We need to get one little bit of business done first. Adam, Richard Dean, where is he? Oh, I'm not sure. Well? What's your game plan here? I have no choice, but I gotta go home for it now. Right, and then you go to them? We're gonna have to go somewhere to discharge after we do. Okay, I'm gonna reconvene the city council meeting. If I could have some quiet, please. Reconvene the city council meeting at 7.30. And we are going to... The next item on the agenda is a work session, but we are gonna have to go by that and move to the public forum, which is a time certain for 7.30. So we will begin item number four, public forum. And the first person up to speak is Mary Ann Ward, to be followed by Joanne Hunt. And all we ask is tell us whatever you want, just do it respectfully, and you have three minutes to speak.  When the red light goes off, your time is up, and you need to conclude your comments. Good evening, Ms. Ward. Welcome. Hello, task force meetings. The report looks good on paper, but from the very first meeting, the makeup of the task force has graded on me. How could anyone, including the task force itself, accept that five white people were chosen for a seven-member inclusive task force? When I brought it up at the meeting, it was discounted in favor of patting themselves on the back for having been chosen. Recommendation number two, their recommendation, acknowledges that the task force should not have been formed. It states, if necessary, vacancies in the pool of people who comprise the public art review panels or task force be maintained until representatives having those perspectives can be found, meaning different ethnicities and people of color. What that says to me is, if you only have two people that fit the bill for a diverse task force, you do not have a task force. It was illegitimate for reasons, more obvious reasons as well. The selection committee got this one wrong. One counselor stated that he alone formed the task force. If that is true, he alone stacked the deck in favor of removing the mural. Another claims that he refused to allow people of color on it. I'm told acquiescing was the only solution. Both statements are documented. I believe they were chosen for their positions. Who would and who would not support removing the mural, not for their perspectives. There definitely was a bias for removing the mural. In the words of the donor on the task force, we never really had a prayer that it was going to stay up. More, and I'm very troubled, that qualified Burlington residents who would have made up a more diverse and legitimate task force were rejected.  He just happens to employ the wife of the marketplace director. Even before any of the resolutions cited in the recommendations presented or invited guests were heard, some were calling for the mural's removal. It was definitely a stacked deck. My position pre-task force was known to. I was told in a convoluted way that I was not chosen because I support saving the mural, which has no bearing on why I am speaking out tonight. It was an illegitimate, if not unlawful, task force. This needs to be made right. I have requested of Councillors Hartnett and Wright that they present a resolution that de-legitimizes this sham. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Ward. Joanne Hunt, to be followed by Sophie, I can't pronounce the, so it will be Sophie from Old East End. Joanne, welcome. Hi, Joanne Hunt. I'm Interest Practitioner, Cultures for Family Medicine. I work at UVMMC. I'm here again because we still don't have a contract. And I was on vacation last week, so I wasn't here for the presentation of the UVM CEO, et cetera, to the Green Mountain Care Board. A couple of things. I encourage all of you and all of you to keep supporting the nurses. This has been a long haul. We're making progress, which is good, but it's also really difficult. Pretty much all the progress we've made has become of our good efforts and pushing hard and strong of our bargaining team. So if you know somebody, support us. Thank them. I guess I want to talk about another thing, which is the high executive wages at UVMMC. It seems ridiculous if the COO Eileen Whalen can get a 20% increase and her salary is now over 1 million that we can't afford to get more than we're getting. We often brag about Burlington being the number one this and the number one that or the top 10 that. When you figure in costs of living, we're the 47th state UVMMC is in nurses' wages. That has an impact. We talk about wanting good health care. We talk about wanting to treat the opiate crisis, the mental health crisis, health and wellness, obesity, pretty much everything you can talk about, nurses are involved. And yet it also seems like nobody wants to have anything to do with the negotiations because that's up to the management at UVMMC. The board of directors have said that even though there were board of directors members at the Green Mountain Care Board hearing, they haven't been to any of the negotiating sessions. So again, we're making progress and that's good, but I would really ask all of you to keep supporting us. We have not gone away. We're not going away. And we really believe this can have a huge impact on improving the care and the satisfaction and rewarding the nurses as they need to be. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Hunt. Sophie. And you can tell me what your last name is. I couldn't... Quest with a Q. Quest. Okay. I'm going to make the old East Bend neighbors a new organization. Thank you. And everybody please pull the microphone in and speak right into the microphone so everyone can hear you. I came here to thank on the basis of our neighborhood organization that the Department of Public Works for their amazing work on Colchester and the way they've done it all summer and will be continuing to do it in the fall both for what they're going to do finally give us pedestrian signal lights and for the way they've done it a hardly disturbed traffic which you can not believe if you've seen everything they've done. Thank you, Ms. Quest. Carolyn Bates is up next to be followed by Gail Moreau. Ms. Bates. Carolyn Bates. I went to high school at Whitefish Bay, which is the suburb just north of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And yes, they drank a beer. But I wanted to tell you that in 1932 during the recession, our high school was first built. After that, they would add grandstands, football, recreation fields, auditoriums, and over those years, never, ever did they have to tear any of those buildings down. They built them so they lasted and they're just glorious even today. And I am totally disgusted with our town for building a high school that won't even last 50 years. And I want to be sure anything we choose to build from now on is net zero. It has solar and it follows all of the green building rules and we do not go cheap. We put things in that we can maintain and we put in a contract that ensures that we always put maintenance and repair money first over anything else for that school so it doesn't fall apart and get disgusting like this one is. It's shameful. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Bates. Gail Moreau is up next. We follow by Charles Simpson. Good evening, Ms. Moreau. Good evening. I am Gail Moreau, board chair of the Heineberg Community Senior Center and former executive director of this organization for many years. Sitting next to me is Gloria Reynolds. She's a board member as well and a longtime participant. I first want to thank the city of Burlington and Mayor Weinberger for declaring August 21st as National Senior Citizens Day by recognizing the contributions of our older adult citizens and continuing the efforts of Burlington in supporting the resources and programs the city offers to this population. I am here tonight to support the resolution that will be presented to you to establish a senior study committee in light of the recent elimination of United Way funds to the Senior Center. It became apparent the need to investigate opportunities for financial sustainability of this organization, which serves over 500 older adults on a weekly basis with programs, services, meals, and opportunities for community engagement. The city of Burlington has been the main resource for the center, but there is now a need to look further to establish longevity and sustainability. This study group will offer their advice and guidance as well as take a look at a general and general holistically at services and programs provided to all of our older adults in Burlington as we look forward to an increased population of over 65 population. Thank you very much for this opportunity. Thank you, Ms. Moreau and Ms. Reynolds. She's here for support. It's always good to have support, I know. Charles Simpson to be followed by Kate Stein. Good evening, Mr. Simpson. Welcome. Thank you very much, councilman, mayor. We know that the help of the lake is a key to both the livability of Burlington and its recreational tourism economy and to our drinking water supply. We know our wastewater sewage processing capacity does not now meet demand. An untreated sewage is regularly dumped directly into the lake from which we drink and in which we swim. We are told the city will be coming to the voters to ask for a funding bond issue to enhance capacity for the system. Yet we know that well over 1,500 new toilets and showers are scheduled to be added upstream to the system. That is a system that is at present over capacity. I urge the city to require impact fees on large developers to pay for the wastewater treatment capacity that they will require and not to lay this charge to the general residents. I realize that there may be some stormwater retention capacity that is part of the permits for the large developers downtown at Cambrian Rise, but this does not address wastewater treatment capacity. This shouldn't be levied on the general public since the beneficiary are the large developers. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Simpson. Kate Stein to be followed by Lorraine Carter Lovejoy. Good evening, Ms. Stein. Welcome. Thank you. Good evening. So as you know, I'm Kate Stein. I am the mom of a rising freshman. We start on Wednesday at Burlington High School and a son who is going to be a senior this year who has cerebral palsy and uses crutches to get around. I'm coming to the support of supporting Burlington High School from an accessibility point of view. I could talk about a lot of different points of view, but we live this every single day. And I've been working. I joined the re-envisioning in 2014, so I've been working on this for a while. I want to thank those of you who came on tours, and I want to thank you for listening to our school team that we'll be presenting later today. The building as it stands is very discriminatory. My son, as I said, uses crutches to ambulate. Occasionally, he's had to use a wheelchair when he broke his foot in the middle of winter, and I'll tell you why that's a challenge. We're going to take a typical Tuesday, and I wrote it down so I wouldn't miss any of the transitions. He started at 7.15 in the band room for a jazz band. He'd go to school with friends, and they'd go in the bottom of A building, which is not the front door. They'd go in that door and go directly to band. When band was done, he had to go to PreCalculus, which is housed in E building. To do this, he had to leave the band room through the opposite door that everybody else leaves. He would go to the A elevator if it was working. He would take it to the third floor of A. He'd walk the length of the building. He'd go into the ramp from A building to B building. He'd take another elevator. He'd go to the first floor of C building via a ramp. None of these ramps are up to code. They're too steep. Then he would go outside to E building to take an elevator to the second floor of E building to take a ramp, which is actually flat, so that one's okay. Back to C building to go to English. I changed the route in here, sorry. To go to English. That took a lot of time. Then he'd have to go back to band because that was the next class. Then after that class, he'd have to go back up to pre-calculus. It's a lot of wasted time. The money that could be saved on his paraeducator is to help him with transitions like that. If the building were fully accessible and barrier free, we wouldn't need to pay for a human being to be with him. That's a lot of money you could save just in human resources. To close, I really truly believe I love the sign all are welcome. I think that's wonderful. I think we really need to go further and really make sure that everybody is welcome at Burlington High School. Thank you. Thank you, Miss Stein. Lorraine Carter Lovejoy to be followed by Shelley Waterman. Good evening. Welcome. Hi, my name is Lorraine Carter Lovejoy. I'm a community member. I've been a part of the Burlington High School Re-envisioning Committee. I'm a teacher in local alternative schools and I am a new mother. So I will have a student in the school system hopefully in a new high school in 14 years. So I have heard a little bit from elected officials that this feels rushed and to me it does not feel rushed although I've only been on this committee for the past year. I know that people have talked about this for decades. The principal last year said that a lifetime of students have passed through the school as it is now which is shameful really. We have been following a process. This committee was formed. We elected a school board. We have appointed a superintendent. We have appointed this committee that we have. We have hired designers and people to do their job to put this package together to say this is the best option for our community right now and we feel proud about what we have put forward and we expect for the community members to be able to vote on this. I want to talk a little bit about 21st century learning because that's kind of there are some buzz words there. It basically means that not all learning is done in lecture style anymore. What we are doing right now learning as a community is not lecture style. We are discussing things. We are breaking out into smaller groups to work on projects. Now students have to sit in the hallway. This past fall I was a parent educator sub at the high school which meant that I hung out with a lot of students that did not fit what you would think about in a high school that would not fit in that lecture style classroom and I spent a lot of time sitting on the floor in the hallway. The student didn't fit in the class and the teacher might not have had any work for them to do. That doesn't feel fair at all. Every student at Burleson High School has a Chromebook. A lot of classrooms only have two outlets to plug in those Chromebooks. The classrooms do not reflect how students are learning these days. I guess to close I just want everybody to think about I I guess I just want to respect the voices of the community that I've heard over and over that we need a new high school and the time is now. We've waited too long. If not now, when? Thank you Miss Carter Lovejoy. Shelly Waterman. To be followed by Maha Takahashi. Good evening Miss Waterman. Welcome. Good evening. Thank you. So I want to start out by saying that I'm a mother of two daughters who are students in the Burlington School District. Sorry. And I'm no stranger to advocating for accessibility and inclusion in the city. I was a member of the mayor's committee for accessibility and inclusion several years ago. And I want to talk about the right to dignity in this city and with our schools my daughter is more disabled in that school district in the structure as Burlington School stands than any of her limitations could ever afford her. The dignity that families have to suffer through undignified situations and I'll give you an example of just what that means. My daughter has classes in sea building the restroom is in lower sea she's a wheelchair user so in order for her to use the bathroom just in sea building again like Kate said it's a maze of ramps, elevators, outdoor exchanges just to get back into the building to use a bathroom that everyone else can use a flight of stairs for. And I want you to think about that and I want you to put yourself in that situation and how undignified it is for a 16 year old girl I want to talk about meaningful inclusion and how when a person has limitations just how incredibly difficult it is when we do not have universal design in our city or in our schools it takes so much time and energy for her to get from one point of the building to the other and it's not just physical structures it's also the attitudes that we have for people with disabilities so I want to say that my family supports the creation of a new high school we welcome it it's time it should have happened years and years ago and you have an opportunity to make a positive change in this community and to set an example for other schools in the state to say that we support and welcome every student and that we support students with disabilities thank you good evening, welcome thank you I'm Maho Takahashi I have been a part of the organization called Peaceboat which is a global educational voyage for peace and sustainability that sells around the world we have sailed with over 170 Hibakusha survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki for their personal testimonies after moving to Burlington from Tokyo I was delighted to find out that Burlington has been a member city of Mayors for Peace which is a solidarity of cities around the world for nuclear abolition since 80s so hats off to Burlington's leadership in nuclear abolition but we need more now as the world has introduced a treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons US is not catching up Shigeko Sasamori she was 13 years old at that time 86 years old this year is a Hibakusha from Hiroshima she was burnt she says that she looked like a black burnt toast and her father had to peel off each piece of her skin she had to go through 27 surgeries in her life can you imagine that can you imagine that to you or your 13 year old child and the world we live in now has so much more powerful nuclear weapons than Hiroshima and Nagasaki some people say that it's for deterrent but if it is then why are we still talking about the threat of North Korea there is what Burlington can do there is a proclamation going around the country many cities are coming together to call for US to pull back from the brink of nuclear war I encourage you all to look at it and consider signing I am delighted to share with you that Shigeko along with other Hibakusha from Nagasaki Yasaki Yamashita they're coming to Burlington next month we'll be taking them to six local schools and we'll be talking to over 2600 students in public I'd like to invite you all to come to a public event that we are scheduling on September 19th at 7pm at UVN and hear what they may have to say thank you thank you Ms Takahashi Robin Lloyd is up next to be followed by Frank Gillette thank you following up on Maho's comments about the Hibakusha coming to Burlington I'm here to support and urge you to support a proclamation calling for we call it back from the brink of nuclear confrontation I believe I've sent that to all of you together with the little flyer telling about the Hibakusha coming in September and I'm very grateful to Joan Shannon who responded and questioned me about it and asked for more details and so I hope that we can move towards a proclamation either from the city council or from the mayor at some time before the Hibakusha come on the 17th of September you may know that the there's a group called mayors for peace and there's also the the US the United States conference of mayors the conference of mayors has supported and accepted a statement from the mayors for peace which is a very strong statement calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons and a person who could not be here Judy Yarnel from ward 4 left me copies of this statement and wanted me to hand it out to all of you so I have it here I mean the president of the United States is presenting a very dangerous policy of low level nuclear weapons as Maho has described the impact of a nuclear weapon small or large is devastating on any person nearby for the rest of their life to try to survive the impact of radiation sickness and the cancers that follow from that so I hope to we will be in touch with all of you I hope individually maybe and to get your support and hope you will come on the 19th to the to the event at UVM and we'll also be in touch with the mayor's office and perhaps that's the way to go to have a mayoral proclamation so thank you thank you miss Lloyd Frank Gio to be followed by Liz Currie Good evening Mr. Gio welcome Hi I'm Frank Gio I'd like to speak for just a couple minutes about the high school I first had this idea about the high school back in 2002 so over a decade and a half ago I firmly believe that the city students need a new high school all three of our kids graduated from throughout went through the entire Burlington school system my son's a lawyer my daughter's pediatrician and my younger daughter has a PhD from Yale so the school system served us very well we're very pleased with that result what I feel is that the proposal that's on the table $70 million to build a renovation of the existing school building doesn't fully serve the needs of the people and a better solution which I proposed low these many years ago and have brought back up from time to time since is that a new school be built in what is called the north 40 near the urban reserve and that the school be built into the bank into the steep embankment on the east side of the reserve just to the north of where the railroad goes through the cut and that the level area of the urban reserve be playing fields it would be one of the most spectacular high schools in the state if not the country with a view across to the Adirondacks the access to the school would be from north avenue with structured parking either to one side or on top of the existing school I'm an architect but I haven't designed the building because I felt that it wouldn't all it would be would be a source of argument not about the merits of the concept the key the other key aspect of this idea is that we would use the property of the existing high school for the development and construction of housing and that housing of high density at least as high density as the old north end if not higher depending on the political will of you all would be used as a tax incremental financing district to pay for the new high school so there wouldn't be a $70 million bond issue paid for by the citizens of Burlington thank you thank you Mr. Gio Liz Curry is up next to be followed by Karen Downey good evening Ms. Curry and welcome thank you I'm speaking as the board three commissioner expressing my personal views as you know the district will be presenting on the project later I know you all believe in the need for a new high school I'm here to ask you to understand there's an urgent need to place it on the November ballot the discussions and planning for BHS redevelopment and have been going on for over 10 years in March of 2019 the district will have a general education fund request on the ballot and we understand that the city may be planning to place money out items on the ballot as well having a $70 million bond request compete with the school district's budget forces voters to choose between our high quality learning environment and educational programming needs and next March the baseline tax increase for the school budget will be 6% just to make up the difference between the city's gap in the property assessment and the CLA which is now over 20% so that will be the baseline it would be reasonable predict that school spending will be at least 2% due to health care increases and we have a teachers contract negotiation so right out of the door we're going with most likely somewhere around the 8% increase without even doing any numbers so second Burlington is committed to inclusion and equity but our schools do not allow us to fulfill that promise as you've heard it's unfair to our students and other staff and parents with mobility barriers to continue excluding them from participating fully in our educational process it's unfair to our students and families to consider safety and security risks that exist with the current physical configuration it's unfair to English language learners to be isolated in one section of the building when we're working hard to create an inclusive and welcoming climate and the sooner we save money on utilities through energy efficiency the sooner we can reduce our operating expenses and redirect funds to educational services for academic achievement academic achievement is diminished by the lack of natural daylight lack of thermal regulation and poor indoor quality there's a number of articles about this most notably a 2014 study of over 2,000 classrooms in California Washington and Colorado knowing that when controlling for socioeconomic status and racial makeup inadequate lighting noise and low air quality and deficient heating and cooling in the classrooms are significantly related to worse student achievement and test scores every day that goes by without a sub-standard high school exposes our city to economic risk we have a healthy economy now with a construction boom that's creating hundreds of units when millennials begin forming families school district questions your consideration delaying the project sends a message to these young adults that sow the seeds of doubt in our education facilities in the city current construction projects will be winding down thank you thank you miss currie Karen Downey is up next to be followed by sandy baird good evening miss Downey welcome good evening and thank you for having us here tonight I've been a member of the Burlington high school renovation committee since 2013 so I am a resident of Burlington I'm a parent of a graduate of the high school and I also have worked in the system for 30 years as an occupational therapist my initial involvement with the renovation committee was because of accessibility students using crutches or wheelchairs or students just needing a little more time to get from point A to point B I just want to give you some specifics with breakdowns we hear about the infrastructure at Burlington high school we hear about the problems with electrical plumbing furnace hallways that are really cold or really hot but there have been times recently that students could not get to class because sewage was erupting and building e and students would lose their entire term paper because the iPad they were using had a blip we have had students who could not use the elevator in a building that we heard about coming from the chorus up into or the van room up into the rest of the building because a building elevator has had significant problems we've also had building elevator problems in D building as well as needing a replacement in B building so we've waited many years and I remember hearing the discussion about putting the high school down on the waterfront and I believe Betsy is here tonight I heard Betsy talking about that at least ten years ago and I appreciate the gentlemen who gave the specifics on that but I also remember us talking about the traffic issue and just getting school buses the longer we wait the longer our students are not getting quality education so I hope you will put the bond on the ballot in November and we can get started with our renovation for the new building thank you thank you Miss Downey Sandy Baird is up next to be followed by the final speaker tonight Charlotte Dennett good evening Miss Baird and welcome Sandy Baird I'm from Ward 1 and I'm here tonight to talk a little bit about the peace initiative and the ban on nuclear weapons that Robin Lloyd spoke about before me and I would remind the city council and the mayor that we are part of mayors for peace I believe that's correct and I thank the mayor for doing that or for continuing that resolution which was passed by Bernie Sanders I believe back in 1986 I would also remind us in very troubled parts of the world right now a sister city in Nicaragua we have a sister city in Israel in Palestine and we have a sister city in Russia all of those cities are under various kinds of attacks and chaos has ensued in all of those cities one of those sister cities has nuclear weapons and since recently there has been a real chance of confrontation with that nuclear power by the United States to urge city council and the mayor to take seriously the idea that cities should be forming peace with our neighbors and I would ask that you seriously consider supporting a ban on nuclear weapons that Robin spoke about just recently thank you final speaker tonight Charlotte Dennett good evening Ms. Dennett and welcome Dennett I'm also here in support of the Burlington city council where the mayor signing a proclamation concerning the banning of nuclear weapons I'm also coming as a former reporter in the Middle East and I'm currently working on a book about the endless wars in the Middle East and I would urge you to read this statement by the conference of mayors specifically this paragraph whereas tensions between the US and Russia have risen to levels not seen since the Cold War and the two nuclear giants confronting each other in Ukraine, Eastern Europe and Syria and an accelerated tempo of military exercises and war games both conventional and nuclear and risky encounters between Russia and US NATO forces increases dramatically in the Baltic region and Syria and as I speak I believe there is a warship heading to the eastern Mediterranean a US warship towards Syria right now I cannot emphasize how serious the situation is there but at the same time I've been grappling with how to break through what seems to be a certain psychic numbness to quote the great Dr. Helen Caldecott about the threat of nuclear weapons and in a conversation recently with some other concerned people this sort of thought experiment came up and I'd like you to really think about it supposing we are sitting here now and we suddenly get news that a nuclear weapon has been launched towards the United States it may have been an accident or it may have been deliberate what's our response the responsibility what would our response be I can guess what the knee jerk response would be retaliate what would retaliation mean think about it think about the dangers to the planet this is very serious anyway I do urge you to consider the proclamation and also to attend the events on September 19th here the Hibakushu thank you and with that that concludes tonight's public forum and we just so everybody knows on the council and the public we are going to be diverting a little bit on the agenda the work session on the proposed wastewater stormwater upgrades and bonding will come after the schools we are first going to go to item number 5 which is the consent agenda I will recognize councillor Nodell President Rod I move that we adopt the consent agenda as amended and take the actions indicated moved by councillor Nodell seconded by councillor Buescher any discussion hearing none all those in favor of passing the consent agenda and taking the actions indicated police AI any opposed we have passed the consent agenda before going to the school presentation I'm going to dispose of some business that we have to do but they are really quick items so first I am going to um recess the regular city council meeting and convene the local control commission meeting at 7 at 8 8 11 first item on the agenda is the agenda Chairman Dean I will move adoption of the agenda agenda has been moved and seconded by Commissioner Roof all those in favor of the agenda please say aye any opposed we have the agenda item number 2 is the consent agenda Commissioner Dean I will move to adopt the consent agenda taking the actions as indicated and seconded by councillor Roof motion made to approve the consent agenda take the actions indicated any discussion hearing none all those in favor please say aye any opposed we have passed the consent agenda and then a motion to adjourn motion to adjourn made by Commissioner Dean seconded by Commissioner Roof all those in favor please say aye any opposed we have completed the liquor control commission now we have two meetings that the mayor will preside over and so I will recess the local control commission meeting and turn over at 8.13 and allow the mayor to convene the next two meetings which are Board of Civil Authority and then City Council of Mayor presiding so thank you President Wright let me call into order at 8.13 the Board of Civil Authority and the first item on the agenda is the agenda and welcome a motion on it thank you Councillor Paul is there a second second by President Wright discussion of the agenda all those in favor of the motion please say aye aye excellent we have an agenda the next item is the consent agenda do we have a motion move to pass the consent agenda and take the actions indicated second excellent any discussion all those in favor of the motion please say aye opposed and the motion carries unanimously and without objection the Board of Civil Authority is adjourned at 8.14 and I'll call into order the City Council of Mayor presiding at 8.14 as well and welcome a motion on the agenda motion to approve thank you is there a second second by Councillor Nodell discussion all those in favor of the motion please say aye motion carries we have an agenda motion to approve second by Councillor Roof excellent all those in favor of the motion please say aye aye opposed consent agenda is adopted and that brings us to 3.01 point of order we have a Councilor Nodell has a question I think did you have Councilor Bushard Councilor Bushard I'm sorry are you okay? bring us to 3.01 which is an appointment to the conservation board for term expiring on June 30th 2021 I'd welcome a motion or nominations for this position I would place in nomination the name of Ryan Crehan excellent are there any additional nominations seeing none I'll close the floor to nominations and is there any additional discussion before the vote on the nomination of Ryan Crehan seeing no interest in discussion we will go to a vote all those in favor of appointing Mr. Crehan please say aye aye I believe that is majority unanimous majority and Mr. Crehan congratulations thank you for your interest in serving on this board and with that President Wright the City Council Mayor presiding is adjourned at 816 and I turn it back to you thank you Mr. Mayor I told you that would be quick okay so we are moving back let me reconvene the regular City Council meeting at 816 and move back to the agenda and item number 6 will be the nomination from the school board and school administration and that will be Chair Claire Wool Superintendent Yao Bang and I think Nathan Lavery Director of Finance and whoever else may be coming up with you good evening welcome and just so it would be clear that there was no vote I think most people understand that no vote tonight but September 11th taking up requests for ballot items so with that you have the floor thank you President Wright and City Council once again we want to show our appreciation for the opportunity to share the work that we put into delivering you what we think is an excellent package around Burlington High School and thank all of Councils for sending the questions along in the last few months and also of course the Mayor's letter in terms of indicating some specific questions excuse me for just one minute just remind everybody again please pull the microphones in very close so that everybody can speak directly into the microphone so that everybody can hear you perfect do you want me to start over? no you're good I know you did receive our package with the specific questions so we're going to try to go through the presentation as expeditious as possible considering the time frames and then leave time for any questions that may come later on can you advance the slide? so if you look at the graphics here I wanted to kind of just start off getting sort of a national perspective one of the challenges nationally across many districts if not almost all is the challenge around capital and for years and decades many school boards have had to make the hard choice between either deferred maintenance repairs or putting money into students or staffing and usually the decision is to put into the people and then it creates a challenge down the road look at these graphics here I just happened to be in Baltimore about a month ago with a group of Burlington students and the picture on the left there I took between in a hallway through a gated off fence so this particular school had such severe deferred maintenance that they had to the city had closed down the hallway which meant that all the classrooms in that side were off limits and they're in the process now looking at rebuilding an entire school because of the challenges they have and the graphics on the other side or other schools in the east that have these sort of same kind of deferred maintenance and this is very similar to some of the hot spots we have in our schools but I wanted to reassure you that this is not just a Burlington challenge this is a real real Herclean feat for many districts across the country in terms of balance and when's the right time to do these upgrades I'm not sure I can I'm going to start, I'm Marty Spaulding Director of Property Services for the school district I want to give you a brief overview of the project and some challenges that we have with the current building structure so here's an aerial view of the high school and as you'll see it's very spread out built with a number of different separate buildings what you can't see in that aerial view is the fact that the building is built on the hillside but we all know that the high school is built on that hillside so the bottom floor of our the bottom floor of our A building is actually seven stories below the top story of our E building so it makes for very very long travel paths for anybody to navigate across that very spread out campus which and it also doesn't meet current accessibility ADA standards we have aging and outdated learning spaces as well as very insufficient building envelope with the insulation in the exterior walls as well as the windows and roofs etc because the building is so spread out there's lots of exit doors to all of the buildings which also affect our security and security to keep this campus secure from having people access those unsecure entry points slide so some needs identified by staff in the community our additional PE space for gym classes as well as our after school athletic programs some additional space for our theater programs some creating our classrooms to be more collaborative creating classrooms that have more temperature control with air conditioning creating a high performance design obviously reducing travel paths is a major priority of this project as well as creating safe entry points another detail of the project that were identified from administrative is to create ninth grade academies and we'll talk a little bit more about that later in the presentation as well as additional conference room space and large cafeteria spaces with natural lighting etc so slide some project design priorities are ADA accessibility consolidation of classrooms and student support spaces as well as department spaces to create this collaboration create a maker space identified deferred maintenance needs of the building install new windows roofs and create a more energy efficient building to reduce our energy cost upgrade systems such as our HVAC as well as lighting and storm water management enhanced building security install a new sprinkler system one of the design criteria that we're trying to meet with this project is becoming a collaborative high performance school this is a chips model chips is very similar to LEED where there's a point structure where the building would design to meet a high performance model that's specific to schools so unlike LEED where LEED is a little bit more specific to energy efficiency chips is focused on all aspects of designing schools such as acoustics in the classroom natural lighting creating appropriate display space for student artwork and etc so just a quick overview of the project slide here's a look of a concept of a new front entrance of the high school north avenue so we're proposing to construct 115 square feet of new construction that would wrap around our existing A building and then we would be renovating 165 square feet of our existing A buildings, F buildings and B building total square footage of the school would be 280,000 square feet the building's currently 245,000 square feet we would do this construction where we would propose doing the new construction around the current A building while students are going to continue to use building C, D and E once the new construction is completed we would then eventually demolish building C and D and possibly E however there is some discussion about repurposing E for other future programming unrelated to Burlington high school the proposed project cost for this renovation would be roughly $70,000,000 I'm now going to introduce our architect from Black River Design John Hemmelgarn to talk about some of the design details Good evening, again my name is John Hemmelgarn, I'm a partner with Black River Design Architects we've put together what we think is a pretty nice plan here the key pieces of this site plan that you're looking at, as Marty mentioned is getting rid of those C, D and E buildings and actually putting the parking lot up on top of the hill there where those buildings are freeing up open space where the current parking lot is which allows us to separate the bus traffic from the vehicular traffic in the drop-off as well as creating space at the bottom end of the site for our stormwater treatment you can see that that then opens up the view from North Avenue and Institute Road of the building so that it's not across the parking lot it's open space, the new building gives you a clean new facade instead of those large expanses of blank brick building that are there now I think those are the highlights of the site plan so if we can move on so while this isn't perhaps the most important floor we're going to start at the bottom to give you a quick overview of what's contained in this building on the lowest level on the left are the tech center programs one's existing one is the new aviation lab in the lower left the purple in the center is the on top program which because it's on the bottom will have its own separate entrance which was an important factor there and finally the yellow areas you see on the right are the additional PE space that was identified as a programmatic need for this project it also allows community use of this as it is down near the road it also provides some support space for the athletic fields across the street which are not available currently next the next floor up really highlights this is the level that the stage is on in the building and we've put the band and music programs there so that we really have a performing art center on this level so that we have a position on the right and at the lower part of the of the plan you can see well in our printed materials those are light blue they're kind of gray here those are clusters of classrooms and we try to keep the classrooms so that we don't have individuals of groups of classrooms that are maybe only one or two but at least four or five that are near to each other to promote the collaborative teaching that this building really wants to so this is the main entrance level more or less where you come into the building currently up in the upper right you can see there's a rectangular block that would be the new administrative area and guidance departments where you can have a secure entrance where people can come into the vestibule be greeted by someone in the office sign in to the building this way everyone knows who's in the building and we're trying to get it so that everyone is actually coming into this entrance including not only the high school population but the tech center population as well we've relocated the tech center administration to this level down towards where the kitchen is on the left you also see there there's a courtyard and I'll show you an image of that here in a few minutes but this gets you the main entrance, the access to the auditorium, the access to the gymnasium the access to the cafeteria so these are all the major public spaces in the building in addition you can see how the classrooms wrap around the outside of the building there I think that's good for that floor in addition you'll see this new entrance atrium will then have connections that we're going to build up at this next level up that connect across to the B building because the B building as Marty said steps up the hill so in addition you can see the orange spaces there in the upper right and just next to the gym these are faculty work areas that are designed to create some collaborative areas for faculty to meet and to work together also to be very accessible to the students in addition on the left those are the art rooms which are currently on the upper level of A building which is where actually that's where the on top program is right now those are isolated currently but with this plan when we connect through over to B building it really becomes a very integral part of the building actually I'd like to go back one slide I know that's going backwards here for our time but the really a key component here that you see is where the cafeteria is in the upper left that connector over to the F building that you see in the in the very upper left is very important this allows us to expand the cafeteria expand the kitchen and create an internal handicap accessible route from the front door over to the tech center that is something that now has another very circuitous route much as you heard some of the other speaking about earlier to get access or the students really they just go outside and up the hill in the snow and the ice so this is going to really integrate the tech center with the high school next and finally then this is the B building this is the last part we want to talk about is in the existing B building we're going to locate the 9th grade academies so these guys with these new walkways and connectors over to A building are going to be very connected but again have a little bit of an autonomous area within the building for the 9th graders I think that's I think that's it so go ahead the video should be on here is that right? so this is an image of as you come in the building at the new entrance kind of walking through that central gathering space or the commons or the atrium as you would like to call it looks great I don't have a clicker on that this is a view as you come across from the bus lane the other thing you'll notice as we get towards the end of this is back right when we get to the near the front entrance is there's a new elevator there that gets you access to the three main floors of this building as you come in at the front door that gets you to all those main public spaces in the building it's right there on the right thank you John for sharing and we will have an opportunity to ask specific questions around the site plan if council wishes to do that tonight just moving on I wanted to I know you heard tonight there's a big ceremony around the whole high school that predates the schedule we have on the calendar here so I won't go through all that history but just a few highlights just to indicate in 2013 when after some conversations the Black River design was awarded to redesign the BHS and BTC in 2015 there were the facility conditions assessments and you have all this in your package your own leisure in 2016 the two building project options rose so there are a number of conversations around different options building new school not building new school renovate do partial ADA accessibility pieces but we got to the partial demolition renovation expansion and then the re-envisioning committee which came out of a group of community members who really wanted to see this project take light through community process and started that process by some staff and then finally community engagement included tours and many of you have been on tours lots of communication and brochures around the project itself and then finally on August 21 the board made a motion to approve the option C which was the option that had most of the benefits and sort of the added value features for 70 million bond question to bring forward to council that date we did receive a letter from the mayor which I believe was a consolidation of questions from council and concerns and we greatly appreciate that because that gave us an opportunity to focus information that we should share with council to get your support in moving this forward so the next phase of our presentations we are going to address the questions specifically and at your pleasure let us know if you have further questions at this time or you want to hold them off to it another time but we will try to get through the initial presentation of that do you have a question that you need to Mr. President what do you plan there was an invitation to ask some questions there will definitely be an opportunity for questions how much longer is the presentation we are going to quickly go through the eight questions but some of them are in the slides that we have shown already so we will glance through then we will come back and open up for questions let's finish the presentation unless there is a question that has to be asked right now thanks the first specific question was why are you proposing this particular plan and this particular option and what other options were looked at so we will back up a little bit we did do a study on all of our buildings to identify the deferred maintenance needs which include looking at those needs for the high school one option was to address just the bare minimum deferred maintenance needs of the high schools which was identified to be roughly $30 million quickly after communicating with staff community etc the need the want to address the bare minimum of this building clearly did not address the ADA requirement challenges of the facility this was not an option that was rose to the top of the list then we the options that did rise to the top of the list was to do a renovation which was going to cost roughly between $60 million and $70 million or a new building and then the re-envisioning committee was formed to go out to gauge the community of their appetite to do either one of those two options to renovate the current building or propose a new building after lots of community input the re-envisioning committee made a recommendation to the superintendent to move forward with renovation versus new it was overwhelming support to renovate the building versus build a new facility for many factors and then then we drilled down to go to the next slide three different options that ranged between $60 and $68.5 million most of those options included the same scope of work however we were focusing a little less attention on the tech center and the number of improvements that would be doing to the tech center as well a little less focus on the HVAC upgrades specifically on air conditioning to do a baseline project of $60 million versus a more modest project to ensure that the tech center received the same number of upgrades as the high school for $68.5 the board also felt that we wanted to provide air conditioning to the entire facility the board voted to approve $70 million to cover the expense of making sure that we're air conditioning the entire facility as well slide we also looked at options for an $80 million project and what that entailed as well as like I mentioned a building a brand new high school which would cost roughly $100 million I'm wondering if for pacing we can have questions for question one from Marty while he's on this section and then we can move on to the next question would that be a little bit more... questions on each or do you want us to just go through everything different people are going to be here for different questions that's why does the council want to ask questions I guess we can stop and ask if questions Councillors have questions on this any questions from the council on this first one Councillor Hartnett so you want from $68 I hear those numbers right $68 to $7 million based on air conditioning that seems a little excessive I just want to make sure I get those numbers right is that what we're talking that is what we're talking we receive estimates from our mechanical engineers in order to provide air conditioning to the entire facility would cost an additional roughly $1.5 million okay just wanted to make sure thanks any other questions on this one Councillor Mason thank you Marty I guess I'm confused because if I look at the $68.5 million option it says AC offices and common areas so I don't understand why we bumped up another million and a half if air conditioning was in the $68.5 air conditioning was in the $68.5 to do common areas and offices but not classrooms and to do dehumidification dehumidification only in the classrooms but the board felt strongly that we wanted to provide that level of comfort to all of the classrooms throughout the complex so we can also expand the use of the building throughout the summer months thank you that's helpful thank you Councillor Mason Councillor Nodell and then Councillor Bursher thank you isn't right will the school building be used extensively during the summer months when the classrooms are air conditioned or will there be an effort to program and do some additional programs beyond what's happening now many of our buildings are used throughout the summer for summer programming and most of the buildings that are used are the ones that are currently air conditioning those are the ones that are the first choice I should say the high school also has tons of summer programming and building and there could be more we currently run summer programs in the high school now this will just give us an opportunity to increase that capacity there's summer schools and other partnership programs that happen throughout the summer great I think that it's really important to utilize that space if we're going to air condition absolutely thank you Councillor Nodell Councillor Bursher I'm going to wait till number two Councillor Bursher passes Councillor Paul Councillor Bursher so in this slide that you've got right in front of you was there any again I don't know if this is workable but just a question was there any consideration given to like for example the meet requirements of the chip certification at 65 million putting that into the chip doing that and only that of higher performance, greater energy efficiency into the 68 and a half million. So in other words, that there could be some sort of middle ground that perhaps it didn't need to be 68 and a half million, but you could somehow rather that these are at all interchangeable. Do you know what I mean? Everything is definitely interchangeable. I'm not quite sure I understand the question, but the difference between option B, the 65, and the difference compared to the option C of the 68.5, I can just give you an example with chips. Chips is based on a point structure that ranges from a minimum of 85 to a maximum of 250. The assumption of the 65 million would meet the minimum to receive the certification somewhere in the 85 point range and we were proposing to increase that point structure in the 68.5 somewhere in the middle of the 85 to the 250 more in the 150 range. Does that answer some of the question? Yes, thank you. Thank you, Councillor Powell. Councillor Jang and then Councillor Dean. First of all, thank you for being here and for the detailed presentation. And I believe that some of the commentators did explain that this process of renovation or construction has been here since 2013, is it accurate? And looks like also you already had a capital plan of 19 million dollars to 39 millions. And looks like this is like 70 million. Does it mean we need to subtract those 19 to 39 million or this is totally 70 millions you're asking for? So it is a separate piece and that is one of the questions that we'll have a finance director actually give you detail about that specific area. So if you can hold that, we'll respond to that first thing when we get to that section. Yeah, and what is the name of this project? Actually, the actual name that the school district is calling it. What is the name? VHS Re-Invisioning. Re-Invision? VHS Re-Invisioning. Re-Invision. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Jang. And Councillor Dean, to be followed by Councillor Pine. Thank you, President Wright. So I know that with each one of the options that you've offered to us tonight, there are significant investments in energy efficiency, both in terms of the exterior of the building and the systems that are servicing the building. Can you talk to us a little bit about the differences in operational costs between investing less versus investing more in the project? Definitely one of the next steps is to do some energy modeling on the project. One of the things that we wanted to do before we invested in doing energy modeling to five different options was to narrow down one specific option. That energy modeling is gonna be based on the performance of the building envelope, windows, et cetera, as well as the mechanical system. Other factors are gonna be included in those operating costs, such as full air conditioned or partially air conditioned. We anticipate that the energy costs will be reduced significantly. The building's also going to be 45,000 square feet larger than what it currently is, so there's gonna be additional space that needs to be part of that equation. But we definitely envision a reduced energy cost because of the upgrades that we'll be doing to this facility. So if I could just do a quick follow up so to make sure that I understand. So the net operational costs for the facility may not go down, even though we've added all of these additional energy efficiency measures because we've added so much square footage. We are adding square footage and we're also adding air conditioning to a building that's currently not. But the operational costs on a per square foot basis will likely be decreased based on these investments. Okay. That is true, correct. All right, thank you. Yeah. Councilor Pine, to be followed by Councilor Roof. Councilor Deng-Lart, Councilor Dean actually, largely touched on what I wanted to ask, but I would like to say that I think there's some, some detail needed in this area that I think Councilor Dean was asking, referring to. It's helpful to have a scenario under which we have options around how much additional load of energy use is a result of the air conditioning versus perhaps not air conditioning the entire facility. I think it'd be helpful to see some options there because if we invest heavily in energy efficiency and make a really tight envelope and we have great indoor air quality, all those great things, but we've increased the load so much that there's not enough savings to really offset some of the bond costs. And that's what we are hoping to see is the ability to use some of the savings to cover debt service and not have to rely on the taxpayer, rather use the savings inherent in the project to cover some of that. So that's a really important piece, I think, for some of us. Yep, that's a very good point that we'll definitely do those calculations through the energy modeling. That was one of the factors why we didn't come right out of the gate and propose the air conditioning right from the get go because of that added operational cost. Thank you, Councilor Pine. Councilor Roof and Mr. Mayer, of course, don't hesitate to jump in anytime. It's your letter and responses to your questions. So don't hesitate to jump in if you want to have further questions. Councilor Roof. Thank you, President Wright. This chart is really helpful. I'd answer a few questions that I've had, especially showing the genesis of how he went from a $30 million number up through 60, well, then 70 million. One thing that I would really like to see before asked to vote on this for the 11th would be, well, not a full accounting line by line of what the project would look like, but a general accounting for what the makeup of the project spend will look like at that now $70 million level. Is that something that you think could be produced? We have that included as an attachment in the... Which attachment is that? I believe it's F. And actually, we'll be able to speak to it at a different question as well. We'll be bringing that up. I look forward to it. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Roof. Councilor Zhang. And Marty, this is a question for you. I mean, this is a big project and a project of this scale. And we also know as a director of the property services. So you have so many other work going on. Are you the one who will also manage and control this specific project for the district? No, but why don't we hold onto that? That question as well. Cause that also be addressed in one of the questions here. Thank you. And this is actually Mr. Pine just asked when the construction is taking place, it's happening. Where are the students going to be placed? Well, that's a good question. So because of how we're proposing to do this construction by building new construction wrapped around our current A building, we'll be able to simultaneously do the work while students are still using A building. And then clearly they will also be able to continue using buildings B, C, D, and E. This was a thought process that had to be considered in order to phase this project, this work of this project that's gonna be phased over possibly two, two and a half years. So we had to figure out how to make that work happen while kids are still going to school in the building and try to reduce the number of let's say modular classrooms to be used or sending students, displacing students off campus. Thank you. Thank you. And we'll go to Councillor Shannon and then the mayor. Thank you and thank you for the presentation. As many know, I'm a parent of a current high schooler and the need for a new high school does not escape me in any way. And I like what I've seen here from the architect to understand how the new building would work. At the same time I am concerned, it's a very big decision for our community. It's a lot of money that is concerning for a lot of taxpayers and we need to get it right because this is a decision for a generation or maybe three or four generations. I was concerned about as somebody said in public forum, this is a process that has gone on for a very long time but I am concerned that the latest group that was charged with looking at this might not have benefited from the work that had been done by all the previous groups and I'm not sure how much of work that had been done previously and ideas that had worked their way up for a while and then administrations change and interest was lost if they were able to capture some of the good work that has been done by previous groups both in the recent past and not so recent past. And in one of the documents, we have a lot of documents to look through here and I can't say that I have thoroughly studied everything but there's a document I think it was called OPR Draft and in it there's table one stakeholder input sessions and it says that on May 17th you spoke with educators and the number was 10. The students and parents, apparently nobody showed up and so the meeting was canceled or there was one parent who showed up and the meeting was canceled. In administration there was input from 12 people and the community re-envisioning group there was input from seven people presumably those were the people on the committee and I'm hoping you're going to explain to me how that was not the only input that was received in creating this current plan because I think just like we heard here at public forum there are a lot of interesting ideas in the community and I don't know if the idea of a TIF district to pay for this is a real possibility if it was considered by anybody or if the many other good ideas in the community have been considered at this point so I'll let you speak to that. I'm going to start and then pass over to Marty you can talk about the OPR process as well too. So thank you for that question there that's a really good question in terms of we didn't start by reinventing the wheel. When I was here in 2015, 2016 we did gather all the information from previous groups that had worked on the high school project and started that at a staff level in terms of looking at what was provided and what the options were and there were options at that point 100 million, 200 million and at that point even there was an analysis around 90 million project and that's when we took the next step in terms of we weren't ready at that point to bring it forward and the continued analysis and then we started re-engaging some of the former community members who were part and staff who were part of the original proposals and they sort of integrated into the new groups and then they started a new process based on the information that they had previously one of the slides there that you saw that had the initial nuggets around identified by staff and community that was from the initial assessment that was done a really robust assessment that went through all staff in 2013 and gathered information in terms of what the needs and the hotspots around the high school and then so we've taken that and we've kind of sprinted from there okay let's how do we make it better and I'll let Marty talk to you about the OPR process that you mentioned. So as Yael mentioned that list from those slides that said needs identified from staff that those are the same design directives that we've been working off since 2013 what we wanted to do with our OPR process is validate that we're still working off the same parameters that were identified in 2013 because obviously lots of things had changed since then so we hired an outside firm CS associates to help us do that our owner project requirement come up with a firm document that's gonna be a guideline for the project design as well as be used throughout the whole entire construction process right into the commissioning of the project you had mentioned the number of staff that participated those were all department heads so they had received feedback from the teachers within their departments before participating in that so though there wasn't a vast number of people that were in the room that were representing a number of teachers what we clearly identified through that process is we validated that the design directives that we were working off from 2013 are very similar almost the same owner project requirements that we're currently working off now. So I appreciate the explanation about the participation from the educators, the administrators and the re-envisioning group and it seems like everybody there was remained on the same page but it does appear that there was not any input in that process from students and parents, correct? Yes, we did try to hold a student session it was late in the late in the end of the year unfortunately no students chose to come it was a voluntary option to participate no students did end up coming to any of the events we can certainly replicate that at the start of the school year. And what about the ideas that were brought forward tonight which was an idea from a decade ago or more that you could create a tax increment financing district that would help support which I think would require building on a different site where in this process were things considered that were a little more out of the box? I think we were looking at all options out of the box through this process. I don't, I wasn't here at the time that we proposed to build on the North 40 it's not obviously not land that the school district currently owns. I believe at the time that that was presented it didn't create a whole lot of momentum to move to the next level where obviously these options are, you know have validated to move to the next level to follow through with these projects. Let me just to reinforce again cause I know you asked about the community but the re-envisioning committee was a group of about 30 community members and many of them were on the previous sort of advocacy groups around that so what Marty didn't share with you is that we did have an opportunity with that group with the previous specifications from the architects and engineers to have conversations with that group as well too in terms of given guidance moving forward and at that point I don't think anyone went back to 2008 to say that's the plan that we should go through. I know there was conversations about it there have been lots of conversations but Marty and I both were not here during that period of time and that's never seen to caught on in any of the conversations we've had that leads to revisit that plan that was presented then. Or other financing ideas. Yeah, we'll talk about that as well too in terms of other financing. Thank you Councillor Shannon. Mr. Mayor, did you? Thank you President Wright. Just while we're on the slide I do think it would be a helpful clarification. You know, I think it pretty clearly a pretty significant decision and the moments leading up till now is deciding to move away from this $30 million option towards the 60 to 70 million range and I think that slide is suggesting that the smaller option would not have addressed the mobility issues, the ADA issues which is very compelling. I think no one, I don't believe anyone sitting in here doesn't believe that the ADA issues that have been described in detail tonight need to be addressed. I think there might just be some confusion over the 2016 report recommending a renovation plan seem to and maybe it's a confusion within the report but it does seem to suggest that this lower plan would address ADA issues. So can you just speak to that? I can speak to that. So that plan, so as you know that we have six different buildings actually eight buildings on the part of the makeup of the campus of the high school we currently have four elevators in order to make those buildings more ADA compliant we would need to have an elevator in each one of those buildings to reduce the travel pass to allow you to go from floor to floor in those separate buildings in order to add those elevators you would have to either build on the exterior of the building or take interior space away from that particular building other areas that would need to be addressed in order to bring the buildings up to ADA would be to add restrooms make them more ADA compliant. Again similar issue if you're let's say we're talking about C building if we currently have one bathroom in C building on one floor and we wanna add another bathroom on the second floor as well as an elevator we would have to take away existing building footprint to add an elevator on the second floor which would take away from existing classroom space we'd have to do the same by adding an elevator take away existing building footprint so in order to recapture that the additional square footed needed for classroom space we would then have to add on additional square footage to the building so it really isn't just a factor of popping in an elevator or an extra bathroom without it also impacting other additional square footed costs somewhere around the building but could you make the building more ADA compliant based on a current configuration? Yes by adding more bathrooms and more elevators as well as other features to make it more ADA compliant but that's not going to address the very very long travel pass that we currently have by going from the first floor of A building seven stories up to the third floor of E building that adding additional elevators is not gonna address that. Thank you Mr. Mayor. Okay, we're gonna have to take a little change in process here because that one question took a long time and this is a huge issue, no doubt but we can't take that long in each and every question. So what I'm gonna ask you to do is run through the Mayor's questions spend just a brief amount of time on them no and then we're gonna have to come back and ask questions separately but I wanna spend a more significant amount of time on the tax impact question. But it's gotta be a quick response to what the Mayor's questions are. We got the letter today Councilor Busher you will have plenty of time but we are going to do it this way. Okay, excellent you guide us we'll try to give you what we can. So the second question dealt with the explanation of how proposed plan will improve education of our high school students and Marty's comments just leapt off the ADA piece and I won't go through that because I've heard testimony and I think everyone kind of supports accessibility at high school so I won't get into that. The other issue that I wanted to raise for council was the two years ago we had an assessment from the New England Association of Public Schools Commission that does accreditation in New England and their report indicated significant flaws in our physical building and not being able to resource and plan for programming and they gave us a timeframe to sort of report back and so currently right now I have to report back on October 1st the plan to meet those needs in order to comply with the programming and resource needs so that's another challenge for us so another outside entity has identified that this is a barrier for our staff and our students. Yeah, it's the accreditation piece, yes. The OX77, most of you have heard about PBL, Proficiency Based Learning and by 2020 we're expected to be somewhat compliant and I say that because the configuration of our building does not allow us to fully implement that at the lightning speed we'd like to get to. Part of the challenge around this is being able to congregate teachers and students into spaces and changing the learning model. Traditional model has been subject specific, English, math, science and you're trying to teach. Now we're looking at certain terms of expectations, outcomes and skills that have to be achieved and they could come cross-curricular over a number of different subject areas and you have to read a proficiency level. So the plans that we have integrate that with the physical plant and able for us to achieve those goals more efficiently and be able to provide for our students. We are behind in that plan because of the restraints that we have and we know the plan we have with the added changes will help us reach those goals. I'm gonna have Noel Green, our principal, just talk briefly a little bit about the welcoming learning environment piece that sort of addresses part of the question as well too. Thank you. As a high school principal, I obviously am quite excited about renovations to the high school. One thing that's important to know that the challenge that we currently face is that our building dictates our curriculum. The limits within our building dictate some of our curriculum. Our teachers should dictate our curriculum, having classrooms that have the capacity to be flexible, to have a Socratic seminar, to have a group assignment in order to achieve these proficiency-based learning attributes which require that students have multiple opportunities and a variety of opportunities to access them. Our current facility does not allow that. A teacher should be able to come in each day and say, I'm gonna try this approach, but currently that is not the case. And the way our building is currently configured, there's no rhyme or reason to it. There's no pattern to it because we have to use space based on what can fit in certain areas. We need a space that's designed that has a logical pattern where we can say this fits here for a particular reason. And that's why the Freshman Academies makes sense, something that we cannot accommodate in our current facilities. Studies show that the most opportune time to work with our students in a holistic way is in the ninth grade. That's where loss occurs. If we provide a nurturing and strong education for students in our ninth grade, it is less likely that we'll lose them in later grades. So having them be in a specific area where the teachers can collaborate and work in a cross-curricular way, that is the best approach for us. And our current facility does not allow that to happen. Our buildings are siloed right now. Teachers can go months without seeing each other. The new space would be designed so that teachers would have that ability to collaborate and work together to increase the rigor in regard to our curriculum. Thank you, Noah. And I hope during the question period, people have the opportunity to ask a little more questions so we can talk a little bit more about the Freshman Academies and sort of the research around where we're going with that. But I do wanna end this question off around addressing the issue around safety and security. We've had a number of studies and analysis around our building in terms of the inadequacy of the safety and there was a report in 2015. It's embedded in the package that you have from Margolis and Healy that clearly demonstrates that our building is not suitable for the current safety patterns that we have to establish. Right now, we've last year engaged a consultant to look at our school in terms of lockdowns, holding secures and the new era we're in in terms of creating sight lines and procedures around keeping schools safe. Our school, if you look at the plan alone, you know it's not safe and students are going outside to go inside multiple doors, opportunities for individuals to come in and out and it does not meet with the requirements of the current plans to keep our students safe. And that is one of the most, utmost first priority for administration of schools in terms of ensuring safety for our schools. And so this new sort of plan would give us the opportunity to be able to ensure the students are secure as best as possible and we had to put emergency procedures in place that we can manage at this point. One of the, one of the Margolis earlier videos, a couple of years ago, and we're talking about deferred maintenance, the paneling at the high school does not even allow us to do a 911 call and for them to identify exactly where a spot of the school is coming from. You can imagine on that large campus like that, that is, you know, a tragedy waiting to happen. So we're hoping to be able to be prepared and have the facilities in a way that we can keep the safety and security of our students and hopefully never have to exercise those challenges. Slide. Oh, I should keep going. So in the moment you've all been waiting for, the tax impact and we've got senior director Lavry to speak to this particular area. You want the slides, Nate? Do I want the slides? Yeah, in a moment, I suppose. So I'll just brief introduction here. We're gonna cover a few of the high points that came out of the letter that the mayor wrote, but we're also just going to provide a variety of tax information that will be familiar to those of you who've attended some of the school board meetings, but may be new to some of the folks who haven't had the opportunity to view it. So specifically, if we can go to the next slide, please. We envision borrowing the money, probably over three fiscal years, these are estimated quantities, and there is certainly gonna be variability in these numbers in terms of how it will phase in, but we expect to have a small amount of borrowing needed in the first year, where that'll be mostly for paying, for design and that sort of thing. And you can see the bulk of the borrowing will occur in the second year, and then we envision a third kind of phase of borrowing. So you'll see this reflected when we get to some of the estimates about how the tax rate ramps up. I wanna also point out, you can see it on the note in the right, that we estimated these impacts on the basis of borrowing over 30 years at 4%. That is the product of conversations that I had with Rich Goodwin about what would make sense in terms of both interest rates and maturity. So I just wanted to point out we've had the opportunity to collaborate with Rich in this discussion. I thank him for that support. Our next slide, please. I won't spend a lot of time on this unless the council wants to get into it. I'm sure Councilor Wright would be happy to give you all a tutorial as well, but the state system for calculating education tax rates includes a variety of variables. The variable that we focus on and we manipulate, so to speak, as we look at tax impacts here is the education spending. The other variables are all held constant in this analysis. We know that over time, those numbers will change and they can move in ways that put upward or downward pressure on the tax rate. I know that the council's familiar with the common level of appraisal, for example. For the purpose of our analysis tonight, those other variables are held constant so you can really see the impact of the result of the borrowing associated with the BHS project. Next slide, please. So I'll linger on this slide for a moment. We wanted to provide some examples in dollar terms of what we're talking about. We will move on so you can see some percentage impacts and get a sense of how these things ramp up, but we felt like it was important to give people a flavor for what the tax impact would be. This is the marginal cost, that is the additional cost to taxpayers, one being an estimated property tax impact on someone whose taxable property is $250,000, and the other is the income tax cap on someone whose income is $50,000 and pays on the basis of income. You'll see that we have shown the impact by year here so that as the borrowing ramps up, so does the tax impact, and then plateaus for a period of, because that's 28 years, and that is associated with the fact that at that point you're fully paying back all of the borrowing you've done over three years, and then as you pay off the various phases of that borrowing toward the end of the bottom of the chart there, you can see that the tax rate, or rather the tax actually comes down, you get to a point where you've completely repaid all of the borrowing. So again, it's important to see and just to understand that that we're talking about something that ramps up, then plateaus, and then of course as you've paid off the bill, it phases back out. Next slide please. This reflects the same information on the previous screen, only we've turned it into percentage terms for the property tax payer so that you can see once again, the ramp up and then the phase out. Here you can see that at its peak, the result of the borrowing would increase the education tax rate for a property payer by a tick over 6.5% from the FY19 rate. Next slide please. We also thought it was important to understand the impact of what's being proposed for BHS in conjunction with the other debt that the school district either has currently or plans to take on as part of our $39 million capital plan. So we've added a second column to the chart called Other Debt that factors in those other pieces and a third column, Total Debt. And so you can see the impact of the total borrowing over the course of both the complete repayment of the BHS borrowing as well as the repayment of the borrowing associated with a $39 million capital plan and other debt we currently carry. This chart is a graphic illustration of the information that we just looked at. You can see that there is a blue line illustrating the percentage change in the tax rate from FY19 resulting from the existing capital plan and debt, and then we've layered over top of it another line that reflects the addition of the BHS project into the tax rate. You can see that toward the right-hand portion of the graph, those lines dip below the 0% here. That means that absent any other borrowing as we pay off debt will eventually get to a point where in fact, all else being equal to tax rate would be lower than today because the current budget incorporates about $3.7 million of debt service. And so when all that's paid off, we will actually would be in a situation where holding all of the variables constant, you have a lower tax rate in 30, 40 years whenever that is there. Next slide please. Okay, so that was the tax rate. I'll move a little quicker. The next set of slides is the debt service. That's the budget impact of the school which is probably of some interest to you folks. It was of a lot of interest to the school board as you can imagine. So once again, we show the same scenario here where you can see the impact of phasing in the borrowing, plateauing at a point where the BHS projects added about $40 million of annual cost to the budget to service the debt, and then it phases out. Next slide. We've given the question of the debt service the same treatment by adding in the impact of the other borrowing. So you can see the aggregate impact of both the BHS project and the capital plan as it's envisioned right now. Next slide. And we've graphed that so that you can follow the kind of spike when the BHS project fully phases in which is in fiscal year 2022. You can see where the kind of looks like almost a black line here peaks or spikes up there in fiscal 2022. One of the things that can be a little confusing when you look at a graph like this is to figure out which of the lines is actually changing. So for example, there are some times when like in fiscal year between fiscal 2026 and 2027 where the graph peaks and then takes a significant drop, that's really the blue that's going down substantially. It's not the darker line. So sometimes it's confusing to which of those two sources of debt is changing, but in that case it's the existing capital debt. Okay, so we move quickly through debt service. Now we will get to the total amount of the debt. This is relevant to the council and to the mayor because you folks have been discussing a debt policy and so we wanted to make sure that we covered this particular item. Once again you can see the kind of phase in, phase out impact here. I think the most important thing, at least as I've understood it with respect to your conversations about a debt policy is to see that in the right hand column you can see total debt associated with the school and how it's projected to peak in fiscal year 2022 at 119.7 million dollars and then it will decline from that point until we are debt free. Next slide please. Here's a graphic illustration of that. You can see once again the impact of the significant borrowing associated with the high school causing a real spike in the graph and then you steadily pay that down over the following years. Next slide is the end of question three and the beginning of question four. This question's a little broader. So this question was about, kind of about the state financing system and so to the best we could interpret it we wanted to both talk a little bit about the state financing system and also what the future of that system may look like. So in this case we wanted to first talk about the fact that all of the analysis you've seen here assumes that the school budget and ultimately that the state education fund bears 100% of the burden of the project costs. Later in our program Chair Will is gonna speak to some of the other options that could be out there to reduce that impact but just so folks know you're looking at like the assumptions based on everything being paid for with ultimately tax-supported debt. Folks also have asked about the, how the system and particularly income sensitivity impacts this. Well you saw a slide earlier that showed that those who pay on the basis of their income that the dollar impact on them, again it's all in those hypothetical cases is lower than someone who's paying on the basis of property. That's the way the system is designed generally. It's worth noting that a little over 70% of Burlington households pay their education taxes with their income sensitized. And that's, we're just a little bit ahead of the state average in that regard but it's very, very similar to state as a whole. So another question that came up was what will changes in the system, the education financing system mean for all of this analysis? And the answer is we don't know what those changes will be and so we can't say with any confidence this is how the system's gonna change and this is what it's gonna mean. What we do know is that it's been the subject of a lot of debate recently by state policy makers. There have been talks about shifting from a model that is based largely on property value to a model that's based more on income. Again, without any type of concrete proposal it's not something that we can do an analysis on and say this is what it would look like. But one other option that's out there that has been explored and discussed in the past is and that people have brought up before is state aid for school construction. So for those who are not familiar with this the state used to support through cap of state debt paying schools portion of their construction costs and that's not something that has existed in about a decade since a moratorium went in at the state level on that. Some of our legislative delegation have talked about and I believe even proposed reinstating the state aid for school construction but at this time that doesn't appear to be on the horizon. So it's something that's out there would obviously help Burlington going through this project and one of the things that we're committed to doing is making sure that even though it's kind of complicated but even though the state aid for school construction has a moratorium there's still a process you can actually go through to apply to exclude your debt from the excess spending threshold and other things. So we plan to kind of pursue the avenues that exist in current law just on the chance that state aid for school construction comes back or that otherwise that we want to position ourselves so that we would be able to take advantage of that if possible. The good news is the state's paid down it's obligation in that respect so there's no one in line so to speak but we want to make sure that even if we start to move forward with this project and something does change legislatively that we can work with our delegation to ensure that we can access those funds. That's the end of the question for her. Thank you. Thank you Nathan. And we've got to really shorten this up now going forward because we have to come back to the council for a limited number of questions at this point and I'm going to there will be some time but it's got to be limited at this point because we have other big items still to come and what I'm going to suggest to counselors get some questions out but that you can meet with the school board or the superintendent over these next couple of weeks call them and get some other answers and you should also be prepared that on September 11th there may be additional questions. We did just get the letter today with the answers to the mayor's questions so we haven't had a chance to really fully digest the answers so I don't want to you know we've got another big presentation coming up so we've got to make this brief. We're here to support the council so whenever you need to cut us off let us know and we're certainly open in the next couple of weeks to answer any follow up questions. Right. All right I will be quick. I'm a communication specialist within the school district so one of the questions we had was around what is the plan to really get the message out about this so you heard tonight about the work that went in through 2013 through 2017 which was really engaging the community and spreading the word about what we were doing and I just want to reiterate that that has been a key piece of what we have been doing for the last five years and it's a plan that we want to continue to do that so if you go to the next slide you'll see just in the sense from April until now you'll see that we have really been hammering public engagement and information sharing about the project so we've had this project covered in nine different media outlets from like I said April until now and then an additional four just in the last week as we geared up for tonight's meeting. We did three tours of the building. We did tailing at City Market on Vermont primary day. We posted on all of our social media accounts, had the OPR sessions in addition that we talked about and the last thing that we did, you can go to the next slide, is we did a survey for our community so we spread a survey out to everybody that you have seen on this message. We had 401 responses to the survey. It's not a scientific survey and I know that Councilor Wright you had had some concerns about the community that we sent it out to and you would see that it was the re-envisioning committee, people who took the tours, our staff, our parents, but it was also NPAs, it was largely our community, you are correct, still out of that 401 responses which is larger than people reply to when we ask some sort of budget they would support in March that's usually around 350, 375. This was in 68 hours and if you go to the next slide, you can see that our preliminary results showed that about 70% of the people who took the survey supported a bond of this nature. So I'm gonna go quickly as you asked. If you go to the next slide. I don't wanna spend a lot of time on a survey. I know you don't. I only added one slide for you Councilor in case you would be interested. You can go to the next slide please. And the next slide. And just wanted to break this out for you, it was about 20% of the people that took the survey were residents that did not have children in the system and the people that supported any sort of bond on the ballot, it was about 60% of the people who took the survey. So what I wanna reiterate with getting the survey out in 68 hours to 400 people with the work that we did leading up to, you can go to the next slide please. From April until now, I feel strongly that that really lays the groundwork for what we are able to continue to do. So our plan going forward from now to November is to continue, we're gonna reinstate the tours. We had great success spreading the word about those. We are going to present at each NPA. We're gonna continue to do tabling at city market. They have offered, they said, how many more dates do you want? And so we're gonna do additional locations around the city taking the volunteer efforts of our re-envisioning committee that will be led by me. So it will be district led, but it will be supported by a group of community volunteers. We will continue, we will launch a traditional and social media camp informational campaign, really spreading what this project is. What does it mean for your taxes? How long is it gonna take? We're gonna have a complete updated website and we're gonna hold more community and forums and engage the business community. We've had initial conversations with GBIC who is talking about having board meetings in the building so that they can show the business community what this looks like and how a new high school could be a benefit to the economy and to the business owners in the community. Going beyond November, that is when we really hit the ground running with the design work again. So I wanna tell people that the opportunity for people to really help us get this plan detailed is not over. But once a bond passes and we knew that we had money in the bank, that's where we can really start to hone in on the details of this project. We'll have more community meetings. We'll continue to work with the media and we'll continue to really keep everyone abreast of the situation. So I hope that answers your question. Thank you. And I think with that, we need to go to the council for questions. Again, the council got the answer to the mayor's questions just this afternoon. In fact, late this afternoon and I have a lot of chance to digest the answers. So there could be additional questions come September 11th. But let me go to Councillor Busher. And again, we are gonna try to wrap this up in the next 15 minutes. So we can't have a series of questions from everybody. Councillor Busher. So I have a couple of questions and a couple of comments. One is, one of the comments has to do with how this bond, if we move forward and it passes how it's paid down. And when you look at it, the financial impact is on really on the first 20 years. I mean, it's really high. And I'm concerned about people on fixed incomes and people, including those that are already retired and that they're going to take the biggest hit. I just didn't know whether there was another way to look at how you'd pay this back. I really would like to understand if there's another way to do this. This is traditional, what you've presented. I'm looking for alternatives. That's one question that I had, well, one statement that I have. Now, the thing that I wanted to share with you is that when I looked at your little video, the first thing I saw was that staircase to heaven. I thought that doesn't speak to accessibility. I'm sorry. Did you ever think of an escalator? I just wanted to throw that out. And then with the mayor's question, well, I'm really serious about that though. The explanation of how proposed plans will improve the education of our high school students. I really didn't hear, I'm a detailed person and the only way I'm gonna be able to sell this to the people I represent is to have some answers to these kinds of questions. Today's world, there's STEM programs. I didn't hear anything about this. I didn't see any detail about improved lab space. I actually read that report that was done in 2015. I printed it out and read it all. And I have lots of comments about that, not tonight. But there were things about different size classrooms, little areas for individuals to study, groups of people to study. I haven't seen that and I thought that went to the question that the mayor was asking. He felt you would address safety in ADA, but he was looking at how you're gonna improve teaching, how you're gonna do that. I heard you talk about teachers, but I didn't hear about the amenities for students and I'd like to know those details. With English being a primary language, are you gonna have labs for people to be able to learn English and practice their English? I really think that if there's a place for me to find that in a reader's digest version, I think that's really important for people to understand what their students will actually get from this new high school besides accessibility. Now, I have a 39-year-old daughter. She's my youngest. When I went back to school night, I almost killed myself going up one of those little ramps or walkways, so think about it. That's a long time ago where accessibility was already an issue, so I'm really rushing and I know Councillor, I mean, President Wright's gonna, I'm not looking at him, but anyways. Look at me, Councillor Bursher. I'm not looking at you anyways, but I'm really glad that on top is gonna be integrated into the system. I'm hoping that they're not offended by being on the bottom. I'm not making funny about that, but I'm concerned about really how they feel about themselves and I want, that's really important. If you're in the basement or on the bottom, sometimes that impacts how you see yourself, so I just am throwing that out. Freshman academics, last thing I'm gonna say. UVM has the freshman building where they bring people in together. I like the idea, but if you've got somebody who's really bright, I hope you're not gonna hold them back and keep them with a core of people that maybe they need to branch out, so lots of things that I've thrown at you, but I think some of those details are really essential for people, the people that I represent to say yes, thank you. Thank you, Councillor Bursher, and I'm glad you weren't looking at me. But did you, any quicker action, all that? Yeah.  Tremendous amount of great analysis because those are all questions that we ask and we don't have time to go into all that, but I would say, first of all, I think the on top is a particular program we specifically are looking to accommodate better and there would welcome a new space. We've kicked them around the last two years, actually from space to space to have a permanent home that's integrated and have that support from the building would be great. Thank you for asking the question around the curriculum piece and the student engagement piece. Excellent. One of the things I've been talking about is to have new modular spaces and maker spaces and also the technology. Someone made a testimony today about only having like one plug-in. We don't have the designs in our classrooms to integrate new technologies. When I was in China a few months ago, I've got to visit a brand new school and you should see what's in those classrooms in terms of the ability for kids to connect with students outside of their country through technology and we want to provide those pieces as well too. You make a good point, maybe we should do a little primer, specifically around the pedagogical nature of the schools in more detail than we'll have time tonight, but certain we can work on to give people what the added value is gonna be for that space. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Bushard. Now I have Councillor Roof, Pine and Paul with specific questions for answers. Specific questions that I don't need the answers to now, but maybe in follow-up over the coming weeks. I'm actually gonna, I'm not gonna go through all of them. I'm gonna go through the two things that for me are sort of must-haves. If I'm gonna feel comfortable voting on this, come the 11th. Because if it was tonight, I don't feel prepared to do that and I wanna get there and I just wanna kind of lay out where I'm at with what I'm looking for. The project budget, I did not see it in the attachments and you don't need to bring it up. If it is there, I just couldn't, maybe I just couldn't find it. And I understand that given in the stage of the design, it won't be exact, so to the best of your ability, demonstrating what those dollar amounts are and compared to the program in the new building. The second, and this actually might be a partnership here for the administration and the district, the combined debt chart for the district is really helpful to see how that's gonna go. It was also nice to hear that we're gonna be debt-free come 2050, I look forward to, I'll be here. I think, some of you might- Don't go any further with that, Councilor Riff. We know over here where you're going with that. I've already calculated, I'm not gonna be paying some of this. All right, I'll pick it up. But no, to my point, we can move on, but I'd like to see a combined debt analysis, projection of both the city and the district. We have other bonds on the horizon. We have water, we have memorial. We should be looking at, we'll have budget increases. We should be looking at what the collective impact on the checkbook is going to be so we can make that decision, that everyone can make the decision well knowing what those impacts will be. Hi, I'm gonna be here. I'll follow up on smaller items. Okay, thank you. We will certainly make sure to forward you those documents that you're looking for. We have had talked about alternative strategies to meet our debt service, one of the things that we're well aware of in our director finances. In the last three years, we've had surplus of 1.5 million, and we've usually put that back, so that's a conversation for the board. They may decide to utilize that in some way to decrease the borrowing or the tax impact in future boards. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Roof. Councilor Pine and then Councilor Powell and Councilor Mason. Sure, the first is actually just to address Councilor Busher's concern, which I share, but I think the way I understand this, that the payments that are made by residents will still be treated as if, the same as payments that are made in taxes toward the operations of our schools. In other words, the portion of the payment that a taxpayer makes to retire the debt will be treated as income sensitized. I want Nate to confirm this, because that's my understanding of how this financing will work. Yeah, that's correct. The taxpayer is just gonna get one bill. It's gonna have their education tax. It would just be higher if part of what we were using the Education Fund revenues to pay back was an additional $70 million worth of debt. Okay, so if your income sensitized though, you will still continue to benefit from that income sensitivity. You will continue to benefit from the provision, absolutely, but folks should understand that when a school district increases, it's spending per equalized pupil, the tax rates go up for both property payers and income payers. So sometimes I hear people erroneously suggest that if they're income sensitized, it's a free ride and that we can spend $200 million on a new high school and they'll pay nothing. That's simply not true. So better that people understand that there will be an impact on all payers. Thank you. The other thing is really a clarification and I don't like to be the skunk at the garden party, but the notion that TIF will be used on a new high school should just be clear that is not feasible whatsoever. So I just want to be clear about that. I worked many years at CEDO and the one thing I did do is get us the downtown TIF and I know how the waterfront TIF is structured. There's no scenario under which TIF will be used for the high school. Just want to be clear. Thank you for the clarification, Councillor Pine and also Mr. Lavery on your clarification on who pays. Councillor Paul and then Councillor Mason. Thank you, thank you, President Wright. So first thing I just wanted for the public that is not here, not present in the room, but is watching this, I think that they should know that there is a vast majority of school board members that are here and just want the public to know that there's a great many of you here, at least a majority, I think, and thank you for coming. I think it shows the dedication that you have to this issue and to doing your best to encourage us to do what you'd like us to do, which is a good thing. I don't think that, I mean, I'll just speak for myself. You don't need to convince me that there's a need. When I walk into Burlington High School for the tour that I was at a week and a half ago, and I walk up those stairs, those are the same stairs that I walked up years and years ago, many years ago, and the school hasn't changed a whole lot since I went to school. So I don't think we need to be convinced of the need. I don't think we need to be convinced of the need for accessibility. I am my daughter in a number, about a dozen other parents and teacher, parents and children work very hard to get an elevator in Edmunds Middle School so that that school was accessible. It still isn't completely accessible. So the need is at Burlington High School, the need is really at every school. For me, the issue, and I also think that this is a collaborative effort. I mean, the bonding capacity of the city and the need that you're asking for have to go hand in hand. We're all here together. You're not a separate entity from us. And I think that to me is a critical piece of this. You mentioned about the debt policy, the debt capacity, this city council, this administration, every voter has worked pretty hard over the last several years to bring up our bond rating to where it was back in 2008 and 2009. And we fought hard for that. We want to make sure that we continue on the trajectory that we're on. And so my concern, and it really isn't to all of you, but my concern is that we've only got another week and a half or so that we're going to be voting on this. We need to know what those ratios are, where we are with our financial advisor, where we are with projections towards the trajectory that we're on with Moody's. And that to me is the overriding issue. After that, there's lots of other questions about the tax impact. And I will only ask one question, but that is my one question. And we need to know those answers first. And then I think, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm trying to look for a way to get to yes. And the first way to get to yes is to know that answer. So thank you. Thank you, Councillor Powell. Councillor Mason. Thank you, President Wright. I'll sort of pick up and echo Paul's comments. My concern is one of timing. September 11th is two weeks out. We haven't heard from our advisors. We don't have a debt policy. And I am not comfortable moving forward with a $70 million project, knowing that there are lots of others in the queue without having that in place. So that sort of gets to my appreciating all of the efforts that you're doing to get this to us as quickly as possible. I've heard two reasons it has to be November. You know, I'm not yet convinced. So, I mean, maybe you could speak to why it, what's the importance. I've heard, you know, the superintendent speak to, you know, there's an accessibility issue now and it's not fair. I appreciate that and I hear that. But I'm still not convinced that a four month delay is, you know, going to move the needle. And the other I heard articulated work by one board member about putting it on the ballot at the same time as an 8% projected 8% increase. If there are other reasons it has to be November, I guess, you know, either now or over the next two weeks, if you could articulate them, I think that would be helpful. So you don't have to speak to that. My second question sort of is to Nate, I guess. I'm still struggling. I don't understand, you know, the state school financing system, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around, you know, do we need AOE or someone to say yes, because this is a big ticket item that it sounds like we don't pay for all of it. So if the answer is no, that's great, but if the answer is yes, I guess have we started those conversations or do we have the consents we need? So the answer is no. In effect, what this would do is increase the school's budget, which means that we would require more money from the education fund. The system is set up such that whatever schools choose to spend from the education fund, they get that money. But they pay for it through higher income, or sorry, higher property taxes, even if you are income sensitized, again, you pay for it through higher taxes. So it's not a question of whether or not the agency of education would give us the money. It's just a question, again, of what is the tax impact going to be on the people who are paying the bill? Thank you, Councilor Mason. I think that Councilor Shannon. But isn't there a penalty for excess spending and how does that fit in? That's a great question. There is a penalty for excess spending. In fiscal year 19, it was somewhat over $17,000 per equalized pupil. Even if tomorrow we all snapped our fingers and we borrowed the full amount of the $70 million that we're envisioning right now, we would still be below that penalty threshold. Obviously, we're not borrowing it tomorrow. It would be a number of years before it's fully phased in, but we would still be below the excess spending threshold even under those assumptions. And there are places, by the way, in Vermont that exceed the threshold. However, more importantly, the law allows for construction debt of this nature to be exempted from the penalty calculation. So we would, as I mentioned earlier, plan to go through the process to make sure that if that spending threshold is changed, for example, legislatively in the future, we still can take advantage of that exemption. Thank you, Councillor Shannon. I think that we're... Councillor Jang. Thank you, President. I don't want to get out of here without saying this. And I think right now in this city, we don't have an issue that's as important as reinventioning, that's the name, of Burlington High School. Because when I hear a constituent who been to private school, who never been to any of the public schools, who grow up here in Burlington, don't have any children calling me to let me know, you need to vote on this. I should highlight that because we should not compare what's not comparable. There isn't an issue here in this community that's not as important as this because all of us, what we want is for the children coming to school to leave the school safely to go home. And we all know what is going on around this nation. Safety is not something that we need to take lightly. And this, only that aspect, I'm not even talking about the education of the children, but just the fact that kids are coming to us leaving safely and would want to come back and also we can even use the building for all the community uses. We talked about here just right now how Burlington has become a community school, how the athletic field can be a use for the specific for the community. This need to be clear in our head as elected officials, we should take this as priority. Anything else we can wait. But my question to you is this. I would like to know what are the assets of the Burlington School District. Are there any option that can get a 10 million, 5 million or 2 million from our existing asset in contributing to the 79 million, to the 70 million. That's my question to you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much for your presentation. I wanted to say we are an anomaly in the state of Vermont. There aren't other, due to Act 46, other districts are consolidating. This council has approved incredible growth in the next two years. We will see city place. We will see Cambrian rise. We have approved housing. And we, there are many things in the queue for sure. And we understand that as a full board we come here tonight sharing your concerns and absolutely looking for collaboration on this. When is the time to address our high school? It's been 55 years. We would look to the city and the community for that support. We would look at the federal level. We look at Senator Leahy's son, who is a graduate, Bernie Sanders, a huge champion of the American Disabilities Act. This is a priority and we stand here tonight unified as a board to present it. We will work with you. We have proposed November because of the, what Commissioner Curry spoke to as well, the timing, the inevitable challenges we face as a state in public education funding. That will be presented in March. So thank you for your time. We appreciate the opportunity to share. And I think it's imperative that we as a school board meet with you to have some more information sessions and sharing so that your questions are answered because we share your concerns. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you all. Thank you, Chairwoman Wol, Superintendent O'Bang, Mr. Ellick, Mr. Lavery for the presentation and the answer of all our questions. And again to the council, I know there are additional questions. Certainly contact any of the people here, calls or meetings. And in addition, be back on September 11th. There may be further questions before the votes held, for sure. With that, now we are going to move back to the work session for another actually very important to the citizens of Burlington and the region and the state, which is the fate of Lake Champlain in our water. So while the high school is indeed very important, I think this one may be equally important. And I do apologize and thank you for being willing to wait until that lengthy item. But so my sincere apologies. Thank you, President Reiser and the full city council. We appreciate your perseverance with us tonight. Chief and Spencer, Director of Public Works. I'm joined by Assistant Director Megan Moyer, overseeing our water resources division. And make sure you use your mics. Please pull them in close and speak right into them. We've been having problems with that. So thank you. No problem at all. The presentation we have in front of you tonight is the result of a lot of diligent effort on the part of our staff and our consultant team. It is an ambitious yet pragmatic proposal to reinvest $30 million into our wastewater and stormwater systems. This is next. Not a sprint, but a marathon. Our commitment to stewarding the clean water of our community is one of the core responsibilities of Public Works. And together with the public, we have made significant progress over the generations. So you'll see in this slide here, which shows the combined sewer discharges pre-1994, which is identified in this red bar here. That was prior, 24 years ago, prior to our last upgrade of our wastewater treatment plants. We were on average discharging 170 million gallons of untreated, undisinfected combined sewer. Combined sewer in our main plant sewer shed is a combination of stormwater and wastewater. The three bars on the left here combines the performance of this year at our plant. We have processed, and this is wet weather flow during storm events, 75 million gallons of wet weather flow. We have processed, treated, and had partially disinfected another 8.9 million gallons. And then you'll see here four million gallons of untreated and undisinfected. So you compare that number to the 170 million gallon. We have made significant progress, but we have far to go. You'll see at the bottom, to save time, we are not going to go through a lot of the detail that we've discussed before, but for members of the public or others who are interested in the detail, the link at the bottom of the screen will give a lot of background. Next. Here is a quick summary of what will go over tonight, and we are going to do it quickly. Next. We have made significant progress in our tenure here over the last five years in increasing our capital funding in our water utilities. What you're seeing at the very bottom here, by year FY13, up to FY19, is a continual growth in our capital expenditures. The significant growth in blue and purple relates to our water utility and the support that the voters have made through our sustainable infrastructure plan. But even the wastewater and stormwater investments have trended up due to some careful management and renewed focus on reinvesting in our critical core systems. This was a presentation slide provided to the council as part of our FY19 budget presentation. And if we go to the next slide, you'll see another screenshot from our budget presentation, which foretold the investments that are needed in our wastewater and stormwater utilities. At that budget presentation, we talked about the need to upgrade our existing treatment systems, our collection system reinvestments, and our stormwater outfalls and collection system. And we showed down here a chart by fiscal year of what we were projecting for upcoming investments. And we talked that we would likely need a bond in the upcoming years. What has transpired over the last few months has expedited our work and brought us to today. Next. We have made significant success together as a community on the sustainable infrastructure plan. The council and the administration have made through a partnership effort a remarkable gain in attacking our deferred maintenance across asset classes. The streets, the sidewalks, the water mains have gotten tremendous attention over the last two or three years with projects surrounding this building underway as we speak. With the drinking water, we brought that into the first phase of the sustainable infrastructure plan for a number of reasons. One is to renovate those pipes requires us to disturb the surface of the roadway. It made no sense to repave a road and then have to disrupt the pavement to upgrade the water lines. Second, we had come out of Frostpocalypse, our term for the massive amount of breaks that we struggled through in 2014 and 2015 that significantly threatened the viability of our water distribution system. And as a result, we brought forward water as part of the phase one. We are here today to talk about phase two of the sustainable infrastructure plan. Next. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Assistant Director Megan Moore. Hi, thanks for having us. So the next few slides, I'm going to step through the major drivers that are behind the selection, the specific selection of projects across wastewater and stormwater, which form the basis of the proposal that we're presenting tonight. So on red, you can see places where we've had wastewater permit violations and beach closures caused specifically by infrastructure failure. Simply, things not working, such as valves, our PLC, our computerized control system. And unfortunately, on Friday, we had another failure, this time at North Plant, in which a chemical feed line was blocked and we had a disinfection failure and discharged 75,000 gallons of undisinfected wastewater. On the, well, it looks yellow here, but it's supposed to be very bold green. On the right, you have what it is we need to do in order to fix the stuff that's on the red. So specifically, and when we get into the proposal, there's a specific line item for the disinfection systems. But basically, all of the wastewater capital improvements for high-risk assets need to be invested in. We've also had, as you're aware, wastewater violations and permit beach closures caused by the impact of high-strength waste on our biological system. And in order to address that, we really need to accelerate and expand the development of our industrial wastewater program, which would require high-strength users, not just breweries, but also high-strength users to divert their high-strength waste away from the system. Next slide. Just a couple of examples, and it's hard to get a really salient picture, but it ranges from disinfection systems, which have had multiple repairs, which you can see by the different colored pipes, to disinfection system control panels where only one of those switches actually works, and a lot of the parts are obsolete. We can't even replace them. The entire system has to be replaced. We have bromine pumps. Those have not failed this year. Those are also a critical piece of our wet-weather disinfection system. We've had failures on the hypochlorite side, but hypochlorite works in conjunction with bromine, and so if we had a failure of these bromine pumps, we would be in a similar situation as we already have been. Next slide. Again, none of these systems have been upgraded since the last upgrade in 1994. We have, at the headworks, automatic gates that are no longer automatic and actually require somebody to have to operate them, which can be very challenging in trying to manage a storm event. We have corroded metal components that have band-aids literally on them and are not easily repairable, largely because once metal starts to get corroded, you can't keep welding to bad metal. You eventually have to replace the entire system. Next slide. This is a graph I believe we've showed in the past about the trends of increasing BOD, biological oxygen demand. This is not due to our added residential units. This is due to the awesome success of industries throughout Burlington, each one of which that touches organic waste does have a disproportionate impact on our system. This trend line can be, we believe, can be significantly knocked down by an effective and comprehensive industrial wastewater program. In the past, we mostly were looking only at breweries, but again, anything that handles organic material is contributing more than a domestic wastewater system. There are numerous examples throughout the nation, and we have a consultant on board who's helping us evaluate how we may be able to come up with a tiered program and what sort of long-term maintenance that's going to require investment and staffing and so on. Next slide. You're also aware of the impact of both combined sewer plant flow on main plant as well as our collection system to our overflows. While I think folks have been conflating this as a new issue because we have had these other new issues of the plant, this is not new. This is something that we've been working on since the 1990s and more recently with the integrated planning project where we're trying to go city-wide and develop a comprehensive plan. That comprehensive plan is not going to be ready until 2020, but that being said, we do know there's opportunities to keep ensuring continued progress on implementation because that is a big piece of our eventual success is to dial back on the frequency of the untreated combined sewer overflows that are out in the system as well as dial back on how much storm flow does get to main plant. Next slide. The colors are not great. On the left it's orange and on the right it's green. There's lots of other things we can walk through and that's largely what we did with this plan of high-risk assets, sewer pump stations that are close to water bodies, sanitary combined and storm water pipes that are failing. With your support we did a sewer assessment and we were able to film about 20% of our combined sewer and sanitary lines and the number that I'm bringing forward it represents the pipes that have enough deterioration that they need to be addressed in the next five years. Otherwise we're going to be looking at more sinkholes potentially more surfacing of sewage or people not being able to use their sewer system because there's a significant blockage. So we have to make sure that there's adequate funding not just to address the things that have failed but to try to stave off additional failures in the future. I know everybody has been this summer has not been great it has not been great for me and I would like to have a chance to share in the future where we are not closing beaches due to things that technically are in our control. Lastly we need to keep in mind that there's a whole suite of additional regulatory obligations that are anticipated particularly on the separate storm sewer side and so while we're not putting forward a lot of money towards that we can make sure that we can maintain progress and not sort of have a whole new suite of things that comes without having done some additional planning. This is where we start to get into the numbers. For over the wastewater system that top line you can see is our specific investments on the disinfection and those computerized control systems which failed and we're not just doing it main plant we are going to be doing it east and north. So that's 1.4 million there's a the 11.4 million dollar number and that's broken out in