Hey everybody. Welcome to the May 5th Ward 6 NPA meeting. I'm Dale Azaria, a new Ward 6 NPA Steering Committee member and with me is Nelson Martel, a more experienced NPA Steering Committee member. So we are holding down the fort here at the Greek Orthodox Church. Glad to see a few people online. And we will start things off with any public comment, public forum or announcements. If you have one, you can use the raise hand function or just unmute and start talking. Hi, this is Matt Grady. Can I please make a comment? That'd be great Matt. I just wanted to say it's my first time being on this side of the camera in five years and I just want to express my appreciation to Nelson and Joel and Dale for continuing this great tradition. Our NPA is a wonderful event each month and it's just a great pleasure to see you there and keeping this going. Thank you very much. Well, and right back at you Matt, we are so appreciative for everything that you've done for the last several years, building up this NPA and keeping it going. I'm not fishing. I'm not fishing for it. Really just wanted to say that. We miss you already. Are there any other announcements or public comment? We can wait you out people. At the same time, we don't need to drag this out too long. Our first, our first agenda item is to hear about the Vermont Make Music Day and we've got David Shine from Big Heavy World. And David, I see you're there and if you are ready to fill us in, we'd love to hear what you have to say. Okay. And can I share a screen if I want to? Yep, absolutely. Okay. Well, I will in a second. The Music Day Vermont or Make Music Vermont happens on June 21st of the solstice every year. It's part of World Music Day, which has been going on for 40 years, which is a celebration of community music. It's a celebration all over the world started in France. It's a really big deal in some places. And we're going to make it a big deal here in years to come. The musicians celebrate how music brings people together, essentially, and crosses all sorts of borders, linguistic, cultural, you know, and it's a worldwide celebration. Big Heavy World, which is a music advocacy group founded by Jim Lockridge and a bunch of other people that used to run a beautiful youth program at 242 Main. I remember that and that was in Memorial Auditorium. It's been going, Big Heavy World's been going on for over 30 years now. And we are the Vermont expositors of World Music Day. We have the whole state, and we have stuff going on all over Bennington, Brattleboro, Randolph, Swanton. I want to encourage people in Ward 6 here to partake. You can play your ukulele on your porch for your neighbors and be part of Make Music Vermont. And others can bang on flower pots in their preschool in their in their schools and beyond the Vermont map. And so I'm interested. I'm going to ask some questions. What parks are in Ward 6. I don't know the word map that well. That's a good question. There's the Edmunds School property, which is not really a park, but it's a public space. Probably the park that most of us spend the most time at is Callahan Park, which is not technically in Ward 6, but that's kind of our neighborhood park. Can anyone point out any others? I've got all the Champlain College grounds there because I grew up around the street on Maple Street. I actually probably grew up in Ward 6 between Union and Willard on Maple. So I kind of know the turf and I know Edmunds backyards and stuff like that. I encourage any musicians among you to or any musicians you know to play in the neighborhood on June 21. And I'm going to give you a link to my contact information. I'm going to share this screen right now. First, which describes what I just lost the zoom here here it describes what it is. And let me see this is it here. Can you see this make music day Vermont. There we go. Yeah. Okay. Tens of thousands of musicians all over the world 120 countries celebrate music all ages skill sets and genres are encouraged to participate. You can be on your front porch you can be in a state park. You can be on a main stage. You can be in your yard. I myself am playing my ukulele from my back porch for the cats and dogs and neighbors who want to hear. There's a call to musicians and I'm going to show you how to get in touch with me, and how you can pass this on to anybody you want to know. It's every style of music is welcome. You can get information at big heavy world.com make music Vermont, and you can register as a musician there. I'm going to share this another another screen now. It's kind of edits that information into big so stop share is here. And then I'm going to share this other screen here. So this is, this is how to get in touch with me. If you're interested in this if you want to advocate for music in Ward six. I know the church that you're in would be a great place for it if there are any musicians there who want to play there. And this is my contact information daft shine at big heavy world.com there's my number. And this is David I'm sorry to interrupt but we're not actually able to see most of that flyer. We're seeing your screen but it's kind of cut off. Yeah we see the word make and that's it. Oh, oh, I wonder why. Okay, well then I will I don't want to take up too much of your time but I'm going to say this and it'll be on the recording. Big heavy world.com make music Vermont. And my email is daft daf SCH EIN daft SCH EIN like Daffy duck at big heavy world calm my phone number if you want to find out more about it or advocate for the ward and try to find musicians to play in the neighborhood. My phone number is<PHONE_NUMBER>. And if you get lost, go to make music Vermont and you will find the website and how to register and how to get in touch with me. Thanks David, I wonder if anyone has any questions for David. Matt do you have a question. David, thanks thanks for all this information. You know a lot of my kids and a lot of other, a lot of their friends they just love to 42 main back in the day and I know that that's gone, you can't really use more a lot of time anymore. Is there any way, what do you what do you think about ways we can somehow get a space like that back for for well for young people. Jim Lakers and myself are advocating relentlessly with Burlington City Arts and the mayor's office and city council to bring that back and now Melinda molten who you probably know of from I mean street landing.  And if I can write this down anybody who's, I can send it to you Nelson. That's Matt, that's Matt. Get it in the minutes that's a great idea. That's a great idea. Yeah, I can I can send I can send you something about it. And what's what's your email Matt. Matt 7631 Gmail 7631 at Gmail. Yeah, because Melinda Melinda put something on Facebook what about Memorial Auditorium and I said there's a group that's been trying to save it for years on Facebook. Jim Lakers and myself and some other people. We stopped the mayor from selling it to UVM for a hockey thing. Back about in 2013, and that that Facebook group is growing and growing so yes, we are all about it and Clevelle. He says he needs like 12 or 13 more million funds have already been raised. I mean, it is whether the reroute whether the iron under the brick is completely rotted, but even to keep the facade and build something new under the facade. There's a lot going on right now so I'm so glad you asked. Should I email you that right now after this meeting so you can. Sure. Okay, yeah, I'll forward it to Nelson and Dale I've got their emails so that's okay. Okay, great. Thank you. So that's about Memorial Auditorium. David I got one more question if you still have another minute to just get back to make Music Day. I'm wondering if you've done anything to connect with Champlain College or with UVM. Maybe that their students are gone by then but Well, I, my dad used to teach in the old medical school which I think is called the Dewey building so I've got plans for something on the steps there. With that with that NPA, I think is that one eight. We were talking about that, and I haven't connected with Champlain College yet though many of the interns at big heavy world are at Champlain, and we need to do it of course they're out it's doing 21. It's a lucky thing. Yeah, to get a musician on some of those great wands, you know, you know, on on on on Willard Street, which they used to be private houses when I grew up around the corner, every chicken's in one of the backyards of those. Does anyone else. Does anyone else have any other questions for David about making Music Day. Oh, please. So, so I'm Charlie with CCTV and I'm just wondering. Do you have any interest in having that that meeting on Monday. Also done the same way this meeting is being done. So it's going to be live YouTube. I'm not saying we would do it but if you contact make TV. I'm sorry. Yeah, make TV. This is what Ward six always does when they communicate with CCTV if you contact them they might contact you back and say, would you like that meeting with Clevelle and Linda Malton, etc. Would you like that to be filmed and broadcast by Channel 17 CCTV.  No, this is the one that's on the corner of Archibald Street. Okay. Yeah, I mean, my theater company used to be in that building. Okay. Great. I will forward that information to Melinda and talk to her about it. Okay. Okay. I'm going to be emailing right now Matt 7631 at gmail.com more information about it. All right. Thank you so much, David. Bye bye. Bye bye. I think we are on to our next agenda item. Of course, David asked the question about what parks are in Ward six and Max Madalinsky is here to talk to us about Champlain Street Park, which I will confess to not knowing exactly where it is so maybe that is where we can start. So, Max, are you here and ready to go. Yes, I am and that is exactly where I was hoping to start so perfect. I have a brief presentation and I'm going to pull up. See here. Can everybody see my screen. Okay. Yep. All right, so I'm Max Madalinsky. I'm a project coordinator for the city of Burlington's Parks and Recreation Department. And to get straight to that point, I'm here to talk to you about Champlain Street Park. It's a pocket park here in Burlington on South Champlain Street located about mid block between King Street. Can everybody see my cursor here. Yes. All right, up at the top there and Maple Street down at the south. So this little green dot is the park. You can see the size of a residential lot and you can see sort of a Google street image of it here from the front with some garden beds and some wooden furnishings and an old playground. And I'm going to just move forward here. So we started this project back in 2020. We started doing some outreach about sort of refreshing and rejuvenating the park. The playground that's there is pretty worn out as well as a lot of the furnishings and it really isn't looking so great if you stop by there these days. And anyway, the project temporarily got put on hold due to the pandemic. And we kind of started back up again early in 2021. I guess technically it would be late in 2021 and early in 2022. So much more outreach going to all the NPA is getting a survey going tabling in the park and also partnering to get some surveys through non English speakers knowing that this is sort of a higher density, more diverse neighborhood that we're in. And so in total we got about 89 survey responses and had some pretty good in person events as part of that and if you participated thank you so much for giving us feedback on the park and what you'd like to see in it. And real quick, we had sort of a mixture of activities using sticker dots and questions we were asking in our survey, where we were just pulling people on like what kinds of things they would like to do in this little pocket park. Some general trends are people want to see more like relaxing passive activities, you'll see up at the top is relaxing swinging gardening picnicking. Like exercising more active running spinning throwing are kind of way down at the bottom there. So, nothing too dissimilar from how people kind of use the park now, and generally kind of keeping it more relaxed. We also had a lot of sort of informal questions more open ended and this is just sort of a smattering of responses. We got back from those so some common things we heard is people have had some concerns about security there. There's a lack of visibility into the park lack of visibility at night. Just cleaning it up generally getting rid of brush and fixing up landscaping and keeping the uses fairly similar to what they are now except maybe making the playground there quite a bit bigger and a little more attractive for kids. So we kind of came up with some design directions for the park to add some lighting to make it more visible, make that playground bigger and replace it. Open up this one little view that is sort of in the southwest corner of the park so that you can see through to the lake which you'll see a little bit more of how that would kind of work later. And to replace the benches add more gardens and vegetation and sort of replace all the fencing and things like that around the park. So, from there we kind of jumped into doing some analysis here. And we started with sort of doing a shade analysis by building a 3D model of the park here, as well as the building to the north and then this building which actually isn't there yet. There's currently a vacant lot here but the owner of that lot has permitted something that's going to look like this so we just wanted to know, knowing that the community has interest in gardening here and potentially doing a community garden, how that might affect the park and whether or not that was going to be feasible. And so these two overhead images sort of show the results from using that 3D model to sort of analyze how the sun and shade are going to move through the park throughout the course of either a couple days in the spring and fall, or through the middle of the summer. So, up on the top here is what is going to kind of happen to this park on the spring and fall equinoxes and then in the lower image is in the summer solstice. So the darkest gray means the park wouldn't get any sunlight in that area throughout the course of the day on both of those days whereas the medium one means you'll get maybe like three hours of sun and up here is like three to six hours and this next shade of gray and then if there's no gray on it that's full sun. So seeing this we really realize this isn't a great location to formalize community gardens where people would be drawing a lot of annuals that really need that full like nine hour, nine to 12 hour day of sunlight. One of the big things we wanted to kind of know about what might happen when that building goes up and whether or not it would make sense to invest in infrastructure like water and additional beds and things like that to make a community garden here possible. You know then there's some other implications but we'll just kind of talk through that in the design concepts because I know we don't have tons of time today. I just did a quick analysis of all of the trees, mostly the canopy trees that were in the park with our city arborist and this is kind of what we came up with based on his recommendations. So we're going to keep three mature trees on the north side of the park it's actually two hackberries and one really large red maple. There's a number of white ash trees that are kind of growing on this side of the park which he was recommending. We proactively start removing. I don't know if anybody's aware or has heard about emerald ash borer coming to the state of Vermont, but it's basically an insect pest that has come over from somewhere out of our country and is considered invasive and is slowly infecting and going to cause the decline and death of many of the ash trees throughout our state. There really isn't anything that can be done to prevent that from happening to a lot of our trees so whenever we're sort of tackling these kinds of projects we try to get ahead of it and remove them, knowing that they're eventually going to die and become a hazard tree in one of our parks that could fall on our infrastructure potentially really hurt someone. We'll work to sort of maintain one mature hackberry tree that's in there though, so that we still have some vegetation on that side, as well as some something to sort of provide shade from hot western sun as we go through summer days. There were also a couple crab apple trees there that were in pretty serious decline that he and his crew proactively went ahead and removed. And after we sort of showed him that shade study he took a younger crab apple sapling that had been planted there and has relocated it to a different park for the time being knowing that it was eventually going to lose all the sun it would need to survive. So with all this stuff we kind of came up with a general design scheme and we have sort of two design concepts that I'm going to walk through in a second. These sort of themes and ways of using the park are kind of the same in each of the concepts. So we're looking at pushing that playground that's currently right here to the back of the park, kind of to make this space which is really deep and narrow and kind of less visible like really activate it and make it sort of the more active space throughout the park. So then also add sort of a dedicated seating area, making it so any place people are going to be hanging out at the park or if you're walking by with your lunch or something like that it's where you're going to stop and it sort of adds additional eyes. You know both on anybody you might be hanging out inside this little sort of narrow deep park, but also offering so that there's other people when they're hanging out in the park can sort of look out at the street and people watch that kind of thing. And to use sort of the central area as an overflow and just generally more informal lawn space so that you know people have that kind of space where they can choose to do any kind of activity. And then the last thing and we're not going to talk too much about it and the two concepts I show but we do intend to add some type of light in this back corner. The back of the park just gets very dark after hours particularly and you know once you get from the fall through the winter into the early spring. So first I'm just going to talk through our playground concept here and what we're going to show in each of these concepts. It's basically going to be the same, and this is just a concept to show sort of the general design intent for the playground. So we have the right colors, we want it to take up roughly a third to half of the park, somewhere in that range and there's kind of a few different activities but the reality is is we're going to have to competitively bid this piece of this project just because it's so expensive, and the actual equipment that will go in will kind of be down to what vendor we end up working with and what they can provide for our budget. So those in more detail some of the things we're looking at including and requesting. So one would be a sort of a climbing structure that could be used by older kids and younger kids. And we're really stressing high visibility items for this so that people can see clear through the park, and also taken the views that do go out to the west from the park. The next piece would be some type of basket group swing, taking sort of advantage of that view we've looked to kind of site it as close to that southwest corners we can, while still sort of respecting use zones that something will be looking at. And lastly, we're going to keep sort of the main playground structure something that's oriented towards two to five year old kids as we heard and a lot of our outreach, a number of days school like a number of day care programs bring younger children here to play. And there's a number of younger families, our families with younger children I should say that are coming to this park to use the existing structure. And again all of these things you'll notice we're really looking a lot at high visibility items arching beams that sort of are used to support other things with ropes and support all of the play elements within the playground. And just to give a little bit of visualization to what we mean, and talking through that we made a little 3D model of what that would look like here. So you can take in that view. We would propose lowering the fence on that side down to three feet so you're still sort of containing kids but there's clear visibility right over it to the lake. And then having just all of those nice open features through there and something kind of bright and colorful to pull you in. So this is the first rough design concept, we're looking at the reality is of these two concepts I'm going to show we might end up landing somewhere in between.  So looking at the hardscape in this design, you have this gently curving path that sort of comes in along the south side of the park where it's going to be shadiest, and where we're going to get the least sun in the park so we're not taking up any soil that we could potentially, you know that would have more options for plants that you could put in there that might need full sun we're really locating the hardscape there. And looking for opportunities to put in some swinging benches along that side, tucking in all of our amenities there. And then adding a sort of a stone dust patio with some bistro style tables and serve some boulders here to kind of demarcate that entrance and add some extra seating options right at the front of the park, and letting that all kind of spill into the sidewalk and street so that the two kind of become slightly interconnected right up here. So next looking at landscaping we would look to put in this scenario as much vegetation kind of along this north sunny side of the park as we can. Any seating looking to gussy it up a little bit with some things that are shade tolerant here, and then adding just a little bit of signage and, you know, kind of putting a little bit of fencing there again to kind of create that entrance and then when you do come into the park, knowing that it's a park versus, you know, just a vacant lot or something like that. And now I just have two renderings to show you this concept just to give you a better feel this is looking into the park from the streetscape. And then this one would be from roughly the edge of that playground looking back towards that path back out of the park. The next concept is called the wandering walk, and you'll see a lot of the same elements here a curving walkway stone dust seating area here, some landscaping on the north. And here we've really tried to sort of create a room type feel for this seating area using some site built planters here as well as these plantings tucked in against the building on the north side. And then meandering that walkway a little bit creating some extra space for a lawn in the middle. And then using the vegetation taking advantage of what son we can, putting in some screening vines along the fence on either side to add some additional greenery and also provide a little bit of separation between the neighboring parcels in the park. And then adding a few shade tolerance shrubs kind of on either side of the lawn, so that it makes it feel like a little bit more of its own space, mounting that sign here and then adding bike racks out actually in the sort of edge of the right away here so that if you were arriving on bike it would just be really clear where you're to park your bike before you walk into the park. And I've got a couple of renderings here just to show it and make it feel a little bit more real. This one's looking back out at the street. And so aside from hearing which of these concepts you might prefer we also are really interested in hearing what people would like to see us prioritize in this park. If it would be implementing that playground first fencing and landscaping type items, lighting a seating area, those kinds of things. So we're going to be working on getting a survey up at some point, we're trying to get it up next week it's still kind of going through some formatting at this point, but we'll be asking those kinds of questions and as soon as I have that link up and running I'll be sure to send it along so that you can plug it to anybody you might be interested in providing feedback on these concepts and priorities. So we started on doing some cleanup in the park, Nate Landieri who's one of our parks commissioners and a member of the ward five NPA is actually coordinating a green up day effort this coming Saturday and I'll have his contact info on here he's asked that if anybody's interested in helping clean up the park to get in touch with them will also be working on proactively taking down a number of those ash trees on the west side of the park and really starting to open up the view and make it a much more visible looking through the park. I'm going to be headed to two other NPAs because this park actually sits almost on the border of wards three wards five and board six so I'll be heading to word five next and I'm still waiting to hear from the two three NPA about when I'll be on their schedule. So we've sort of finished up our outreach will sort of take the feedback we've heard and incorporate it into the pieces of this that are going to cost more money so that we can sort of finalize that concept going into getting RFPs posted and things like that for items that we're going to have to So thank you so much for your time and I'd like to just open it up for questions comments ideas anything like that. I've posted our project website and my contact information down here. You can find a longer version of this presentation that I actually gave it a public meeting earlier this week as well as slide deck up there and some scheduling info about next steps. And then for anybody who's interested in helping out at that green up day event here is Nate Lantieri's contact info please reach out to him and help give a hand to clean up the park if you've got some time. Thank you so much Max. Um, are there any participants here who have any questions for Max or any opinions on the different priorities that he asked about. Feel free to use the raise hand function or just unmute yourself and start talking. While people think about that Max, I will ask a question that I had, which is the playground surface. Is that like some kind of a composite sort of thing. Go ahead. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. I just was curious about the surface because I saw you had it very collared. And I just am not really familiar with that kind of a playground surface of what it is, how it stays clean or how dirty it gets and you know sort of what it'll look like in two, five, 10 years. So what we're thinking for Champlain Street Park is that especially knowing that a group swing like this is a fully accessible piece of equipment so somebody in a wheelchair or who has mobility challenges could be transferred into it to go into a group swing like that. We'd really like to put in what's called rubberized safety surfacing here or port in place rubber. So basically recycled rubber fiber typically made from, you know, recycled tires or other rubber sources that's ground up into very fine chips and then mixed with a resin binder to sort of solidify it into one thing and it's sort of placed almost like asphalt or concrete or something like that, you know, like they, in this way, probably do it over a base of aggregate or something like that so that it was somewhat permeable and allowing water to go through. And they then place it on there and kind of trowel it around to whatever the needed thickness is to get the level of impact attenuation you need in case somebody falls off a piece of equipment and, you know, they kind of bounce off it basically and it protects them. We do have some of it in Burlington at Oakledge Park. We don't have a ton of it at this point. We're trying, and through actually the latest bond that was passed we do have some funds that are set aside specifically as we start to undertake some of our playground replacements in the next coming years to put more of this in because many of our playgrounds in Burlington right now just aren't accessible for either caregivers in mobility devices or children in mobility devices so we really want to put more of this stuff in. Generally, it's all warrantied for like 25 to 30 years both for color fading and UV resistance and things like that, which is about the lifespan of a typical playground. So, from what I've seen at other playgrounds I've been to not here in Burlington that much since the only important place we've got is at Oakledge and that was put in like a year or two ago. In other cities it does hold up well over time. Really, the issues with it is it needs to be periodically vacuumed, but it's actually way less maintenance than wood chips which really need to be raked a lot and you need to refresh them, like two times annually and have somebody is checking in to make sure that they are where they're supposed to be and that also really don't allow somebody in a mobility device to get out to any of your equipment. So yeah, that hopefully answers your question about what it is and what we're showing here is doing something with it that's a little more creative a little more colorful so that draws your eye to the back of the park. Thank you that's great. Are there other questions or feedback for Max about the different priorities or about the plans. I have a quick one. It's not great. Max, thank you very much for all this information. Maybe I apologize if you already went over this. Are you funded completely for this or is that still something that's going to be negotiated or so how's that going to go. We have about $70,000 set aside for this project right now. We do starting July one when the bond funds become available will have money for safety surfacing. But on that budget we've got that 70,000 we're pretty, that's pretty tight. So like the safety surfacing we could probably manage but the playground itself like even without that rubberized surfacing, like the structures we're showing here is probably close to like a $50,000 investment to sort of put all of this in perspective right and then something like a light because there's no electrical service here becomes a little bit more expensive. The fencing you know you're looking at at least like 10 to 20 grand depending on if we go with something nicer like an ornamental aluminum, or if we, we can't do chain link because of the way this park is zone but there might be some options kind of in between that 10 to $20,000 range we could make work. So our budget is tight, which is a big part of why we want to hear about priorities and where people would want us to invest the money first, so that we know where to get started and then maybe down the line we can improve some other things that are lower on that priority list. Okay, thank you. Hey Max, thank you so much for coming for giving us this information. I know you mentioned that there will be a survey available soon and we will definitely be looking for that. Yeah I'll be happy to send that link along as soon as we get it up and right. Terrific and I will ask you to stop sharing your screen. Because it is time for us to move on to our next presenter so thank you Max we really appreciate that. Thank you so much. And next up on our agenda is Robert Golding from Department of Public Works to talk to us about 2022 construction plans. Hello everyone can you hear me. Sounds good. Awesome thank you it's always hard to follow parks. They always have such amazing things to present. Hopefully we can do do that just some justice. We really appreciate the agenda time we know it's valuable. I've heard from DPW I think a couple times over the last year and probably more requests coming down the line so we always appreciate being able to come in in the springtime to give you an update on kind of how the bond money is being spent. The progress we've made on our pretty vast network and really try to let you know what's going on in your neighborhood and some of the bigger projects that are going on citywide. We're certainly happy to answer questions and give you the resources that might help you down the line if you have questions or want to find out more information about what we're up to at Public Works. So I'm going to share my screen and go through a pretty hopefully a pretty brief presentation. Whoops, let's see. I am getting an error message. Let me see if. I'm just asking me to change my permissions. So let me see if I can quickly do that. Well, in the interest of time maybe I should talk through the presentation certainly happy to share this afterward. Thank you. Yeah. We all need to be flexible right. That's right. So, I can tell you it was a great presentation but I'm going to try to do it justice now. We have a lot we're trying to manage in the city is I think you all know there's 95 miles of roads 130 miles of sidewalk, over 100 miles of water mains, over 100 miles of sewer and sanitary pipes that run underneath our city and we have plans to reinvest in all of that this year and I want to walk you through some of those important investments. First, I want to take a brief step back just to make sure folks have an understanding a little bit of how we plan our work. We base our work on what we hear from residents through C click fix through elections through what you communicate to your counselors. Those help us set some important priorities. We also need to look at what available funding there is the last few years there has been an enhanced level of funding for some of the core assets that we manage a public works thanks to a couple of successful bond votes over time. Then certainly city plans and city council priorities also help us set our work plan agendas. This takes us back to the sustainable infrastructure plan which we are currently managing and we're kind of in phase two of that now. Back in 2016 a couple significant bonds were passed to help us refund and rebuild our sidewalk network. We've been using our street network and our water network. In 2018 the clean water resiliency plan was proposed and passed by voters which helped us refocus and reinvest in the wastewater and storm water system. Couple, all of these are different though certainly related components of what we're trying to manage a public works in the past we have not been aggressively funded in the city we've let things slip like sidewalk network condition. We have a pavement condition and certainly some of the water resources infrastructure over time. The last five years we've seen an investment at triple the normal average of our sidewalk network we've rebuilt about 16 miles of sidewalk over those five years. Average five years we would have probably built about five miles of sidewalk paving we've seen almost a double amount of streets, repaved with about 20% of the city over these last five years. That means we are now re placing or relining really for the first time in recent memory in a proactive way. A little more context on funding just so folks are aware of how our plans get funded. We are going to begin to draw down the successful March bond as Max just mentioned in July, though a lot of that is already going to be influencing what our work plan for the year looks like. A lot of folks ask questions about the federal infrastructure bill and some of the existing federal money that was sent to states and municipalities. That money is largely targeted and doesn't necessarily go towards some of these core assets that we want to reinvest in like paving sidewalks water mains. There are things like lead provisions in the infrastructure bill, not a worry that we have in Burlington so there's not a lot of that targeted money we can make immediate and direct use of just to briefly answer that question. The other challenge we have, and I have a chart here which kind of puts it into, I think good context which you can't see but construction prices are up inflation is up in the supply chain as I think everybody knows has been stretched asphalt prices for instance according to VTrans have gone up from 580 a ton in January to 719 a ton in May. It's about a 15 or 20% increase that we are seeing in all of our projects, similarly with concrete costs. And asphalt are the life of blood of public works. Construction has started.  We are on home Avenue right now rebuilding a water main, a couple detours and traffic impacts down that way so check your front porch forums are signed up for VT alert to learn a little bit more about those impacts and certainly as they get closer to your neighborhoods. If you look for those services you'll be seeing more of those. You'll also be seeing green belt signage around the city, letting you know about pipe rehab work, sidewalk work or paving work. Generally in the corridors where it's happening we don't want people to be surprised we're trying to reach you in a couple different ways to make sure whether you're a homeowner or just passing through. We're trying to target how we make sure you know what's going on on your route to work or in your neighborhood. Quick update on the clean water resiliency plan that bond in 2018 that reinvests in the storm water wastewater infrastructure we had a pretty challenging year in 2018 where we had about five incidents at the wastewater treatment plant that led to some beach shutdowns and some short term acute issues with water. We can't promise that those are solved forever but we have made some significant progress in these three or four years since then alone thanks to the voters will in passing that bond that $30 million bond. Just last year we completed really significant key upgrades at all three of our wastewater treatment plants. This year will be continuing an eight mile replacement or renewal of storm water and sewer pipes. We've also reinstalled two new pump stations where we were having issues on in these very old pump stations pump stations help convey wastewater from low parts of the city to the wastewater treatment plants. And as I think some folks here probably know we've also done quite a bit of green storm water work a lot in Ward six. This is planned for the old north end this year, and then not not necessarily part of the clean water resiliency plan but in any other project where we're tearing up a street redoing a streetscape we try to find ways to build, whether it's above ground or below ground storm water infrastructure in place. I've got the slides up so you don't know what I'm skipping but I'm going to skip over a chart that kind of demonstrates the year by year sidewalk investment every year because I do want to let you know and I'll share this certainly with whoever wants it and I'm happy to make it available in whatever ways are convenient, but our sidewalk reconstruction list, the long run list, where we're doing hundreds of feet not just spot segments was recently approved by the city council, I think in Ward six. And that spruce street is likely, probably the only long run list. Sorry long run segment but about 1600 linear feet from Willard to Union, it looks like the entire north side and a lot of the south side will be rebuilt. This is the first street ledge mirror and Margaret proximate to Ward six, though not directly in Ward six. And then we have a long short run list of about a dozen or so sidewalks where we're doing about 50 feet or so, of some of the worst stretches of Ward six that will include Adam street Adams court Howard ledge road main part of main part of maple parts of prospect parts of south union and of course Shelburne Street which is as being reconstructed as part of the Shelburne Street roundabout project. If you go to the DPW homepage Burlington vt.gov forward slash DPW right at the top is a splash screen of our construction portal. You click on that you'll be taken to a map or you can look at a map or a list of most or all of this work at this point it's uploaded on there so since you can't see. You can see here certainly it's an opportunity if you want to visit the website to see a little bit more about what the map network of our work looks like this year. In terms of paving will be paving about six miles of roads, this is about triple the normal average that will happen in Burlington in a given year three of those miles are thankfully being done by the state. They'll be managing the projects, they'll be funding the projects, and that will certainly make a significant contribution to some of the major arterials, and their condition in the city. I'll just quickly read down the list of streets being paved by us this year and I don't know if anything's directly in Ward six the hopefully if you're a resident who bikes drives walks on the pavement you'll benefit from some of this work but Alan street first Cliff Parkway Flynn Avenue, part of Flynn Avenue Franklin Square Lakewood North Ave, North props North prospect Street, Plasper Gav tallwood and university place are all set for repaving. We do have about another $90,000 set aside to patch some of the worst of the worst so we can pave a street. That's very expensive and we use contractors to do those comprehensive paving fixes. We can patch roads on our own which you'll see in the winter time with a cold patch material not super durable, or with hot mix that is much more durable but we do it a smaller scale so this set aside fund is going to be available for again the worst of the worst where we'll likely use a contractor, and it'll basically bridge the gap between what we can do on a small scale and what contractors do at a high cost on a larger scale to really try to get another significant part of the cities roads rebuilt. Given how difficult of a year it's been on the pavement. And just in terms of the state paving list I would suspect a lot of folks in Ward six got a postcard a few months ago indicating that there was a two year project that V trans was undertaking to pave Shelburne street, as you know, South Willard Street St. Paul south and north when you ski Riverside and main this year it's likely going to be north Willard Street saving south Willard for when the Shelburne roundabout is fully done, as well as all of Riverside and all of main street from north Willard to the city limits. This will make a pretty significant dent in the kind of overall condition of the road network. Hopefully, you're going to see some benefits from that. A lot of this is going to be planned by the state as night work, which could bring some impacts. I certainly there will be more communication from them and or us to work with residents and what to expect during some of the worst of those of those projects. Maybe you all know probably very much about the Shelburne street roundabout I wanted to share some hotline information, but it's very available for you to find on the Shelburne street roundabout.com website. These are good resources to have just to stay abreast of the estimated time of completion, which right now is 2023 and to answer any questions, especially any burning issues you need addressed think we've tried to address. Again, this is a state city project, and we're using an external consultant to manage a lot of this outreach work but trying to address noise issues traffic issues. Traffic calming issues that we've heard of. So certainly use the hotline as a resource. I did want to make a pretty significant announcement for folks who haven't heard but the city council did approve the first ever construction contract for the Champlain Parkway. The first phase of that is scheduled to start in July 2022 and be completed in 2024. That's only the first phase which is going to involve upgrades to Lakeside Avenue in a section of pine street between Lakeside and Kilburn, as well as the actual construction of the parkway from Home Ave to Lakeside. During this first phase there will be no interstate connection. So we don't expect or anticipate any traffic, you know increase in traffic since there's no connection to the interstate. We've also phased the work along with all of our other work, such as the Shelburne street roundabout to try to mitigate any real traffic concerns that are going to come from doing all of these projects together. I think the most significant plan we're working with the contractor now on is that no major pine street work is going to happen while the Shelburne street roundabout is under construction. We do have a great chart that shows you how everything is phased. And I can keep promising that these things are great since you can't see them but I do encourage you to check our website. We'll reach out directly to me because I would love to make sure you get ahold of any of this info you see but it will kind of lay out the year and the project as we go along and try to phase this work to bring the least impacts on the community as possible. Great Streets Main Street is underway, concept planning is underway. We encourage you to go to Great StreetsBDTV.com. You can learn more about the project as it stands. You can fill out a survey and let us know what your interests are. We've had a couple community meetings and next week we will be back at City Council for an informational presentation, as well as the DPW Commission. Then we would expect to be back at Council for some decision-making later in the month, but certainly right now is a great time for you to check out some of the different concepts and to let us know through the survey what your ideas and thoughts are. You also certainly can email myself or the contact information on that website if you have specific questions. I will end it here, just letting you know there's a couple more projects of note in the city and the university place and Mansfield Avenue, maybe not directly impacting folks on this call, maybe it is, but I'll leave it there. Those are truly significant projects that will kind of rebuild the streetscape for mostly the residents who are using those streets now, but they're great projects and I'm going to end it there, but certainly my contact information is available on the DPW website and any other ways I can circulate this to you, I'd be happy to. And I tried to breeze through that so I could leave time for any questions if I've missed something and certainly happy to take those. And if I don't have an answer on me, I promise I will follow up and get you that answer. So thanks a lot. Thank you so much Rob that was great. Are there questions or comments or feedback for Rob from anyone who's out there in zoom land. So while people think about that. I'm going to ask a question and I kind of feel like this is not a fair question, but it's what I really want to hear the answer to Rob. And that is, when am I going to be able to ride my bike on Shelburne Road. Any questions so. I realize it's not fair I'm not trying to put you on the spot but it's what I want. I know, are you asking specifically about the roundabout project or, or just better. You know, just like you know the road the sun like I ride on the sidewalk now when I need to go along Shelburne Road, which is better I think than riding in the street but is there any hope of any kind of bike facility on Shelburne Road, anytime ever. That's a good question so at first I thought you're asking about the roundabout but no in terms of this important question and a harder question I don't think we have any short term plans to add infrastructure on Shelburne Road or Shelburne Street. One of the things we have to focus on stemming from the 2017 walk bike plan is to build out the infrastructure, you know through neighborhoods through some of the main arterials, recognizing that Shelburne Street spent a pretty significant truck corridor commuting corridor and that would require a lot more expensive work I think to upgrade facilities on that road. I don't have any specific. I know there's nothing specific in the short term and I'm not sure if there's anything kind of on the shelf that as funds allow or as the timeline starts shifting as we put other projects in on the back burner as we've completed those I don't know the kind of medium to long term answer that so I'd love to talk to our planner and follow up with you.  But it'd be nice to have something between those two. Yeah, it is a fair question I can understand that. Hopefully, hopefully you're safe when you're on Shelburne Road or you can, you know, find some some of the better options that we've tried to implement but so fair any questions fair game so thank you. Thank you that's awesome. Are there any other questions for Rob. I am not seeing any but I know we all appreciate getting these updates and we all appreciate the work that you do with DPW thank you so much. Thank you very much informed. Sorry, sorry about this presentation issue I'll make sure my zoom is ready for the next NPA is but thanks again. That'll be great. Thanks a lot Rob. Oh, it looks like Anna has a question. Is that a question or a comment for Rob Anna. Hi, can you hear me now. Yes we can. I was curious about, I think he mentioned Flynn Avenue going down to the city south southern city market area. Does the plan also include Briggs Avenue there Briggs Street the dirt road next to city market. Briggs is actually a part of the Champlain Parkway project so I believe over the next two years and we don't. So within the next four to six weeks we'll have a Champlain Parkway construction schedule and phasing of work. And since we are mostly staying off of Pine Street this year I suspect Briggs Street from understanding the phasing and the schedule right should be on the kind of sooner side I can't promise that it will be this year but like I said you know Ward 5 has already asked us I think to when we have more information to come see them so we should have more information by June so certainly we can send an update then if you want to reach out directly to me. I expect we'll have a schedule in a few weeks, and we'll know a little bit more about what's getting paved when some of the other upgrades like undergrounding the utilities on lakeside, building the shared use path, some of those things are happening we'll know more very soon. So Briggs Street is should be on that on that list to answer your question. Yeah, great. Thanks. And just one other question. If we did not hear our sidewalk repair on your list. Can we put in just, you know, submit a Karen Paul is probably the smiling right now because I think I bring this up every year, but can we still go on and just request a review of the sidewalk. Absolutely. And if you know I keep promising this great presentation but I had in big yellow letters that it was a draft sidewalk the short run was a draft list anyway refinements are constantly being made and right now I know the list still being really processed with a lot of new data we've collected on both C click fix reports, our own field visits but also 130 mile assessment we just did mechanically with our consultants so to answer your question you can absolutely always submit C click fix or if it's easier a phone call or an email which we would then put into our system for you. And our sidewalk program manager basically is looking at these all year round so if you're noticing something that we're missing and it fits into our work plan certainly it's something we can do. And if not at least it gets fresh eyes on it so I'd love to know the street or the sidewalk but you can also certainly reach out any way you want. Yeah, thank you Rob I appreciate that I'll take care of that thanks. Okay, thank you so much Rob. Thank you everyone. And next up we have Declan McCabe from St. Michael's College to talk to us about mammals in Burlington. And I'll start you off actually by saying that I saw a fox this morning over at the cemetery by Centennial Field. Nice. That's the one that's right off of Colchester Colchester Avenue. I know I know there's mammals here. I have a picture of possibly that same box. Anyway, so we are. Please go ahead we're looking for what you have to say. Yeah, oh there they are I was wondering. Yeah, I have a few slides and it's a scary number of slides but I will slip through and we'll stop when we get to the right time and where we go. A lot of these pictures come from trail cameras that we've put around the place. And I've also borrowed some from local photographers. Kyle Tansley in particular.  And it's not the same thing. Anyway, this works better if I turn it on. Well that is awfully cute. That's another Kyle's. So we'll talk a little bit about who lives here and where they live, how we can protect them, things like that. I'm going to focus mostly on the predators for a couple of reasons. One, people tend not to see them and not to be aware that we have them. And two, they are a really good road and control system, which is important in a place where we've got lots of Lyme disease. So if you look around the area, you'll see that there's lots of green spots in between the houses. And in particular, the intervail is just a gem of habitat. So there's lots of places where animals can live in a large continuous plot. And then there's lots of places where we have little pieces of woodland. That act as stepping stones among neighborhoods. So this is where I do most of my work over at St. Mike's that kind of 90 degree turn you see in route 15 is where St. Mike's is and right across the street, 365 acres of natural area that the college owns. And then that connects through to to a new ski. So there's lots of places where animals can live in a large continuous plot. And then there's lots of places where we have little pieces of woodland that act as stepping stones among neighborhoods. So I do them to new ski and on the other side of the river of course we have Burlington so I think about these things as stepping stones and rather you know people think of wildlife corridors as a big long stripe through the landscape, but the stepping stones are just as important. And as you mentioned when we started off there's foxes in the cemetery on Manuski Avenue and I also see them on the cemetery over on the North Avenue. These little pieces of green are important, and you need to protect those. The red fox is the most common thing that we get. And this one happens to be a photograph through somebody's window this is over in Colchester, and this is what Claudia saw later the same day. I'd like you to imagine the number of rodents that it requires for a fox to raise that number of offspring, and then think about, you know, how more efficient that is and having a whole lot of moustraps and poison. So, you know, it's, it's free. And this is probably the fox you saw. This is the fence of that cemetery. And we had a lot of cameras set up for a project, and Lena Swislaki from Interveil at the time helped me with a bunch of students. So projects like this is in the middle of the pandemic, you can send a bunch of students out in the woods, and they can strap cameras to trees, and they can get, you know, lots and lots of blurry photographs and fuzzy things. And then once in a while you get a great shot.  So the red foxes are really distinctive they got black socks, and they show up as a pale color compared to the other fox that we get. So there's another of Kyle's photos, bit of a tender moment there. So we also get gray foxes, they're much harder to see. I've only seen one one in my time doing this kind of work, but they're out there. And the cool thing about them is they can climb trees really rapidly, and they can escape coyotes so they tend to coexist very well with coyotes. The red fox is not so much. But all of these predators together are going after the mice and rats in our area, which is why we don't have very many rats, you will find places where we have them but not as many as we could have. So, there's a gray fox at night time they got kind of a cat like face, and they're very distantly related to the red foxes so they're, it's not like their cousins it's like they're very very distant relative to like, like humans and baboons that that kind of distance. It's a cool animal. I'm going to skip the video because, well, it looks like it's going to work. So there we go. This is what I when I say red fox gray foxes can time. This is what I mean. They really can time and they can time almost as well as a cat. So they're, they're pretty amazing. And that video came from somebody in Texas. So we'll move on and try to hit the one that people worry about the most I think in terms of dogs. So coyotes were absent in the northeast historically. They colonized across the north side of the Great Lakes, and on the way they hybridized with wolves. So, and they made it to our neck of the woods in the early 20th century, and they've been expanding. This slide shows you in red, the component of the northeastern coyotes genome that is strictly coyote. And then the blue, yellow and green shows you two different types of wolf and domestic dog. So when people call them coy dogs, they're not wrong. And when they call them coy wolves, they're not wrong. And what we've learned by measuring them and in our case, because we had access to skulls at St. Mike's and this is a student research project. They're much, much bigger than the ones in the West. And we, you know, this data set shows shows you that time using skulls. This was a teaching project that got out of hand and you decided to turn it into a research project. The goal was to have a dozen skulls or 20 and in from the West and 20 from the northeast and we ended up with 130 skulls so it became a research project. There it is. And you can if there's teachers out there interested in this. You can use photographs of these skulls to measure them directly. And that's all online under digital coyote. But here is a coyote in the interval. And we almost never get daytime pictures of them. So we were excited to get a full color picture. Mostly we get nighttime pictures like that. And it went away but there it is. And they're much lankier in the leg than our foxes. So they're very, very distinctive, very easy to tell from the two foxes. They don't worry about coyotes. I think they're going to be attacked. Attacks are very, very rare. And attacks on pets are more likely but attacks on people are extraordinarily rare. So not a concern. My hunting friends worry that the coyotes are taking down a lot of deer. And they certainly do get some deer. There's no doubt. And they certainly get some phones. And when you consider the size of the deer population, they're not making any impact. And the deer population came from a point in Vermont where we have to introduce 17 or 18 deer from New York at one point in the early 20th century. And the coyotes came in the same timeframe and the deer population has grown dramatically. So the coyotes aren't really making a blinder the difference to the deer, although every hunter will tell you different. There you go. Sometimes we get them on the snow. They're just very wide in the jaws. You can really tell what you've got. You can tell you're not getting a fox. Sometimes they see our cameras and it freaks them out a little bit. This one was in South Burlington and he's gone. And sometimes they habituate to our cameras. These ones were born at St. Mike's that was basically we were getting one coyote periodically on our cameras. And then when the appropriate season came along, suddenly we were getting a group of four, which suggests that they were born right on campus. So yeah, these, these ones spent three minutes playing with the camera. And this one came up at nighttime.  This is what it did with our camera. It got hold of the strap and it wrestled and it wrestled for a long time. And eventually it got, it was joined by one of its buddies and the two of them went after for a while. They pulled away the, the fabric that we have down to keep the weeds down from our cameras. And they warmed up the camera. And this went on for a long time. So I'm going to flick really quickly through them. That's why I told you I had a scary number of slides. So anyway, 11 minutes, 383 photographs and a six degree air temperature rise.  So they're, they're amazing little animals and you know, people, people love them or hate them. That's my impression. And I think if you put a trail camera out for a while, you may learn to love them. I've only seen two in the flesh, but we get them reliably every night when you put out 20 cameras. So there you go. This is one of the UVM undergrads pictures. So I can't read my slide. Can you read his name from the slide? You've got a closer access to it than I do. Jacob Crawford, thank you. I should have put darker font. Anyway, Jacob was down there in our natural areas, Mike's photographing birds and there was a deer that got bogged down on the ice and the coyotes found deer. And that's when they will get a deer. If a deer is bogged down on the snow, there's nothing they can do to defend themselves. So the coyotes will certainly take advantage of that. And the, in this case, the coyotes ate for a while and then it was, they were joined eventually by a bobcat, which I'm going to skip over some sites to get to that because there's one of my favorite bobcat shots. A lot of people are concerned that the highway is killing a lot of animals and there's no doubt that animals are killed on the highway. The animals also adapt and this one's going right under I-89. Right under the culvert, if you watch the video for long enough, you'll see him come out the corner. Right about now it's areas emerging and that puts them on the median in between the north and the southbound lanes. And then we've had foot cameras on the other side picking up coyotes and bobcats coming out the other side. So they're using the underpasses regularly. And this is that same area of Jacob Crawford's photographs. This is the bobcat that waited until the coyote was gone. Can I just ask you about the size of the bobcat? Yeah.   Although somebody at the Maine thought that they had found a Ninjord house cat and they put a bobcat in their car a while back. Didn't end well. So in terms of pounds, I think they're getting into the 25-30 power range. Thank you. I'm probably wrong on the numbers and someone like Bill Kilpatrick might be watching this and saying, okay, if you're wrong. That's what happens when you have an entomologist doing this stuff. Here is the skunk we encountered and the bobcats came in looking for the skunk and the bobcats did not get skunked that night as far as I can tell. And this is all just put together from still pictures. This is when I wish I had it on video, you know. But skunks are certainly far from the fences. But the bobcats will occasionally get them. So we get a lot of bobcats this year. Typically in years past, we were getting a lot of coyotes and very few bobcats. But the bobcats numbers are dramatically up this year. I don't know why. And lots of them. And we got them in the interval last year. And once in a while we get them with their lunch. So they are definitely very effective rodent predators and they get grayscrolls. They also get other things like rabbits that are not rodents. And then of course if there are rats around, they'll handle them as well. Sometimes they are slightly disrespectful to our cameras. You can see nice clear photographs here. And then the bobcat backs up to the camera. And everything goes fuzzy. So that's how they mark their territory. And I guess the camera was its territory. This is one. Any chance you could rattle the keyboard and see if the video show. Thank you. Maybe there he goes. Watch the tail go up right there. That's it marking its territory. And then of course it sits down right out of frame. So anyway, they're not trained actors. Okay, lots of bobcats. I think they're wonderful. We had evidence of kittens on campus and last year and remains to be seen what we get this year. If you want to get pictures like this, the best thing to do to trail cameras, strap it right onto a log, like literally strap it on the top of a down log. And the animals walk right up to it.  Then you get the fuzzy pictures they walk right over. So yeah, you definitely can get some good pictures. We have Fisher right in Burlington. And we've gotten lots of good pictures of them. Not as many as I get a bobcats honestly, but they're a pretty amazing animal. There's another one using an I-89 culvert. And the next picture was a disappearing. And there's water there too. The mink, of course, will swim in and out. There's one coming down a tree. That's one of Lena's pictures. They can run up and down trees. They're amazing. And that's how they get the squirrels. They'll run around the tree. They'll corner them. They'll convince the squirrel to sometimes drop to the ground, in which case it hasn't got a hope. Can I ask a question about the Fisher cat? Yeah. So can you talk about the history of them in Vermont? Yeah, the Fisher were trapped to very, very low numbers at one point. And then there were laws brought in to protect them. The trapping was banned for a while. Numbers came back up. And then sometime in the 70s, the price of the pelts went up and the trapping increased and the numbers went down again. But they've been recovering since then to the point that they're actually in town, like you can find them in town. They're never huge numbers, but they're certainly usually get two or three pictures a year on 20 cameras. So we encountered one. I lived in the New North end of my growing up around Ethan Allen Park up near the tower. And we encountered one in the daytime, what seemed to be kind of protecting some territory as the kids were kind of playing beneath the base of a tree that seemed to have a nest. Yeah, that's my timer, sorry. No, it's okay. I had never seen one before and I was surprised to see one in the daytime at that. It's unusual to see them in the daytime, but we have gotten more, in terms of, you know, ratios, we get more full color pictures, more of our daytime pictures of Fisher than we do of coyotes. For example, the coyotes are far more nocturnal and the fishers are a little bit less nocturnal and then the Red Fox, we get lots of full color pictures of them. So, so yeah, fishers kind of fun. So I'll just take it through quick pictures of fishers and maybe wrap it up with. There's a nice daytime picture. There's a mink. We certainly get mink. And there's a lot of fishers in our field as a UVM researcher who understood off to the same makes natural area and takes a nice amazing pictures. There's a weasel we've got down there. We get that this the weasel actually was in interval right under the tarp probably hit now for mice. And there's one that has a mouse. And I think the last picture I have is one in its winter garb. So the point I'd like to make I guess by showing you these is we have lots of interesting predators. They're out there. pest control and if we protect our woodland patches and even those little strips between neighborhoods, we will continue to have them and we will be Fox and Coyote and Bobcat towns and not rats and primarily raccoon towns. So what is the process for protecting these stepping stones and the kind of corridors? Periodically, developers will go after a particular patch. That's what we're encountering in South Burnington right now and you have to decide, you know, what do you want? Do you want that patch developed? Do you want to protect some of the core habitat that's remaining? And there are patches in Burlington that are, you know, I'm quite sure those decisions will be made. At some point, people will be looking at patches and saying, you know, do we need more housing here or do we need to protect some habitat? So typically is this occurring at a conversation occurring at like a kind of Department of Planning and Development type? It is, it's a planning and zoning issue for sure. And most towns have some kind of a conservation board that interfaces with the planning and zoning. So that's where a lot of those discussions happen. I'm not sure what the Burlington structure is. Do you folks know? I don't. I don't either, but I'm quite sure there's a structure. But yeah, it's all about habitat.  So if you protect habitat in your streams, for example, Centennial Woods is a great example. There's streams in there. So you've got water. You've got shelter and you've got a food web. So you can't think about mammals in isolation. You've got to think about all of those things and the insects that have to feed the rodents and the rodents that have to feed the larger mammals, the insects that feed the birds, you know, and for that you need native vegetation. So you had said something that it really, the predators at this high level of the food chain are kind of indicative of like a really healthy sort of a healthy ecosystem. If you've got the predators, then you've clearly got the prey. And if you've got the prey, you've got whatever the prey are eating. So you've got the entire food web. And people's yards are part of this equation as well. That we can't, it can't all be parks. It can't all be areas that are common. We need to plant native vegetation in our backyards and get rid of some of the lawns, which will be also better for the lake and put in some native vegetation, which will support native insects, native birds, native, you know, and so forth and have a food web. So yeah. Well, thank you so much. You're welcome. That was so cool. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. Thank you for letting me share one of my obsessions. You know, I'll say, oh, it looks like Matt has a question. I'm just going to say one thing that I was thinking. Yeah. As you were asking Nelson about the, how to protect the habitat that these creatures need. I was thinking about the presentation that we heard two, three months ago about the barge canal. Yeah, that I'm blanking on its name, but the guy, the Andy Simon, Andy Simon from the Ward 5 NPA came to talk to us about that.  Yes, it does. Also got PCBs and other stuff. It does. And also, also a new species of springtail that was described literally from that location at the end of Pine Street, you know, somebody went on. I'm sorry, a new species of what? A new species of springtail. Very tiny. It's almost an insect. Almost an insect. It's a hexapod. It has six legs, but it doesn't meet the definition of an insect. It's its own group. But yeah. You did start by saying you were an entomologist. Yeah, yeah. I don't want to get too deep into the six-legged things. But yeah, literally a new species was discovered in the barge canal. That's cool. It is kind of cool. What's it called again? Oh, it's a springtail. And it was actually named for CHAMP. So the scientist, Felipe, when he decided to describe it, decided to name it for CHAMP, which I thought was pretty appropriate. Fun. Matt, did you have a question or a comment? Yeah, I do have a question. Thank you so much. It was really, really, really interesting. Can you say a little bit about the cameras? How do you set them up? Are they motion triggered or how does that work? It's motion and infrared. So you strap it to a tree and it is infinitely patient. You walk away and you hope nobody steals it. And when the animals pop by, if they are warm-blooded, they will trigger it. So I haven't, I've been doing it for seven, eight years. I haven't gotten a single snake on there. But you get birds, you get mammals, and sometimes you get the weeds waving at the camera in the summertime. So I would suggest strapping it about knee-high because most of the animals come in low because it's tempting to put it in chest-high because that's comfortable for a person. But you miss a lot of the cool stuff.  I wish the camera had been lower. So put it down knee-high. If the ground is sloping down, point the camera down. If the ground is sloping up, point the camera up. So there's a few things like that you can do to improve your success. But they're not, they're not that expensive these days. You can get them for under a hundred bucks at this point. And I recommend you get one with them, AA batteries rather than some of the more esoteric batteries that are out there because then you can buy rechargeables and, you know, keep your operation costs low. SD cards, you step a SD card in there.  And they also make them with cell phone plans. You can sign up and you get a certain number of pictures per week sent right to your cell phone. I have never bothered with that, but I'm told it's a good thing. So yeah, thanks for the question. And thanks for listening. Okay, that's great. Thank you. Yeah. I recommend you get one. Any other questions for Declan?  We'd love to see what you get. That's what I was going to ask. Is there, so there is a kind of a network? There is a network, yeah. And it's valuable information. You know, people can start asking questions. Well, where do we have rats? And how many do we have? And we'll find, if you go on iNaturalist, you'll discover we don't have very many. So, you know, it's valuable. It's useful. Always interested to see where things are. So, what do you think? Have you wrapped up for? I'm just giving a second to see if there's any other questions or comments. Okay. I'm not seeing any. Thank you so much. That was really fun. Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. Really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks a lot. Thanks for having me. Thank you. So our last agenda item is basically just to talk a little bit about future plans for the Ward 6 NPA. We had some conversation about hybrid meetings, about going back to meeting in person, some conversations about going back to having a community dinner beforehand or otherwise serving food. There's not many people in this room to participate in the conversation right now.  And if anyone has any thoughts about that, any ideas for agenda topics that you'd like to see, any thoughts about meeting format and or any thoughts about anyone who wants to volunteer to be a new steering committee member or any thoughts about who might be a good potential steering committee member for us to contact, we would love to hear what people have to say. And it may be that we need to do this on a different day when we have more people. But I do want to just sit here with that uncomfortable silence for a minute or two in case anybody wants to raise their hand. I'm really in question, but did Declan leave because somebody did write a question in the Q and A. Oh, shoot. Oh, he did just walk out. Okay, all right. Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't see that one, Joey. Yeah, we just noticed. All right. I think both Dale and I are relatively new. Dale's brand new to the steering committee. I'm about a year plus here, but only in COVID times. And I think, you know, we heard from Matt and Michelle Baraz, previous steering committee members about the sort of importance of the in-person gatherings, the sort of the community building aspects of just having a meal together. And certainly that's something that we're interested in bringing back. I know it's still a strange time of pandemic-wise and we're hoping to maybe start phasing this back in in June with some maybe light refreshments and hopefully some more attendees in person. And then maybe in the fall will be in a different place. Hopefully in terms of just people feeling comfortable gathering together and maybe starting to populate the community room here. So, yeah, I guess. Nothing else. I think it's probably time to adjourn. Okay. Okay. Thank you to everybody. And we will see you all. Our next meeting is the first Thursday in June and that'll be the last meeting before summer break. So hope to see you all then. Thank you. Thank you. Good night.


Members of the St. Lucia team to the 2023 Carrefter Games returned home on Wednesday evening through the George F. L. Charles Airport. Three of the athletes returned to schools overseas, but the remaining six and their management team were treated to a hero's welcome by family, friends, government officials and sponsors. After enjoying St. Lucia's most successful outing in terms of medal counts with eight total medals in the Bahamas, the team is brimming with confidence. Double silver sprint medalist Naomi London says she wants to be an inspiration to young athletes. We need to notch our outfits. I mean, we can do it. There are so many more little kids who will wish that they have a medal on their neck from Carrefter. So I think as a young outfit, I will inspire the rest and we will come together just to form a larger group next year for Carrefter. For the first time ever, St. Lucia secured medals in every division and St. Lucia athletes climbed the medal rostrum in every event group in which they were entered. The national team was chaired on by tens of thousands watching live on TV and online, glued to the exploits of the island's champions, who rewarded parents, fans, friends and fellow citizens with the best performance ever by athletes from the Helen of the West. The greatest moment at these games was to hear, they commented. I remember last year it was about the DVI, but this year it was about St. Lucia, St. Lucia, St. Lucia. So I think that we went out there and we actually gave it a very good account of ourselves. It just goes to show that we have the ability. Our size does not matter. It's about our commitments and we're willing to go out there and perform. And we did this. We executed well. And so I can only imagine what is yet to come. The Ministry of Youth Development and Sports, along with the St. Lucia Athletics Association, have pledged to work more closely with one another in hopes of putting together a bigger, stronger team to head over to the Spice Island one year yens. In a bid for more podium appearances, the intention is to find more opportunities for young athletes to compete on the original stage. The better to prepare them for the Carifter Games. We have to do a number of things. Firstly, we have to ensure the facilities are up to par. They are game ready and they are well maintained. Secondly, we have to ensure there's sustainable programming. We need to ensure that our coaches are well trained. They are the highest level because there's a direct relationship between the quality of coaches and the quality of athletes that they put forward. So we will continue to work with our athletes. As I indicated, we are going to work assiduously with the Athletics Association to ensure that the programming is in sync with ours. We've invested heavily in a Cuban specialist coach who, like I said, is based in Sufran. There's a reason for that. There's a track facility at the Mini Stadium. We are hoping to track as many athletes as possible. Also, what we are going to do is to ensure that our athletes compete more in regional and international games. We're looking at how we can have them also participate in regional, more regional meets. Of course, the local meets that we have here. And to ensure that these other international meets that our athletes get an opportunity to represent their country, represent themselves, to improve themselves, and to showcase themselves to the world and send them to show as well. Because at the end of the day, they are our ambassadors. They've been put in the work and so we have to ensure that we get them the opportunities. Whilst all stakeholders are celebrating this year's 8th Medal Hall, they are also already turning their attention to the question of how to build on the historic success enjoyed in the Bahamas. From the Ministry of Youth Development and Sports, I am Denise Florenville.


Thank you so much Jota, and now we'll do Samantha Estudis from University of Toronto. And she'll be telling us about investigating then right self avoidance using computational analysis of time-lapse 3D images. So Samantha, is it okay for my desk? Sure. So, I'm Samantha Inastavis. I'm a fourth year PhD student in Julia Lefebvre's lab at the University of Toronto. And I'm going to talk today about one of my projects that's using computational methods of analysis to applying that to time-lapse images to try to understand how dendrites are able to develop their specific shapes. So for context, because I think people who do models sometimes forget, what I'm showing here is just one subtype of neuron that's been sparsely labeled. So it gives you an idea of how incredibly dense these neural tissues are. And within these neural tissues, multiple different subtypes need to share this space and develop the specific morphology they need for their specific function. So what I'm showing you here are six different neural subtypes, and you can appreciate how terribly variable their morphologies are. And what's really unknown in development is what are the cellular mechanisms that occur in order to result in these morphologies. And if you take the starburst, and these morphologies are known to be really specific to, implicated in the function of these neurons. So if you take the starburst-american cell, which is the model system that I'm working with, it's a relatively planar cell within the retina. Past work in our lab has shown that with genetic methods, if you perturb this morphology, it inhibits the ability of the cell for specific function within the circuit, which is to tune the direction selectivity within motion detection, so inability to detect motion. But despite this mature cell having this beautifully radial morphology with minimal overlaps, known as dendrite self-avoidance, early in development, you can see this time course of development approximately from post-anil day one to six. You can see that this is not the case. In development, their dendrites are very complex, and they create this really dense web that has these self-contacts. So this is an example of a P3 starburst-american cell. So in their adult morphologies, they have these really radial morphologies, but in this context, you can see it's this really dense web, and the take-home message here is that this web is forming self-contacts. There are contacts occurring within these dendrites, within these self-dendrites. So the question I'm really trying to understand is how do you get from this morphology to the mature morphology, and what are these cellular mechanisms? So to try to understand this problem, I first went in vitro. So here you're looking at a cultured neuron. So this neuron is taken out of that environmental context, and it's really given its space to develop this morphology. So it's a single cell neuron, and what you notice are growth cones at the distal tip. So classical work knows that in axon guidance, these growth cones emerge. In this example, it's dendritic growth cones. But moreover, there's these dendrite bridges. So outlined in green, you can see when I'm defining as a short orthogonal projection, which is a dendritic bridge, and this is the point of self-contact. And it forms this really ladder-like or web-like structure. So this is in vitro. So then I looked in vivo to see do these morphologies come out in vivo. So again, this is in that very dense neural tissue, and you can see outlined in green and pink the growth cones at the distal tip, as well as the dendritic bridges. So this allowed me to develop my model of dendrite self-avoidance or dendrite development, where you have growth cones that have multiple bifurcations at acute angles in contrast to dendritic bridges that project at orthogonal angles, and as well the growth cones are at the distal tips, whereas the bridges are more proximal. But all of the static analysis is limited. So what it can't tell you are the temporal dynamics. So how are these morphologies changing throughout development, and if you track these morphologies throughout development, what is their role in leading to that final morphology? So to answer this question, I'm using time-lapse imaging so I can follow these morphological events in real-time. And what I'm going to show you is one experiment, an example of one experiment. So this is a P4 starburst amocrine cell, and I'll just play it through. So I hope you can appreciate here how much remodeling is occurring within the neuron. And although there are points that are being extensively remodeled, there are points that are stabilized, that I hypothesize will become the primary branches that are stabilized. So just to show you some frames within that video, there was a growth cone at a distal tip, and the time course of these growth cones is approximately an hour. And this is in contrast to the bridges, where they have much faster temporal dynamics. So in dark green are the invariant branches that I hypothesize will be stabilized. And in light green are the very transient and rapid dynamics of these dendrite bridges. And this video will loop one time. So you can see this is a 15-minute time step, and although the green branches aren't extensively remodeled, the dendrite bridges are extensively remodeled. So everything I've shown you up until here has been very qualitative. So this leads me to my hypothesis adding to my model of dendrite development, the time courses, and as well the role and development where growth cones are responsible for radial outgrowth, whereas the bridges are responsible for dendritic spacing. So the question here is, everything I've been told you has been qualitative features, and typically you scroll through stacks and a graduate student pulls out features and tries to quantify them at relatively low ends. So how can you use computational methods analysis to extract quantitative features from these time-lapse volumes? So typically if you're trying to extract morphological features, you start with the neuron trace. So what I'm showing you here is that same experiment, and then this neuron trace. And neuron traces are the most widely used open source file format for these neuron traces is the SWC file. But one main caveat in doing specific types of analysis is that SWC files are a ball and stick representation of your neuron tree. But the main assumption here is that each individual node within the tree cannot have more than one parent. So because of this assumption you cannot directly encode closed loop structures. So how do you get around this problem? So the challenge here is you need to create faithful neuron traces and when you have very complex cells that are early in development that are near diffraction limited, how are you able to create and validate these neuron traces? And then once you have these nodes of really complex neurons, upwards of a thousand nodes, how are you able to link these nodes through time in order to follow their development going into that fourth dimension? And these morphologies are known to contain closed loop structures. So if your file type can't even encode the morphology you're looking for, how can you answer your questions? So the solution that I'm proposing and I'm working on currently is an analysis pipeline that's using various open source and what will soon become an open source program, the dynamo program that's still in development, to address these problems. So using Vaw3D to create automatic traces of every time point and then 3D registration with Dynamo and importing the output of Dynamo into Python so you can extract your geometrically defined features. So the acute angles or the orthogonal projections. So the pipeline starts with this is created with Vaw3D. This is a three dimensional visualization of one of my experiments. And you can take this as just one time point and input that into Vaw3D. And this is an example of Vaw3D has many features. But one of the dropdowns it has is all of these neuron tracing algorithms and a lot of them are developed by third parties. It's not all of the Vaw3D team. But this trace that I'm going to show you which was the output of the Vaw3D tracing was created by Vaw3D's own algorithm here. So you have a neuron trace and it's an SWC file that can't contain closed loop structures. And as well all of these nodes are not linked through time. So this is my way of visualizing that you have all of these nodes which are supposed to be the same neuron developing through time. So how do you link all of these nodes? And with my neurons specifically there's about 800 to 1200 nodes and all of those nodes are connected by segments. So with Dynamo. Dynamo is a program that came out a MATLAB version about 10 years ago I think but new efforts have been going into converting their MATLAB version into a Python open source version. And I'm currently working with a student in Kurt Haas' lab at UBC to get the specific feature of Dynamo although it does tracing as well. They're auto registration. So the ability to follow these nodes and track the development of these morphologies through time. So then once I have my nodes linked through time then I can export this and what I'm showing you here is what all of these 2D projection of these nodes look like in Python. And then in Python I can I have my geometrically defined features and then I can extract them and in that way analyze the whole arbor at once. This is very much ongoing. It will be the next 2 years with my PhD. So what I've told you is that static analysis can't give you the whole picture. Timelapse imaging can reveal dynamic features that are relevant in development and one of the things that it revealed is that these closed loop structures are relevant especially during development but the data structures that are open source and often used don't have the ability to accurately encode these morphologies possibly obscuring these biological phenomena and biasing our interpretation. So what I'm really looking for is an open source file format that's able to accurately represent these morphologies these early in development morphologies i.e. the closed loops and my current workaround which isn't a direct solution is to build this pipeline starting with ball 3D dynamo for the auto registration and then Python. And I just want to say that I'm giving a poster so in this brief talk about my model of dendrite self-avoidance in development our lab also works with a set of molecules exploring this really interesting idea of neuron identity so if you want to come check out my poster I can give you sort of a broader depth of this model of self-avoidance everything from the molecular up to circuit so 2 or 3 cell circuit level Thank you How automated is the process of neuron tracing? Like if you wanted to trace a single neuron ever development about how much time would that take manually?  For an experiment with 10 to 30 time points probably 10 seconds per time point How much time, totally manually? Manually? Yeah Like 3 undergrads a week probably Thanks Yeah, typically these are not traces like you have to get at your ground truth so that's one of the things how do you validate automatic traces and typically it starts with a manual reconstruction which tends to be a team of summer undergraduate students Which file formats didn't work? I imagine it's been a while since I looked at some of the 3D branching ones but I'd imagine that you know explicitly support closed loop that you could just interpret 2 points in a branch having the same coordinates as being closed Yeah, so that's eventually, yeah, so that's definitely what I will do in Python Yeah, but it's definitely a problem within encoding these structures and for me I'm specifically looking for closed loop structures because I previously developed my hypothesis of branching where you're doing an automatic trace and you're looking at something else and it will automatically miss these contact points So you mentioned that the cross links space the dendrites as they go out so is there some relationship between the number of cross links and where they are between the dendrites because if they're producing some sort of tension you couldn't have sort of 2 on one side and 1 on the other otherwise everything would get messed up So my hypothesis, that's something that I want to investigate in my analysis is where do these bridges occur on the dendrite as well as relative to other bridges I see them proximally closer to the SOMA and less so at the distal edges but that's definitely something that I'm interested in figuring out