm saying. Or affordable, or available, I think. But they can dovetail a little bit, right? They do, I think they do. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but. Thank you. If your monthly costs go down a little bit because of the rent, it can pay for something. Other comments or questions? Yes. So just from a process standpoint at some point tonight or at a future meeting the direction I would like from staff is obviously we're going to have to enter into grantee agreements with each of these parties. So some direction from the council on who to enter into negotiations with and then ultimately the affirmative vote would be to approve those grant agreements. But that doesn't happen tonight. It could, it does not. I mean, we could say go this far and then we'll see if there's additional 500,000 or 300,000 for additional housing from the rest of the ARPA funds. And then you can do the second part. I mean, we've already committed a million bucks. So we're $100,000 short with the recommendation by the affordable housing committee. But we have the three proposals. So we could draw up the grantee agreements with a blank line for the amount and decide the amount later on, correct? At least move it forward that way for staff. Don't you have to negotiate a number? I don't know. I don't know what the process is. I don't know. We're negotiating which is grantee. We're granting. I mean, that's a different kind of direction. I mean, in theory, I guess you could say to us, we only want to spend a million dollars, go back to these three or four applicants and see what you can negotiate for a million dollars. That's not how we have framed it to them to date. But you could give us that direction, I suppose. And all of our trust fund dollars, the 50,000 a year, that's already committed. Is that right? No, so we have $150,000 balance in our current trust fund through this fiscal year. So the 50,000 you allocated this year rolls over, is added to the 100,000 we've previously rolled over. And we have two applicants, two developers who have applied for those funds in addition to these applicants. But we could say, if we wanted to at least go with the 1.1 million, we could use the million dollars of ARPL fund, because that's sort of already been committed by us, $100,000 of the trust fund to go forward directions to you as to work with these three. And then as we get a better sense of where the other demands for the rest of the ARPA money are, we conceivably could come up with $500,000 or $300,000 for the summit proposal. And what amount of time? Because it seems like they are running against a clock. Well, all of this money is running against a clock. I mean, we can't. 2026, but they talked about a matter of weeks. So what I hear Zika and Tom say. Well, what is our timeline to make a final decision on all the ARPA money? So I think we're a little bit comparing two different timelines. So the timeline on the ARPA money is you need to allocate it by December 2024 and then spend it by December 26. So you have a pretty big runway for that. Okay. And I'm gonna go out on a limb developer so people jump in when I say something wrong. The proposals that the committees have recommended, the three that are fully funded are in development. So they are projects that are real, but they are not necessarily projects that are permitted or projects that are shovel ready. The summit project is fully permitted about to close. So there's a timeline for the ARPA money, there's a timeline for the three recommended projects, and then there's a much faster timeline for summit, which is a little bit more of a challenge for you all. Amy has some comments. I would just say that our Hoham project is shovel ready. We have permits and we're ready to start construction as soon as possible. Thank you for that correction. Thank you. So two of them are shovel ready. All right. Well, what's your pleasure, council? Well, maybe Zeke can clarify that. Or Tom, I mean, who will vote? Yeah, we both, either one. Zeke again, summit. We have applied for both. So we've applied for 500,000 from this local ARPA RFP as well as $150,000 from the housing trust fund. Yeah. You don't need both. We do. I mean, that final gap is that $650,000 plus or minus. Oh, I misunderstood. Yes, apologies if I misrepresented that. All right. And to echo Jesse, yes, I think if it's a, what can the city council do now and what is likely to happen later if we're able to allocate more to ARPA? You know, our need is pretty present. I'd love to hear from Chris about the reasoning for $300,000 to came down on in your committee for the summit. Yeah. Thanks Megan. So the conversation started at five and the conversation was, well, they asked for five. Why wouldn't we give them five? We, the application did pencil in an assumption that the housing trust would be awarded 150 and the receipt of the CDBG funds. And there was also a discussion of would there be supplemental funds to make up any gap from a third party such as the landowner to help close any funding gap. So here we are as a group trying to extend a little bit of money as far as we can. So what can we recommend to make them all happen? Give them the gap financing that they need to move forward to make 177 affordable housing a reality for almost 300 people without delaying or killing the project. So that's how we got to the 300. Thank you. I appreciate that synopsis. Yeah. Tom? So I'm very attracted to the two shovel ready products projects, the 500,000 to summit is attractive to me because that's 71 affordable units. And what I'm seeing is going to be a beautiful neighborhood with a dog park. Thank you. That's just great. And then the whole home property. So as looking to get a feel from the council I would be ready to approve both of those tonight. I will say I too was persuaded that Tim's counter arguments on the sound issues related to putting houses right by the interstate, but I just know development well enough to know that if that's a lot more up in the air, I'm fine with considering that at a later date in order to move things along. And I think this council would feel better about putting money towards shovel ready projects to get the affordable houses starting to be built as soon as possible because of the demand for housing in this area. So that's where I am. Well, I'll just put an or in for I appreciate the shovel ready. And when I think about affordable housing, I am so enamored, I guess, of home ownership. To me, that is when you talk about perpetual home ownership, that just resonates with me more strongly than rentals because I think the rental market can change. And we don't build enough homes that people can own. I mean, people who own a home have deep roots in the community, they're part of this. It's not a transitional connection. It becomes their community, their school system, their softball teams or whatever. And that, I don't know, that just resonates more strongly with me than anything else. I think all of the projects meet very important needs.  But I would hate to put that off and have that not happen. I just wanted to re-hear what Chris Tromley said about having any funds that go to Summit be used as leverage with the owner of the property and to be able to, you know, have that third party enter in and help reach the gap, playing with numbers again. I will look at the 300,000 that they were prepared to give to Summit, the 300,000 for the Ho Ha Motel and then the 500 to the Champlain Housing Trust. I do share with you and the Green Mountain Habitat for Humanity to develop these duplex lots for shared equity homes. I do like that model myself. That adds up to $1.1 million and it would at least give that green light to Summit to, you know, within that matter of weeks to negotiate further. And within that number of weeks, we can learn what happens as we're deliberating on the remainder of our ARPA funds. So can I ask a clarifying question to Council Member? So is that in the form of a motion or is that more of a suggestion? It could be. So just to clarify, so the Cathedral Square was not part of that. For now. Disabled, yeah. I would agree with Council Member. Then I'll make that motion. So could you repeat that? So you're saying fund 300 for the CHT and the 300,000 for the Green Mountain Habitat CHT, not talk about the gazebo property at all? For now. For now, and then add in the half mill for Summit. 300,000. 300,000 for Summit. Okay, so now we're still at 1.1. Five, four habitat, three, five, three. And we, that means taking money from the trust? That would, and it's been through the Affordable Housing Trust Fund Committee. I did sit in on that meeting. They were prepared to support it. Unless, please, I know that Emily's here, unless I'm speaking. Ariel has her hands. And Ariel's here too. If that's what we agreed, can you speak at the mic, I can't hear you. But the ultimate decider is us. Yeah, so as a member of the Housing Trust Committee, I am definitely, I find this Summit request very compelling, but I don't feel comfortable moving forward without all the members of the Housing Trust Committee to talk about where those funds would go. And we had not agreed to give that Summit those funds. And that's why there's just these three proposals here in this memo. Yeah, I mean, we, that's not what we had decided. Ms. Emery, so yeah, so I don't know where to go from here on that. Well, it's a council decision. Yeah, so as far as, but as far as allocating the Housing Trust Fund money, yes. What I remember is that it was support for this proposal to go to the city council. Am I incorrect on that? Yes, I am incorrect. Yes, so how the Housing Trust Fund meeting ended was that they have two proposals in front of them. They asked a series of questions and have invited both of those proposals into their next meeting to hear the responses. Thank you. Okay, okay. Well, we still would have the opportunity to reimburse that, you know, for use of funds, other ARPA funds that shortfall, but we don't have to necessarily commit that. I mean, I know it undermines, I guess, the two organizations that had hoped to get $50,000 and maybe they want 100,000, I don't know. Actually, there's 150, right? I really wish we were all here. I'm sorry. Yeah, no, but we're trying to move this along in a process that works for the city and for housing and trying to, I think, balance all these piles of money to see if we can get, you know, potentially additional money for housing. We just can't commit that now because we haven't heard from all the other people that are asking for ARPA funds. And there are considerable numbers of people and some who think that it would be a great idea. Although I think, personally, one of the things we said as a council that was so important is that we really wanted this to show real stewardship and make a difference. You know, and I think affordable housing makes an enormous difference long-term. We wanted something that could last versus, I don't know, maybe $20,000 for planning, which might be really, really important, but it's potentially less of a concrete legacy, I think. So we have a proposal. Oh, okay. 100,000 more. Yeah. Yeah, Vince Boldock, I remember the affordable housing committee just very briefly. I wanna make sure it's perfectly clear that we did not see anything wrong with the summit proposal. There was nothing that we could degrade about it or, you know, complain about it, it was very good. It was just a matter of how much money do we have? We heard a million dollars from the council and we said, why didn't they make it 1.3 or 1.5? You know, there's more money out there. We know there is. And so we're kind of talking about an arbitrary number here. And so we kind of strategically said, let's ask for 1.1 and then push it a little bit and see if they can give us a little bit more. But they're all very good proposals. And so I just wanted to say that, and I really hope you'll make some motions and pass them on this tonight. We don't wanna postpone any of these projects. They're good projects. Thanks. Okay, Sandy, this is number three. I wish Cindy Reed were here to talk about Cathedral Square, because while it may not have permits, those buildings are all built. So we're not talking about construction, but she used to be on the Affordable Housing Committee. And one of the things she said to us, stuck with me, is there is virtually no assisted care living facilities that are affordable. And there's also, there may be pressure. Joe Larkin may have a lot of people that wanna pay a lot of money, more money than Cathedral Square can afford. All of the 34 units of residential care that are there now are market rate. And they're gonna make them 100% affordable. I wish that were in here. Then the ones that are rental for people that work in that field, they're gonna be 28 market rate and aid inclusionary. So I just wanna say I don't know if there's pressure on that. I can't imagine there isn't. I don't think Mr. Larkin's gonna wait forever. But I just wanted you to know that that would take 34 market rate assisted living to 34 affordable assisted living, permanently affordable. Well, there's the dilemma. You, the committee dealt with those concerns and came to a decision. And the council has a proposal that's slightly different. I mean, I guess I would like to say that, you know, there's still a couple million left in the ARPO, right? That, and this is a real need. So it's potentially, I think there's a good chance of funding all of them. I think tonight what we're trying to say is we've dedicated a million bucks, we have 100,000 in the affordable housing trust fund. So at this point in time, we could go forward with Summit Habitat and Hoham with those two funding sources and come back to the other housing proposals when we dig a little deeper into all of, I haven't added up all the requests for the ARPO, but I don't know if anyone on the council has. They're more than we have. And some, you know, it'll be another hard decision, but that's kind of, I think, where we're coming down. So we have this proposal. Is anyone ready to second that? Oh, I will, it's, we're $100,000 over, apparently. So, I mean, I couldn't- Up from the trust fund. But I'm suggesting we add 100,000 from the trust fund. I know they haven't gone through the process, but we could supplement that with, or we could figure it out later. We could find that 100,000 in ARPO money and put the 100 back in the housing trust, but it's there. And these are, two of them are shovel ready. Okay. So that's what I'm suggesting, just as the will of the council. I agree with that. I just want to stress that the gazebo property rehab is a really, really important project. And I'm really interested in it. And I want to see it move forward, especially because it contains housing for the employees that are going to work in the other building. I think it's a great idea for that property. And I don't want to abandon that. No. Oh, I don't either. I don't either. Was in receivership for, I mean, the management there was challenging at best for a while. Yeah. So I support your idea. Yeah. I look forward to talking about that soon, but I would like to get the grants out now because the crisis is here now. I would too. I will second the motion. I understood councilor army to have made if Sue Alnick is okay with it. I would like to talk into the microphone. So. So you're saying 300 summit, 300 ho hum, 500 doors at commons for a million dollars from our button, $100,000 from the housing trust fund. Yes. Good compromise. And then potentially, you know, more later, more later, we'll be shuffling money to supplement some of it. Okay. So do we need you want us to vote on this or is this just that's the direction we can vote? If you vote, if you were ready and have a motion and can vote on directing staff to enter grant agreements in this way. So we have that motion. Chris, did you want to make a comment? Just, yeah, just, just kind of closing comments, just kind of wrap up the, the proposal for us in the comprehensive plan. It talks about being affordable with housing for people of all income lifestyles and stages of life. The four proposals that we've moved forward for the 1.4 million represents that, the entire spectrum where this would be housing for the entire spectrum. And, you know, in regards to home ownership, we're hoping by the addition of transitional housing for somebody who was formerly homeless and they'll, and they can move up through that spectrum and someday move into home ownership. And that's really the power of the gap financing to these highly reputable developers. You know, that 177 households or over 300 people is a lasting commitment that will help just, not just the people that are today, but the people that would be there tomorrow. And it was the will of the affordable housing for the 1.4. And, you know, there's certainly a compelling urgency of when you hear the reports that come out of the point in time report for homelessness, you know, just the steady stream of housing articles about, you know, how difficult that is to get that out there. The urgency is there and this would make a real impact for those people that would be certain today and tomorrow. So thank you for the opportunity to present this. This is a fantastic experience and it really demonstrates the power of leveraging some of the reputable builders in our area. So thank you. Well, I thank you for putting together that sort of continuum and it is very compelling and we'll make our first step tonight, doing most of it and come back to consider the final pieces. So we have a motion. You ready for the vote? Okay, all in favor of the 1.1 million from the two sources for the three projects signify by saying aye. Aye. So that's passed 4-0. Thank, I wanna really thank both the committees for your hard work, your really thoughtful review of these. I think Emily, this is just the beginning of some of those hard committee discussions when the decisions, they're all hard, they're all good and you have to come down somewhere. So I appreciate all your work. So thank you very much. Okay, we'll move on. What time is it? 8.26, oh, we're not too far behind. Item 10, it's reviewing the ARPA survey report. All right, well, share screen here, second. All right, so just a little bit of background here. The council approved the survey on June 6th. It went live June 16th. It was open for a little over two months and we received 351 responses, which as I understand is high for surveys that the city has done in the past. If we're looking at it from a statistical number for a population our size, 20,000 individuals. If we're looking for a confidence level of 95%, margin of error of 5%, the ID sample size would be 377 responses. So we're pretty close to that sort of best practices target number for a survey for a community our size. We asked a number of demographic questions just so we could have a better understanding of who we heard from and whether or not that would be representative of the community that we serve. We asked a question on affiliation had 62% that responded that they are property owners. This is pretty close to the 60-40 ratio that we know that we have in the city of South Brongton between property owners and renters. So that number is pretty close. I'll talk about it a little bit more on the age side, but we see you a little bit older than census data that we have. But this is just a broad overview of who we heard from. I thought it was kind of interesting that 30% of the respondents were 31 to 45. So the people who have children are definitely engaged. Yeah, I thought that was- Aged, and that's some, I think that's great. Yeah, that was better than I expected. Yeah, that's a good number. Here's a respondent location. This is a pretty even split based on our, what's the data source? The 2019 estimates of the American Community Survey run by the census, the SEQ was exactly 33%. So this is more or less in line with our community. This slide, just to begin to talk before we sort of dive into the results, how our sample differs from the rest of the population. I would say this question more than any other is sort of the outlier, is a much more highly educated respondent group that we heard from than we have in the census data. Already talked about education levels. Also, I talked before also about the general age. We definitely skew a little bit older, which is relatively consistent with what we see in terms of civil engagement. Also ethnicity, those folks who preferred not to say, definitely creates a little bit of uncertainty in these results, but we do know that those who did respond that we did not hear from our black African American community or Asian community or those of one or more ethnicity. So on to the results. So the first question we asked is, how has COVID-19 impacted your daily lives? And the several results were financially socially lost, social connection, personal health, access to services or other, and this socially lost social connection obviously is the big, that's the big bar here. That's what we received the most responses. Diving into the other, a few selected responses were folks talking about housing vulnerability, challenges scheduling mental health services or appointment with doctor, engagement with professional community. I also wanted to highlight these two on the bottom, able to more safely bike with less roadway traffic. Thought that was an interesting positive response and also spent more time recreating outdoors. We asked the question, an open-ended question and a few words describe how the pandemic most affected you and your family and consistent with question one, the responses were talking about social isolation and not having time to spend with friends and family. Child care came up in this question, social contact as well as mental health. Another open-ended question we asked and out word cloud here, it forced a number of changes in the way we live, work and play. What, if any of these changes would you like to see continue into the future? And I don't think it's any surprise that a lot of folks talked about the flexibility that COVID allowed with remote work options with remote meeting options, Zoom Act options, just that general flexibility was something we saw come up a lot. A lot of people also wrote none, which I thought was interesting. There's nothing that they appreciated about then the changes of COVID. But nothing. And was the mask, I'm surprised that has such large print. Is that what people were bothered by? Do you want to continue to do your mask? Yeah, that was one of the responses we saw a lot of. Is that, yeah, is that it's, I mean, people recognizing that we're still in the pandemic and appreciate that they want to see masks continue into the future, at least until we're out of it, is the presumption. Some people are still worrying of, I don't know who the people are. Sandy touched on this one earlier. We asked the question kind of identifying the six key purposes that are identified in the ARPA guidelines. And how would you individually prioritize the importance of those in South Burlington? And we asked respondents to rank from one to five. I thought a couple of highlights, essential worker pay was very low. Water, sewer and internet infrastructure was both very high in terms of individuals rating it as the most important, but also very high in those who rated it the least important. If we look at an average of all of these responses, as Sandy alluded to earlier, communities disproportionately impacted, they had 3.16 average, public health impacts 3.12, economic impacts 3.07, infrastructure 3.03, premium pay 2.7. So not a huge spread among responses. So this is the list that we generated and absolutely right that affordable housing was not something we included on our list, that was in part because council had already allocated a million towards it. So this was a question of what other projects would you be interested in the city investing in? So those who listed these as very important, it's a total number of responses here. Child care got by far the most and I think you'll see that in other slides. This is really an outlier in terms of responses. We got childcare had a huge impact on individuals through COVID and they're looking for some type of solutions. Was the water, sewer and storm water as much related to climate change and using ARPA funds to make a difference? Or I mean, I just kind of don't understand that high response unless it was, we could use this money to make a difference around climate change. Yeah, no, I mean, in terms of the question that was asked, we identified it as very broadly that this money could fund water, sewer, storm water infrastructure projects in the city. Yeah, it just, it's interesting to me. Or what? Yeah, it was close to it. Yeah, that's the neck of the other part. I get that. I mean, from COVID, the storm water, I don't see the connection. No offense, Tom. I also just highlighted those who listed these projects as not at all important. It's relatively consistent. It's in the horizontal axis is the same as the very important. I have not shared these with Alana yet, but no offense to public art here. And city center. In just an average score, this is pretty consistent with what we saw in the first question in terms of the ranking. This is just a weighted average across each category. You can almost see sort of four tiers here, childcare, the outlier again, a cluster, and that was next five, next three, very even, and then recreational facilities, city center, public art. So I think this is sort of the meat of what council was asking. It's sort of what great ideas are out there that we haven't thought of, or what other priorities that aren't in this first, you know, this list that we have that you would like to see this funding support. What really surprised me in this result was just how many people responded, talking about the need for improvements in our recreation and community spaces. So both in improvements to our parks infrastructure, as well as developing a, and I'll talk about in the next slide, a community pool or a recreation center. Tom at the pool as part of his campaign. Yeah, and one thing I did provide council sort of the raw data set of all these responses. It's, you know, well over 300 responses. It takes time kind of weeding through, but it's very interesting to see what individuals talk about. And here just to sort of, you know, create the ease of looking at it. I didn't include any responses that didn't have five or more that dedicated to them. One thing that did pop up a lot was childcare, which I didn't necessarily include in this list just because of the, it is talked about so much on the, it is specifically identified project and the 12 that we outline. We also got a number of responses on school infrastructure needs. And then a large number of responses that just sort of said very broadly, use the investment wisely. Don't spend this on ongoing operational costs. Use this to pay down debts or just invest this money well. And then specific project responses, parks just breaking out that prior list, parks improvements, community pool, recreation center, those were the big responses. And then again, you know, you can sift through the, you know, 300 plus responses at your leisure, but I thought there was some interesting kind of unique or one-off responses that we got. You know, mountain bike trail, more benches around high use stretches of city rec paths, a solar pavilion workspace and many of the in the city park and someone actually provided a link to the, to the service and the, in the survey. And then this is another way we asked a very similar to question five and just had folks kind of go through the exercise of ranking from one to 13. What's the highest priority project to 13? What's the lowest priority project? And here are the results. Again, the horizontal axis on the bottom is the exact same as the order of ranking that was in question five, but you can see the results different a little bit in terms of what they rank as the highest priority. Having gone through the exercise of providing, providing the individual responses, I just wonder how much more of those sort of keyed them into things like recreational facility, for example, scoring a little bit higher in this, and then showing the least or lowest priority and then the weighted average among these. So just to highlight a couple of the summary trends, so many respondents talked about the sort of a dire need for increased access to childcare services is something that we've, I know we've all heard of a lot in our own work in the last couple of years. Isolation, increased use of green and recreational spaces. There was a lot of ideas. I think in the spreadsheet I've been building out just based on leadership team and committee requests that we've had, we have 37 different project ideas or potential project ideas. This, if you want to include any of these ideas that would increase that list exponentially. I thought it was also interesting that while it did not rank highly overall in terms of prioritization, overwhelming individual responses for desire for improvement and development of community recreational spaces and improvement of our parks. And then as I talked before, overall concerns about aging school district infrastructure. So that's the broad outline of what we've heard from folks, I think back in your earlier discussions about what you'd like to see occur with this ARPA, with these ARPA dollars was transit, you know, transformational one-time projects. What's the biggest bang for our buck? What's the thing we're gonna look back on in 10 to 20 years and say we seize this opportunity and this is what we did with these dollars. And I think another kind of key goal was, you know, we want to engage the community as well as we can, and what brilliant ideas are out there that we haven't thought of. So the few questions that I have with this, you know, you've now received these responses, is there any additional outreach? Are there any changes in those value statements?  Or is this $200,000? That makes a lot of sense. Or is it still this sort of, okay, we have $3 million remaining. We want this to go to one project. We want this to go to two projects. We want this to go to something, again, that's large and transformational. Are there any of those projects that you see in this data? And is there any investment categories, for example, childcare or, you know, improving our rec spaces that you'd like to, you'd like sort of additional staff feedback, you know, if we were going to allocate $1 million towards improving our recreational spaces, staff come up with a plan of what that would look like. Or if it's childcare services, you know, what can we leverage to have some sort of community spending to improve access to childcare? And then the last question I just asked is timeline, do you want this to occur as part of the FY24 budget process? Very soon we'll be, you know, later discussion about the budget schedule, but very soon we'll be talking about overall the city's, you know, funding CIP needs and other budget goals that we have for FY24. As council is aware, we have, we're starting FY23 in a little bit of a whole because of increased project costs and because of the CPI being so high and the impacts that's had to our wages. Would you like to hear about sort of what some of those potentially unfunded CIP projects or goals may be? And whether this could supplement that, is that an important data point for you to hear going into budget season? So it's a really, it's a lot of information. I know in front of you, and it's a hard, it's a very hard choice to make, but as far as next steps, let us know what we can kind of bring our professional feedback back to you to help you make the best informed decision you can. Can I have a comment? Yes, you may. So, please. So Andrew did a great job on the survey. I do just want to also note for the council that you very intentionally did not ask the committees to provide individual recommendations. You were really focused on the survey. However, many of the committees did provide you recommendations. So those are also attached to your agenda tonight as well. Well, I for one would, I recognize the challenge with childcare. It's enormous. I'm puzzled with or stymied with what we as a community can do. I mean, what the kinds of programs that the state funds tends to be helping people pay for it. There's some kind of sliding scale or, and you know, that's, it would work for a year and then the ARPA money goes away if that's what we chose. So I guess I would like to see some more concrete ideas about, so what does that mean? What can a community do? How do you do that with in a lasting way? So it's not a one-time expenditure, kind of an operating budget sort of will give vouchers to, you know, anyone who can't afford childcare because once the vouchers spend, it's gone and then you got to replace it and we won't have this money. So I'm, I would look for some creative ideas about that. And I don't have them in my head and I'd like to hear some. So maybe going out again and asking some of these people would be helpful, may I? Yeah, with regard to childcare, I was surprised to see that the indoor recreation facility wasn't seen as a natural kind of partner with that because I think that maybe that's how you do it. Yeah. Right. Where you provide a space. And, you know, that could be used in one way or another. That to me was a disconnect in, I mean, in the results. I also heard Jesse say that we could be somehow leveraging community development funds and helping agencies, you know, be a conduit to those funds as another way for us. But I don't know that we need to use ARPA funds for that. Right. So that's with regard to childcare. I was struck by the need for better sidewalks. I mean, there does, it's not a major, you know, a major legacy, but it is something, I saw that, saw those outdoor amenities for people to walk and to be able to walk without falling, right? Or get around, but that was, that just popped out at me. I would like to go back to childcare, for example. And I don't know a lot, I mean, my children were in childcare on point or any time, but there seemed to be enough childcare back in the 90s in the early 2000s, right? And I know that, you know, before the pandemic hit, there was a reduction in childcare capacity and then it hit and it was a further reduction, right? And I hear through the grapevine that another childcare facility just closed recently, right? That's affected a lot of people. So the question is, how do you get more childcare capacity, people have to open them, right? Or reopen them? And the question is, what dial does the city have to help with that? Could it be help with permits or help with expenditures or whatever it takes to, you know, secure space? Or, you know, I don't know what those things are and whether the state has funds to help with that or not, but there has to be a person, first of all, that wants to start a childcare or a group of people that are interested in doing it cooperatively, right? That puts somebody in charge that sets a plan in motion and has a space and then needs to acquire, you know, the equipment as well. So, but I have no experience with that and I don't know who does that could advise us about how the city could help with that. So if that is an area that you all want us to look into, I think that there are a number of advocacy organizations that focus on childcare and Vermont. And I think we could do some research about if we had X number of dollars to leverage, what would that look like? You know, my mind immediately goes to some kind of helping secure real estate or a lease for a new childcare center to buy down that startup cost so that the cost they charge is lower over time. We could do something similar to affordable housing where we issue an RFP to the community and say, give us your best ideas for X amount of money and see what we get back in the childcare realm. So if that is something that we're hearing some interest in, we certainly can go back and do some research on different options for you. Yeah, I think that's a great idea, Jesse. I'd love to hear from Sarah Kenney at Let's Grow Kids and other entities that probably have some good ideas on how to spend funds in order to increase availability of childcare. Would it be helpful to give them a dollar figure like we did with affordable housing? I don't even know how much we have left. Is it three million? Yes, we have, yeah. 3.89 million left. Pardon me? 3.89 million left. 1.1 that we just. 3.089 million left. That's after the 1.1 that we just approved? Yes, because a million was already allocated. 019, okay. It's in the memo right before in the packet today. Yeah. So that number remains because the 100,000 that's coming from the trust fund is not big. Okay. Sure. Yes. I'd love to involve the school in that discussion as well. It just seems like there's a natural fit for it if the city can work with the school to somehow open up available or future school resources for more pre-K and pre-pre-K opportunities. That seems to be a good place to plug in with them. Well, they have money too. The concern I have is I think that there are, and I see a educator here in the audience might have something to say, but I think that they have stiffer requirements at the state level as a public school than perhaps a private care provider would have. And Carol, why don't you come up to the mic so everyone at home can hear you please. Most of the people that need affordable homes are the younger families and they're the ones having children. So what about the concept of in these units of these four projects, having a childcare center is part of the development. When you have 71 families, that's a lot of childcare. So I'm just thinking while you're just beginning these projects and you're helping to fund them, it would be very powerful to be working with some leaders in early childcare and talk about what would happen or what's the pros and cons of making some of the affordable housing unit and actual care facility. Just a thought. Well, you know, I would like to put a dollar figure out there and get some responses. And I'd be willing to put a million bucks toward this. I'm with you. I'm there. So that's where I am. And then see what kind of proposals and maybe the RFP could encourage those proposals to work with some of the affordable housing projects that we're supporting, you know, for another $200,000, maybe you can build a center.  I got the million for housing, now the million for it. Yeah. The big check writing pen. Yeah. Well, we wanted to make a difference. Yes. So you can't do it with a $20,000 planning grant for childcare. I don't think. So I'm hearing one million for childcare. We still have two million. I know, going fast. Yes, John. Sorry, John. I'm sorry, John. I do have her in down on my paper. Ask Helen to call. Thank you. I'm John Kalaki and I'm with the Public Art Committee. And I think you heard that there were 30 proposals from your committees. Yeah, between the leadership team and committees. Right. So I urge the council to look at those proposals because I'm just with the Public Art Committee. We spent a lot of time and we developed a proposal for you to consider to use in a transformational way these ARPA dollars. And if there's 30 of them and you're already dipping up to $3 million without any input from your committees or your leadership team, I think you're getting a little ahead. And as I have a little pony and she pulls me in a cart, the cart right now is before the pony. And I think that these proposals from your committee structure and then bring any priority you want for the dollars, childcare is a very essential thing as well. But it's kind of hard to sit here and hear you taking the $3 million as if it's your dollars and not what your committee and your leadership team is also recommending. So I just urge you to really, it's in the document. And I'm sure each committee will come and be glad to talk about it and the strengths of those proposals. And it may be $10 million, I don't know. Andrew, what is the dollar amount of all these? Yeah, 10 million is probably pretty close to where it is.  But I urge you to just slow down and vet those first before you start sending out RFPs to providers in our community with dollar amounts for a particular piece. Because answers might be in your committee proposals. And I don't know if everyone's read them or not, but if there's 30 of them in your docket, anyway. So I came, I thought I was going to be speaking upon this one, but I think this is not the time to do that, I'll come back. If you take testimony on the 30 proposals, I would be glad to do that. Thank you. Well, I'm willing to hear you tonight if you, I don't know about the council. I mean, we're sort of at our time for this. Can you come up to the, come to the mic. And I really, it's just, hold on. The people on the line can't hear you if you're not. Oh, can't hear me. I'm pretty loud. Yeah, we need the microphone. Okay, I actually think that, oh, I'm Cindy Freeman. I just recently became part of the Wrexham Parks Committee. And I actually think that's really a smart thing before the money's thrown around tonight at three million to have the committee members come and speak about what they think, how the funds might be able to be used. And then you guys can kind of make a decision then. I think it would be good to wait for all of the committees for you to read what the committee said. I wasn't part of that committee decision. I wasn't there, but I think it would be good to actually go ahead and read those first and then maybe have a time that all the committee members come here, you know, at least a few of them and make their case for how to spend the ARPA funds. Yes, go ahead. So I just want to comment that the council did spend a lot of time in developing the survey, thinking about the committees and whether to go to the committees and ask for feedback. And because they had this shared goal of seeing a big transformation with these projects and not kind of doling out small bits to each committee, they purposely did not go to the committees to ask for feedback in the hopes that committee members and the rest of our neighbors would complete the survey and we'd see a whole picture of the city. So obviously it's their decision how to best move forward, but I don't want the community to think that they asked for something that now they're not listening to. Because that was very intentional on their part at the beginning of the process. You know, I think it's good council. I just looked at the public survey though and childcare was way, way up there. So, and we don't have a childcare committee or any committee that really deals with childcare. Well, the economic development committee put it at the top of their list. The amount of money, you know, just have that question go out there and not put the million dollars toward it. Just pardon me. Oh, I'm sorry, Sandy. You're kind of hidden behind them. With all due respect to my neighbor and my representative, I would encourage you to put out an RFP. I think the experience with the affordable housing is if you put out a set amount of money, you really get creativity and things that I think will really benefit the community. I also volunteer at a childcare center every week. And another, and this is just an idea, another thing that's a big issue with staffing. Yeah. Things were, I was volunteering this afternoon. Things were a bit crazy because one of the teachers wasn't there that day. So even you might have a, it would be temporary, but maybe a four-year scholarship program for South Burlington students to pursue it in college with the promise of working in the field for, you know, something like, just, I think you could get all kinds of ideas. I also want to say, I heard, I read all the stuff and I heard Jesse at our meeting say, we don't really have the staffing to put in place and operate a new program. We were talking about weatherization. So we specifically talked about partnering or adding on or supplementing. But I read through all that stuff and, you know, it's a lot of work to manage who knows how many 50,000, 75,000, $100,000 grants or programs or whatever. So to a certain degree, if it's going to be transformative, I think that tends to correlate with a bigger price tag. I would encourage you to put a North paper, a billion dollars for childcare. It's amazing to me that you got that from the survey. And it really, to me, says something. Just, yes. Yes, so you're starting on me. The reason why I support the RFP idea is, but I want to stipulate that doesn't mean that we're going to spend a million dollars. It means we just want to hear different proposals about how we would spend it. And picking a million dollars is arbitrary. It's picking $738,000. It's just trying to come up with ideas on how to answer a community's need for childcare and how we can access these one-time mice for this transformational change. But it doesn't negate any of the work the committee's done or any of the projects or obligate us to spend that whatever that amount is on that issue. Cause perhaps nothing comes back cause we can't do anything for less than 10. We don't know, but we need to find out. Another thing that popped out at me, but we have our GMT person here too, is covered areas at the bus stops. That's, that would be huge. I mean, it goes along with unbroken sidewalks. And I really want us to think about where that transformation needs to take place. And I think that we have to go out into neighborhoods where, you know, people do have broken sidewalks and people don't have access or, you know, affordable care. And they're the ones taking the bus too.  We saw economic hardship, right? I mean that it was in certain neighborhoods, right? I mean, we have to, what can we do in those neighborhoods? So I just, I think of it that way too. Well, what, I think those are good ideas. What is your pleasure? I mean, I threw out a million bucks because I think you can get some good ideas back. I appreciate John's comments that, you know, there's a lot of other committees who have, and I've read through all the stuff too. So perhaps we need to table this and come back to it and have a set up a meeting. Maybe we need a special meeting to just focus on the committee's presentations on the ARPA funds. Maybe at the same time we could have some childcare leaders testify, or not testify, but share ideas that will help us, you know, winnow down. Is there, what's the right dollar figure? I don't know. I just keep going back to, we really do want this to be kind of once in a lifetime transformational. And I think some of the, just my opinion, some of the suggestions for committees were good, but they also are things that we probably should have in our budget. You know, some of the planning kinds of dollars I always support. It's great to have a plan for all the parks. We need to have that. We should fund that just not because of COVID, but because we have parks and it's a big part of our budget and it's something that we should really be thinking about carefully. Yeah, and that's the, yeah. So does that sound like you have a, do you want a special meeting or do you want to do this next meeting? What is the next meeting? The next meeting is Mayhem. Yeah. We can add another agenda item at the next meeting and continue the discussion, right? Because, and maybe we'll have some more information or some more input.  It damaged it badly. It killed over a million people. It's still killing people. It's still sickening a lot of people with long COVID. It's damaged the country's GDP. It's damaged our productivity. It's damaged our employee workforce on a national and an international scale. And so the money should be used if we can to try and find those things that were fragile to begin with that have been damaged that we can repair and repair them on a long-term scale so that we make ourselves more resilient and more robust for the future time something like this happens, right? Whatever that might be. And you know, we already had some problems going into it and we discovered that, bam, one of them is that child care. And so child care problems have removed large numbers of women from the workforce immediately, right? During the pandemic and after the pandemic, right? And also probably people trying to get exercised because they couldn't socialize has exposed some issues with our, you know, recreation infrastructure. And so we can look at that too. But there are all these great items that came up in the survey and I wanna be able to evaluate them equally as well as the suggestions from the committees. But you're right, Helen, some of the things are either in the CIP or they should be in the budget as well. So. All right. Oh, Tom, yes. Just to segue us moving us along, what I think the committees didn't have prior to this discussion was the survey results. And so I love special meetings, Helen. And if you wanna have a special meeting and have the committees come in so that they can integrate what they see in this to maybe for the public arts committee can recognize that there was a large demand for more recreation outdoor spaces. So maybe it's reading your public arts committee recommendation, you're gonna craft that to focus it on expanding the ban shell at the Veterans Memorial. So I would love another special meeting to really dive into what the committees are recommending before we start throwing numbers and RFPs out there. Can make one. Yes, please. Quick comment on that. So because council sort of initial guidance was not getting committee in but I don't think the committees all sort of had a fair shake at going through it. So I would just recommend council giving enough time for them to each committee to kind of come up with their own proposal if they hadn't already in refining. Sure. I think by and large, most did, but maybe not all. Not all. We did get a bunch, but yes, we should get from all. Yeah. So let's. Should I say one? Yes. So part of why we gave you the full data is that this data isn't just, you don't have to use this just for the ARPA conversation. You can use it for as we develop the comprehensive plan as we develop the FY24 budget. So all of these ideas and this community conversation doesn't go away with just these decisions. Right. Absolutely. Okay. So do people want a special meeting? Yeah. Just to do this. Next. We can have enough meetings with you. I like more meetings rather than longer meetings. That's just where I am. Next Monday, next Monday. So if we're going to give committees time to respond, I think we need to give them, I would say two months. Yeah. So they can receive the direction and then put something out. So I think we're, and most of them haven't start. Yeah. So I think we're looking at a special meeting in November. Okay. Okay. It's November 31st, 2024. Mm-hmm. Not that I want to wait that long, but we just keep it a little bit. Yep, we do. I will send around a doodle poll to find a time and then give directions to committees. Okay, good. We are, before we move on to item 11, we're just going to take a very quick break. Is there any money coming from the state for weatherization or no? Okay. So I would like to call back for the South Burlington City Council meeting of Tuesday, September 6th. We will pick up on item 11, which is an update on the construction of the Wheeler Dog Park and options for moving forward and provide direction to staff. And before we begin, I just want to set some ground rules or some expectations that I have. And I think there's a lot of water over the dam. We're under the bridge on this one. And lots of comments from the other paper or letters to the editor. And I think what we need to focus on is not to try to figure out who is at fault, who made the mistakes, why they were made. Obviously mistakes were made. And so what we need to do now is find a way forward. And what is a proposal that we can live with short-term, medium-term, long-term, where can we go in a way that works for the city, the staff, the committees, and certainly in this case, the canine population. So I just want to put that out there. Let's refrain from, he said, she said, or this person did this or didn't do this. That's not where we need to go tonight. So Tom, you have put together a report or an update. And you want to, or Jesse, do you want to start? I don't know how you've figured this out in terms of, I mean, we've all read it, but... Yeah, I think that was a great setup. I think, let Tom's presented you with some options for how to best move forward based on the topography and operations reality on the ground. So I will let him run with it. Okay. Well, thank you, Helen. Thank you, Jesse. For those that don't know me, Tom DiPetro. I'm your Public Works Director. And my involvement with the dark park is pretty recent. And so I appreciate your commentary, Helen. I think after hearing comments, reading the comments, meeting with Betty, I think it's an important asset to the community. So we're really looking forward to kind of moving this forward and getting it open for everybody here. It's a good direction tonight. That said, the installation of the fence, we encountered some issues when we went to install it. And so there's kind of two maps in your packet. The first is a black and white map, the approved plan. The second has a little more color with some pink, green, and blue blobs on it. That's a map I put together, doing a little GIS mapping. So some of the issues we encountered, I tried to call out on that color map, but they focused around basically getting the fence installed and issues related to the presence of ledge, topography that wasn't conducive to installing fence, kind of bedrock outcroppings, steep hills, and then concerns about areas that couldn't be very easily traversed or mowed and maintained due to the ledge again, drainage features on even or dangerous ground. So as kind of a result of all that, as people have rightly pointed out, sort of what is fenced in at the moment is not the 2.2 acres, it's about half that size. So hearing those commentary, or hear that commentary, we have, well, I just also said there was also commentary around making it accessible for all users, which we agree with, we can do, and modifying the park entrance to make it a little smaller and discourage dogs from kind of playing in the area. So we've put together kind of a list of recommendations for moving forward, and I can go through those in a little bit of detail, or I can kind of pause there to talk about the current condition of a park. However, council wishes to proceed. Why don't you go through with your recommendations? Okay. Then we can ask questions and understand them, and because all of them have a dollar figure assigned to each as well, correct? Yeah, okay. So we met with the Fencing Company, and a lot of the figures that you'll see in here, there aren't the two I've talked about already, figures three through six, as I tried to label them for clarity. Those are sort of maps that the Fencing Company has given to us, based on what they think they can do in different areas. So I'll start with the park entrance. What we'd like to do there is replace the woodchips that were specified with a crushed stone, make that a nice compact area, so there's no questions about kind of safety or traction, things like that. We would also like to rearrange defense as requested by others to make it a little smaller to discourage kind of dogs playin