Raleigh, outside City Council on January 27th, and we're invited to come give public comment and talk about how this matters to them. So, yeah, thanks for your time, and we hope to see you either at Pleasure Free Library at 6 p.m. on Tuesday 21st, or at 6 p.m. in front of City Hall on 27th. Good night, good evening, good evening, good night. I just, I guess, event announcement for this weekend for children and families at the Echo Center, and the 20th of this month is NLP Day, and the Echo Center is hosting an event that starts around 10 and ends around 5. There is a podcast that will be hosted through a lot of different organizations. I myself represent Family Farm as a collaborative artist. So, this is an in-force event to know if there's anything to do with family, children, and family related at the Echo Center on January 20th, 2020. Happy New Year, guys. My name is Solveye O'Hillie, and I am on the Public Works Commission as a volunteer, and I just wanted to let everybody know that the Public Works Commission is on its way to Wednesday, which is next Wednesday. And if anybody's interested in what the Public Works Department does, and what the Public Works Commission does, I have a handout, a one-page handout, that I should bring up later in the morning. And so, those of you that might be interested in what the Public Works Department does and what the Public Works Commission is all about, I can give you a handout that can answer any questions. And you're welcome to come to the meetings Wednesdays, Thursdays, Wednesdays, which is next Wednesday. All right, any other announcements, questions, comments, suggestions that I forgot to mention, but everyone's been doing a pretty good job with the mics today, is a little bit of microphone etiquette, microphone usage, is, we usually will hand you the microphones turned on, but if they're not turned on, there's just a little switch here that you can turn off, turn on. When you're speaking into a microphone, it's really best to hold it directly in front of your mouth. You want to hold it like a wrapper, pretty close to your mouth is like a good way to do it. I would like to give you a little bit of a timeframe I mentioned earlier that we have some extra funding available, $2,500 for each board, that means total there's 5,000, but each board gets to decide 2,500 what they want to do with it and how we're going to try to do this process is we would like you to submit an application by February 1st. You can either turn it into an NPA Steering Committee member or you can email it to us, our email is on the paper here. It's also on our website. If you Google board 2 and 3 Burlington NPA, it will come up. And what you're thinking of doing is that at the next NPA meeting, the people who have applied will do a presentation about their project that they would like funding for and then we will vote on it in March. And we also will be figuring out what to do with the extra funds which could go towards buying some more AP equipment for our meetings or going towards food donations to cover any more expenses or we need any more kitchen equipment. And so the next step on our agenda is the city councillors, Max Tracy, Brian Pine, and Perry Freeman. The annual city election, I just want to make sure folks know, March 3rd, it is 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and some of us stand there for 12 hours straight, maybe a little break, we'll see. So please come and say hello and participate, at least that way, hopefully more. We're going to just touch on a couple of the ballot questions that you'll be seeing on the ballot for this election. I will just try to speak to one of them and Max and Perry can help do the other. I should confess I'm going to leave earlier than normal because my son is leaving to go back to college and I told him I would spend some time with him tonight, so I just have to confess. The Housing Trust Fund is a locally, we basically agreed to tax ourselves about 30 years ago and it was a pretty narrow vote, it was actually about 200 votes in favor on, well, the margin was about 200 votes citywide. But we added a penny to the tax rate in 1989. And to sort of try and get through the technical reasons for this, I'll just say, over time that tax rate has decreased from a penny because it is, by our charter, cannot go up with inflation. That's just a simple way to describe what's happening. But we're basically going to restore that to a full penny and lock it in going forward that it will grow as inflation grows so that therefore more revenue comes into that housing trust fund. And you might ask, what exactly is a housing trust fund? It's a local pot of money that is used to create permanently affordable homes for low-income people. It has to, by ordinance, it has to serve at least 20, I think 20 or 25 percent must go to people that are very low-income, below 30 percent of median. So I can't do the math right here, but I'll just say that that's reaching folks that normally need some sort of ongoing rental assistance to be able to afford their rent. And then for home ownership, the target is more in the 50 percent of median income area. So it's Habitat and Champlain Housing Trust homes receive the fault of the money. So some of the money also goes to COTS to run the way station and also run something called the Housing Resource Center. And a little bit goes to Homeshare, Vermont, to be able to provide home shares for people who I would say are maybe overhoused, who want to add someone to their home and there's a home share relationship. That's over-simplifying the relationship, but that's really what Homeshare does. So that's how the money gets used. I think it's really something that we have to support because the federal government has retreated and this started 30 years ago because the federal government turned its back on poor people, especially funding for affordable housing at the federal level was shrinking rapidly. And this was an attempt at the local level to try and make up for some of that. It doesn't come anywhere close to the considerable dollars it used to flow with cities like Burlington, but it is a local way to help to alleviate a piece of the housing crisis for so many folks. And you might know this, but it's working out that half the renters in Burlington, roughly around half, are still what we call rent burden. They're still paying more for their rent than the federal guidelines suggest they should. So that's where rent burden comes in. Unfortunately, about a third are severely rent burdened, which means they're paying more than half their income for rent. So this continues to be an incredibly challenging issue. And the housing cost of this one tool we have available to address it and try and ameliorate what I think is largely a market failure that will never, without some intervention from the public sector, we're not closing that gap. Yeah, should we stop and take questions on that, or should we just do them all? Questions on that? Yeah. Have they decided for language? Microphone, please. The question is, has the language actually been defined? It probably hasn't. I think we did improve language. I will defer to, I don't have the language in front of me, but it will hopefully be in a way that people can read it and pretty easily understand what it says. So the way that it works is that we hold a number of public hearings in January about this part of our change process. At those, the public is welcome to provide feedback, and we are able to make changes to what's being proposed based on what the public provides to us. After that time and later this month, we do adopt what's called the short form language. It is that easy to understand language, but there is, at each polling place, the full actual text of it available, so you can bring it with you in the voting booth if you haven't had a chance to read over it prior to town meeting day, and get a chance to look at any of these questions in full. They're also, you know, all available on the city website prior to that. And if you have questions about it, we can certainly... Yeah, that's a good point, and we do have a final public hearing on these ballot questions on January 27th. It's 7 p.m. at City Council, where we will take comments and questions and try to answer folks, and if we need to make adjustments to make them, to fine-tune them, we will do that at that point. By the way, petitions for anyone who wants to run for any office or do on that day as well, the 27th. And then there will be a final annual meeting ballot item meeting where we basically, again, go over what the ballot questions are on the 26th of February, Contest Auditorium at 5 p.m. on that day. There's other hands back there. Look, you know what I mean. So just for the clear numbers, I have the clear numbers from the housing for the, the penny for affordable housing, and I think this really needs to be clear for people. And I think in this war, in this NPA meeting, people get it, but I went to another NPA meeting and people didn't. But just to be clear what the numbers are for your taxes going up for this, to be very clear, if your house is worth $230,000, your taxes are going to go up $12.42 a year for the affordable housing trust. If your house is worth $439,000, it's going to go up $43.  So we're not talking a big amount of money, but I just want, I want anyone who's doing this to make those figures. And those figures were presented at the, what was the thing that the mayor did in September, the housing summit. So they were very clearly presented in those numbers. So I think it's really important because the wording is probably not going to be simple, that that gets across for whoever is doing that, that it's that simple. Any other questions? Okay, so we move on to the next question that will be on the ballot in March. And that's a change to the availability of the local ballot. We talked about this a little bit last time, but basically for the elections where there's a state and a local ballot available, kind of where it doesn't happen all that often happens in like primary years, like the federal ballot or a state ballot, and then you also have a city ballot. The way that it works currently is that you have, the state ballot needs to be available 45 days before the election, whereas the local ballot needs to be available about 28 days before the election. And so what happens is that if someone requests a ballot as an absentee prior to that before the city ballot is ready, what happens is that they get sent a federal ballot first, they fill it out and they send that in, but then they also get sent a city ballot after the ballot. And so what happens is that a lot of times people are confused. They'll forget to send back the city ballot. They'll think they've already voted. They think they don't want to vote twice or something like that. And so what'll end up happening is that we see just different rates of response between people who have requested in terms of the federal ballot versus the state ballot. So what this change would allow us to do is to essentially push back, would push back the availability of the city ballot so that that would be available at the same time, would have to be available already essentially earlier in the process, that 45-day time period, so that we could then be able to send both ballots all the time at the same time for folks who requested them. So that's that particular change. Is that going to mean that we have less signatures on additional users who are running for city broadcast? So in the... Yes, it wouldn't. It wouldn't in a sense, but it wouldn't go into effect until the following year, so you know that in advance, but it wouldn't move it out because, for instance, like Brian said, the date is now the 27th. So it's like end of this month for a time period which takes place first Tuesday at March. This is a back earlier. About two weeks earlier, yeah. A little bit more than that, but, yeah. Can you send the petition signatures for ballot items? Yeah, petition signatures for ballot items as well as elected officials too. Max, I'm not on school board, but last time someone mentioned the school board and how that could be a problem, did you look into that? Yeah, so we're still working with the city attorney to understand the ramifications of that issue. The city attorney is going to have to provide feedback on that and if in fact we do find that, that's where that provision, where the public hearing comes into play. So if we do find that there is a conflict where we really wouldn't be able to accommodate the need for the school budget, we would be able to make that change. We can also still decide to not include these on the ballot in the end, but that would essentially be something that we do still need to make absolutely certain because that was something that was mentioned after we had gone through committee deliberations and it hadn't come up and thankfully it was raised. So hopefully we'll be able to figure that aspect of it out. Just to explain what that meant is I think the schools need time because the tax department at the state level notifies the school districts what their common level of appraisal is and stuff that really affects what the tax rate will be and they get that usually in January. They get it solely that this will present challenges unless that changes, so that process would need to change at the state level in order to help municipalities. And just so I'm clear, this will be the case. The date will be the same whether or not there is. It'll be the same every year. It won't depend on the election. It won't depend on what election it is. Thank you. Do we have an idea of how much? We have an idea of how much voting will go up due to this. We talked in 5% increase of ballots of people voting, but the city... I think it was more than that in terms of people who sent in their state ballots versus their city ballots. I can't remember the exact percentage but it was certainly high. Statistically significant. I don't know the exact percentage. Anything else on that one? The non-citizen voting and local elections. This allows for a certain group of non-citizens so that would be people who have permanent residents who have a great card. I think there were some questions last time around or a chart of change put around concerns that this would create a list, a separate list of people that that was addressed by the ACLU of micro-justice who inform us that those lists of course already exist and these folks are already sort of known to government agencies already. That would give... expand voting rights to people with green cards and permanent residents. I'm sorry, I'm a little hoarse. I'm under the weather. Were there any questions on that? The wording of our ballot for this is it similar to what might be on the ballot than would you speak to other communities that are considering this? I mean just to avoid confusion statewide or does it even matter? Yeah, I think it's going to be pretty similar in terms of the short form language but I think the verdict that we settled on in terms of how to refer to folks who would be eligible was something along the lines of resident non-citizens or I think that was sort of permanent resident non-citizens was sort of the language that was there to allow any confusion that people might have and it's just important that folks are really clear about that with people that were just giving good information to voters because this did come up a couple of years ago and it was voted down and I think one of the reasons that it was voted down was because of this information is to say that anybody would be able to vote in people not really feeling like that was the case. So I think it would be really clear what is and isn't taking place here with this just so that folks are really speaking about what actually is on the ballot. Any other questions about non-citizen voting in local elections? I'll ask again who we have percentages for people who are currently not voting that we expected to see if this proposal is passed. It's always hard to say how many people will actually turn out but I think the number of folks who would qualify to vote was in the thousands and it was several thousand permanent resident non-citizens who would be eligible to vote which I think would be a great thing to just get them involved and further involved in our local elections I think a lot of folks already are but they just don't have that additional opportunity to come and go around town looking at it so I'd really like for them to be able to at least have that option. Am I on that? So then does this ballot also have I just have to read it but I could ask you does it have any kind of funding to help kind of make people who are resident non-citizens aware that they can vote and be perchant to vote as well as it sounds like it would be a little more work at the poll to some people to get all the ballots to some people to just get the local ballot. Yeah so we have to pass so the charter change process really speaks to the amending the document that is essentially the constitution of the city of Berlin so the way that that works is that we have to have a public vote in the affirmative and the majority of voters say similar that they are in favor of this charter change then what happens is that it goes to Montpelier where the legislature has to vote on it and then the governor actually has to sign that authority because the charter is essentially the authority granted to our municipality giving us rights to do certain things as a city in the context of the state of Vermont and so we have to have such a permission from them to do that so there is this other step of that so should that get through then we would be able to take those next steps about sort of the logistics and how we get the word out how we would manage it in terms of this but Montpelier is moving forward with it legislative council at the state level wrote a long brief on how this is in fact constitutional so it is something that other communities have done and have been able to figure out so I think we should have passed and should the legislature and the governor sign it we will be able to figure it out and get this in place hopefully for next community day we do have the benefit then too of everyone running for office is going to tell everyone they need that this is the case the number of houses in this board they knock on doors where people can't participate yet they have legal residency they have a document that allows them to it is significant it is pretty surprising how many people and they often just say you probably want to talk to me because I can't vote for you but I can't vote here so we will be educating folks in that manner as well as organizations in the community that can certainly help AOP and others interact with folks what organizations did you work with before proposing this amendment or whatever it is called did you work with AOP or did you ask folks if they wanted to vote or talk to the new immigrant communities or folks involved in that who specifically did you talk to I know Brian you have knocked on doors and you have talked to people in your post specifically in the polling community but who did you talk to did you talk to AOP did you make those connections so this was brought by Councilor Roof so I'm not sure who Councilor Roof has been working with on this I have to follow back up with him on it at the committee level the concern that we heard was around sort of persecution and wanting to make sure that we were opening folks up to that so we reached out to the ACLU and Justice on those issues but we can certainly circle back to any other groups that you think would be valuable certainly ALB but any of us would be happy to reach out and just give them that but I'm not sure who Councilor Roof with prior to bringing this and my good Justice response was that it could go expanded further that was their stance that they were very supportive and that they would support it even going further because it seems like ALB is right upstairs there's organizations that could be consulted who work specifically with immigrant populations to talk about to talk about the wording of this or how it affects the actual folks who will be voting that I think really needs to or needed to be talked about but people needed to be a lot of people needed to be consulted maybe that's just a slight concern of mine that that could have been consulted about what they want to do those individuals wanted to do as voting and I can certainly share that also with Councilor Roof that you know do some of that as well so the last item that we have I'll assume unless there's more on that particular issue expanding voter rights to others is the public safety increase to this public safety tax and that is basically police and fire have a specific tax on this bill that is public safety and the fire department essentially advocated for another ambulance in the New North End there is no ambulance it takes the ambulance from station 2 which is on the corner of North Avenue and Strong Street in the recent North End and 80% of the calls to the fire department from that part of Burlington are ambulance related so you can't just buy the ambulance and hope that there's people to staff it you need to actually buy the ambulance and staff it and so the staffing is included in this request so it's 3 cents Mr. Mayor we'll probably speak to this but I think it's 3 cents for every $100 property value of the amount of tax so there will be more information about how that will impact the average or the median value of home in Burlington but it's about taking the numbers and listening to it earlier and since it's versus any anything that we need to talk about we're not only here talking about it we have time for about 3 questions if anyone has questions hey guys I asked you this last time you guys can go again so talking about the net zero Burlington and the climate crisis resolution that you guys passed what's on your mind for the next couple of months what's on your to-do list here how should I do this there are probably activities that are in the works at various levels right now but the one that I've personally done some research on that Burlington Electric also has spent a fair amount of time looking at is how to close the gap for the property owner that you have to make conversions and improvements to their building whether it be weatherization or fuel switching or in small renewables and the idea of tariff on bill financing which is a technical way to use the utility bill to pay back an expense that the utility itself incurs they basically use their access to capital they pay for the improvements and you would be paying the utility through your bill we don't have it in Vermont it's not actually enabled so it needs to get through some work at the state level but that's the closing the financing gap to make that conversion to clean energy for property owners another thing is that we saw on Monday at Monday's council meeting we had a resolution that came out of the transportation committee which is one of the committees that I'm on and what that resolution asked for was really assessing the cost of providing the parking resources that we provide in the city of Burlington to really understand and to more broadly understand the cost really the degree to which we're subsidizing driving in the city of Burlington to really understand how much that costs us to provide those resources with an eye towards hopefully what we understand what those costs are thinking about other ways that we can fund different modes of transportation basically wanting to make sure that folks who are using different, using those roads are paying their fare share because there's a huge difference in the amount of money for instance that we spend on a car infrastructure and supporting cars versus walking, biking and transit and so I think that that's an important conversation so what this resolution will do is that you'll get us that information back in March I see this as part of a much broader conversation about really needing to move forward on on our transportation system one specific thing that I think we'll be seeing in the next couple of months is we'll come to ahead is the North Winooski corridor study which will which is looked at the entire length of the North Winooski corridor so all the community health center in our part of town all the way down through the south end through downtown and into the south end we have the final meeting of that committee coming up at the end of this month on the 28th and then after that it should be it'll come to the transportation committee of the city council for further review the vote for the full city council coming in February what that plan is looking at doing is essentially adding in additional bike and pedestrian resources along the corridor there's a current alternative that would essentially put bike lanes in both directions throughout the entirety of the corridor really getting us that bike facility throughout so in the all north end section that means we're moving parking I have the bike lane going both directions in the downtown section going from four to three lane convert four lanes to three lanes so turn lane with bike lanes on the other side and then we move into the south end which already has those two-way bike lanes going on so there's a little bit less disruption there getting what we already have going on but that's a really active conversation it's something that we're going to be discussing at the committee level council level over the coming months and I think that we look back at things like plan DTWR bike this was the vision that was set for revolutionizing or becoming a world class city for walking and biking Northwood used to be the crucial keystone street for revolutionizing that system and for really creating that added safety, that added benefit that allows us to really get more people riding and feeling comfortable riding and wanting to ride throughout our city so that's one of the big things that we have from a climate perspective is when we look at our climate goals we continue to see year over year that vehicle miles travel go up when we need to be we know that we need to be drawing those miles down so I think this is a crucial conversation for us when it comes to these climate issues in terms of having a network I view it as we either have more for new skis as part of that as part of that network or we really don't have a network I think so I think it's crucial to follow those conversations can I speak to the climate question as well I appreciate the information in the project that you just mentioned I just have a lot of concerns that we're sort of creating a lot of piecemeal solutions and moving at a snail's pace sorry I'm really under the weather I'm glad that I made it here tonight I'm probably going to leave them to this but I just have a lot of concern and I think it's been hard for me as someone who came from Labour Organising and Climate Organising to move into this role and have so much that comes that is not related to climate I mean we've discussed things that are not the climate for good reason there are a lot of issues that need to be addressed but one of my thoughts when I ran was after attending so many public meetings and council meetings and NPAs we actually talked about this huge emergency that we are in and how sort of piecemeal we are moving and slowly we are moving to address the problem and I think part of that when I think about it is this idea that I'm not sure that in our collective conscience we have really understood that we actually have to change everything truly and all of us need to change everything and I think it needs not just elected leaders and leaders in our community doing as much as they can to move this conversation along and put policy in place but it means all of us really taking that on and not to push it on individuals because this is a collective change but the level of movement and action that needs to have is immense and I really want to implore that and just continue to have that sort of call to action in that way and to really for all of us to wake up in the morning thinking about this and to think about it throughout our day and to go to bed thinking about it and think about all the things that we do every day that are just not sustainable. The way that we are living is not sustainable I don't know if people have been following and of course it's been going on in Australia and we are living in a crisis and so I'm interested in seeing change that is real change. I believe that we can't change without changing and I'd like to see how my capacity can affect that as well but I do have concerns that there's a lot of that movement is slow right now and that we need a lot more and can see. So I'm glad I really believe in the change that needs to happen to UCAV and some of the other things that have been mentioned around transportation and rail management and fair free transit and heating district and reducing our emissions but we need to reduce consumption and I think that we need to really move quicker and be all of us getting our hands into this and thinking about it as a justice movement and thinking about how this is affecting also the labour movement and working people that's my response so I know we have more questions and yours will be the last question or the next round I'm going back to I feel like after what Perry said because it's a really important beautiful thing that I'm getting back to kind of simulated insignificant details but one of the things I remember hearing someplace and I don't know if Perth said it or somebody else was that 80% of the drivers and residents and if so how does this impact that or is there a percentage that we know about I'm sorry can you repeat the question so in terms of looking at the study that the city council passed for looking at how much parking costs and then how we change that and how we adjust and use our resources in a different way I think it's something like a huge percentage of the drivers and parkers in Burlington are not Burlington residents and so it's and I'm wondering how you were thinking about that residents versus non-residents I mean I think it's definitely one of those things where we need to create some balance there I think that one of the things is that I think we need to pay attention to that for sure I think that one of the things that especially when we use this a lot of short trips by people who really are able to walk and could walk and those kinds of things so I think that that's really trying to that's really one of the easier areas but I think we definitely need to make sure we balance that for you know the commuters as well as folks who are coming from further away I think that they're one of the things that we discussed in the past is sort of this notion of parking rides so there have been conversations, there's one that I remember having a while ago about creating sort of a slip lane on the B-9 and working with the Sheridan to have some sort of parking garage and sort of intercept facility where people basically were coming from out of town would be able to be caught and basically bust them in and that was that concept a while ago but there may be other solutions like that where we would be able to accommodate folks like that without having to really to really impact the residents as well but I think the reality is that we really are to kind of change everything around that sort of car culture and that car center that we have and really ask some of these questions, at least ask the questions, get the information really open our eyes to the true costs and the things that we're doing and how much subsidy we're really putting into these things. Thank you. Amanda, I think what you're remembering is that 73% of all the people who are employed in Burlington do not have a room and most of them come here every day, find themselves and... Do any of our city councillors have any last things they would like to address before we wrap up and then maybe like two or three minutes? I just wanted to mention quickly that last night, the public safety committee that I would check, I remember last night for the first time since March so it was my first time as a councillor we discussed and I have it here with me the sheltering on public lands, outreach to remove policy and procedures, I don't know has been following this, there was a complaint suit to the city around that possessions that had been thrown out by city workers from someone who was sheltering on public lands and that the ACLU and the city has been in negotiations for a long time about what to do about if encampments people are being asked what sort of all the regulations around posting when in the amount of time that people are going to be asleep and whether it's on lands that are prohibited or not prohibited so I could give you a lot longer but I don't want to keep you too long but there's been some sort of agreement around that and then also the church street marketplace commission came to talk about some of their concerns around the behaviors on church street which I actually had a lot of concerns around the language that brings you on that I think in September they passed a few things regarding like banning furniture maybe sleeping which they don't have the actual ultimate authority to do and I think it would have to go through ordinance committee those are things that I have concerns about I don't, that's not the direction that I think we should be going in as a city and I would like to talk about the appointment of Chief Jenner from Morrison but I think that we're probably pretty low on time so I can, but maybe next time just one thing that I want to announce for folks I'm not going to get into the issue but we do have a meeting coming up on the 16th at the Riverside apartments in the community room of our Riverside Avenue to discuss the Amtrak where the Amtrak will be overrated so if you're interested in learning more about Amtrak coming to Burlington and what that might be for the old war event or just our city in general I encourage you to attend us at 6 p.m. on January 16th in the community room at the Riverside apartments Thank you Thank you to our city councillors, Max Tracy Brine Brine Mayor Whiteburner We'll be back with you Thank you It's not a turn off This is not a I'm sorry It's to be back with you and I will try to not be redundant with my remarks over what the councillors just covered I do want to continue I'll start with the discussion that Perry was on about the work that the city is doing with respect to the climate emergency and I think this scenario where at some level I was happy to sign the climate emergency resolutions that fully agree with this sense of climate emergency and that we need to be doing an enormous amount about it I think I have some different perspectives on how we're doing I think that there is an optimistic vision out there that we can get to and that it's important to understand that if we're going to realize it and I think we should be proud of what Burlington has done over decades and what we are currently doing and I guess a third kind of meta point that I'll give some details I still have some perspective that this is a marathon, not a spring and what I mean by that in part is what the direction we have committed ourselves to in 2019 was one of the big achievements of 2019 as we release the net zero energy city plan which I still believe is the most ambitious local climate initiative of any in the country that a municipality or a local region has put out and one of the things I find exciting about it is it lays out a path to getting to essentially decarbonize Burlington in a little more than a decade that does require us to do some things differently it does envision more biking and walking and that's why those infrastructure projects and that extra reference I'm very much supportive of them it does I think kind of relate to that require us to use our land in different ways which is why we have these major initiatives going through the city council right now that would densify Burlington, that would create more living opportunities in Burlington so that people are living here where there's good bike and walk infrastructure where they can be in multifamily houses that don't consume anywhere near the amounts of energy that single family homes often the excerpts do and we need to do a lot of that and we are working on it also though what I find exciting about the BED plan is that it envisions a decarbonized Burlington where that feels very achievable to me and it shows us converting over our cars people still own cars into this mission it will just be electric cars instead of gas burning cars that are fully recharged with Burlington's 100% renewable energy a threshold we got to in 2014 instead of burning natural gas or oil or wood for the heating of our homes people could be using ground source heat pumps that are the energy involved in that it's electrically generated that's not so realistic on a residential scale always so there are now these cold climate heat pumps which are a technology that's getting better and better and more viable in more and more scenarios so to me it's a very exciting thing to think that instead of some of these very apocalyptic scenarios out there that it's just so overwhelming and it's hard to understand how we could possibly this is a roadmap that says we can get to the decarbonized future we need to and basically afford it there's not some incredible austerity that's needed and there's not some incredible expense so I think that's exciting we're going to keep working towards it we've got a bunch of things coming into the city council a little months ahead I'll give you a further update next time we're back about the homework beside it there not going to hit all the all items unless you have questions about it but the housing trust fund I want to make sure I appreciate your list of questions about the numbers let me make sure that although the numbers I think are modest for most property owners the cumulative impact of those numbers is significant we will go from having a couple hundred thousand dollars a year locally generated for affordable housing initiatives to over the next couple of years that figure will rise to more than 500,000 so it is a more than doubling of the local resources that are dedicated for addressing our most acute housing challenges and this is money that I think will allow us to do more with respect to fighting homelessness problems it will allow us to be very minimal when opportunities come up like there was a couple years ago people may remember there was a moment that looked like the Farrington mobile home park was going to be sold to the private market and there was a real risk to the people living there the city was able to use this housing trust fund to help them move quickly to what they have today which is a resident co-op where the residents control the future of that community the housing trust fund it was mostly the residents who got that done the housing trust fund played a key role to give us more of that type of flexibility and I fully support it and we'll be out there campaigning for it I think there's a little bit of reference to the public safety possible increase in public safety tax I just want to make sure it's clear what that's about we have two ambulances today that serve the entire city we've had that for about 20 years before that there was just one ambulance we're at the point now where those two ambulances are basically as busy as the one ambulance was years ago the number of calls for a variety of reasons some population growth aging in the population changes in the way people just changes in the way people use the system we get busier and busier every year every year the calls go up we're basically at the point now where the city is going to continue the very responsive high quality ambulance services that we provide today and we're going to have to add a third 30 ambulance and that's what this book will be about the exact financial impact where we are still Brian is ready to let me reference now it's still just a proposal now by the end of the month the city council with the administration will be finalizing that and then that will go on about so next month we'll be able to speak more specifically about that we I'm going to try to be quick here so if there is some time for questions and answers I know there's been a lot going on I'm going to put it mildly I'm happy to answer questions about that and people want to make sure everyone knows that we have started the effort to find a new permanent police chief I think we're very fortunate to have an interim police chief a woman who worked with was part of the BPD for 23 years rose to become Burlington's first female deputy chief back in 2013 she left us for five years to be the chief of the Colchester police department and then she retired she's come out of retirement quite remarkably responding to the need and the call that we had here and is serving for 4 to 6 months Jennifer Morrison you didn't see that having that she will not, she's made it really clear she doesn't intend to apply for permanent chief positions so we're going to be searching for a new permanent chief we have started that process this city council this week that laid out the process we envisioned it's quite similar to the one that we followed back in 2015 the first step of that is now we will with the police commission be having a public meeting soliciting input from everybody about what qualities and characters skills, what you're hoping to see in the next Burlington chief of police and then we'll go from there and this will be as community engaged processes like the last time where more than 50 members of the community were really to look directly significantly involved in the solicitation of the police chief we're going to try to replicate something like that we think it's going to take probably 4 to 6 months so it will be an extended process I want to talk a little bit about accessory blood it's kind of a wonky dry term but this is a really important issue and it's one that is in front of the city council right now we have a work session we have a Monday on it and this is this issue that again I think this is important for the climate emergency this is like how do we create more homes for people living in walkable, bikeable, Burlington versus out in the summers it's also sometimes we've had debates here back and forth about whether the city is doing enough to support renters and I see this issue as a renter issue and it's being seen that way around the country and other parts of the state there have been renters rights renter protection movements that have gotten behind California and let me explain what I mean about it and make sure we're all understanding again it's a little bit technical ADUs are accessory these are second homes that are built on the lot of a single family home so usually it's done as a sometimes it happens as a basement home or some an addition to the main house off the back of a house or perhaps you know people call them creating flats right like these little apartments above a garage or a little cottage in the backyard these have been talked about for a long time it's an affordable housing solution because there are ways to create a city like Burlington especially thousands of additional homes helping us address our housing supply channels thousands of affordable homes these tend to be smaller units that rent at prices that even without some of your regulation are on the more affordable end the state actually passed a law back in the 1990s saying this had to be legal throughout the state unfortunately even though it is technically legal in our ordinance very very few of these have been built just a handful and the reason comes down to our rules that even though technically these units are legal there are parking requirements and a lot of coverage requirements and sprinkler requirements and home ownership requirements that together are a bunch of barriers that get in the way of these being built we are trying to eliminate the barriers that we can there and we've got a pretty significant reform that is in front of the council came out of the housing summits this summer and one of the barriers that I think should be removed it's not currently been removed in the draft before the council but I think it should be moved is the home ownership requirement why do I say that removing that would be pro-rector well for one like literally what this says is if you are a renter it is illegal for you to live in this home under certain scenarios it's hard to imagine something that's sort of more directly anti-renter than that it's also anti-renter in the sense that because this is a barrier that keeps these from being built in the first place there are just far less of these opportunities for renters than there would be if we got our regulations right so if we're going to have a debate about this if this makes sense to you, if you care about this the council needs to hear from you I think it's really unclear which way this is going and there will be a vote on that either the 21st or probably the 27th this month take some questions we have maybe time for maybe two or three questions if anyone has questions maybe two if they're wrong are you planning on doing anything about the sidewalks on both Champlain street so both sides are impassable for winter are impassable in the winter? because of how bad shape they're in or because of the way in which they're making their cloud what bad shape they're in and in the winter cloud there are certain areas that dip that melt and turn into solid ice solid ice so when we're planning or rallying through the snow banks I mean there are areas of the city with decent sidewalks the old more than does not have them I agree there are areas of the city there are streets in the city that have decent sidewalks there are unfortunately way too many areas throughout the city that don't I will look in Barber to know specifically and see where that is in the kind of prioritization system hopefully people are aware that for three years in a row now we've just completed our third year of replacing about 300% the amount of sidewalks than we have on a historic basis the sustainable infrastructure bond that the city supported back in 2016 has allowed now to change the trajectory of our sidewalk maintenance which was headed the wrong way for a long time we've only been replacing about one mile of sidewalk a year we have something like 129 miles of sidewalk sidewalks don't last 129 years you need to be on a much more frequent cycle than that and that's what the sustainable infrastructure bond has allowed us to do we've worked pretty closely with the city council and we're mostly on and we're committed to continuing that high much higher than kind of the past level of funding but we've got to keep holding it out here and I'm not another way of questioning I don't know exactly the condition you're talking about but I hope and we try to be quite deliberate about it's not a political process by which the sidewalks get chosen there is an empirical rating system there are sort of computer measurements done as well as sort of use analysis to try to make sure since we are in such a deficit that we put the money where we'll have its greatest impact we got much more work to do here I acknowledge that I guess I'm just saying walking is a priority sign walks need to be fixed can we have a question back here one more thing about the sidewalks that people should know since we can't replace all the sidewalk since it is a huge financial impediment to do as much replacement as we need to another thing that has started in recent years and maybe you'll notice that if you were already aware of it we use a diamond blade now to slice down sidewalks and level them out as much as we can if we're not in a position to replace it yet and sometimes that addresses lips that develop another aliveness so we're trying to take this in a couple of directions and I know Perry well I'm with the city councilors and you were better to answer this question but maybe everybody can so I was just wondering about the public safety tax and another ambulance which I just want more information so we have two for the Burlington Fire Department but then how does that interact with like UVM rescues ambulances and medical centers ambulances and private ambulances and then I'm also wondering it seems like so that's three times the amount of the affordable housing and I'm wondering what else is the ambulance and full times DAF how are does insurance get billed as UVM definitely does does Burlington Fire Department bill for their ambulance services and why is it so expensive yeah great questions man so yes if you call 901 if you call for an you know an ambulance in Burlington the city fire department tries to respond to 100% of those calls that is that's essentially the goal of the standard it's the way we can best ensure rapid and high quality care when the two ambulances are busy then we do have these mutual aid agreements that result in usually the UVM ambulance is the next ambulance that responds but they have and that is a staff like students or you know really quite committed students in a certain area it's broader than just Burlington though so sometimes they're busy as well in which case sometimes the ambulance ends up coming from some distance from Colchester or South Burlington or elsewhere the the concern is that if you're relying basically that happens at least once a day right now that it's some kind of mutual aid call there is a concern that if we become overly relying on mutual aid that at times will not be able to provide the the wait times to evolve dramatically even if they aren't going up dramatically on average if you have occasionally one that just takes an exceedingly long time that can be a matter of life or death for that is really what the rationalization comes down to why is it so expensive is not totally intuitive either you know the reason it's so expensive is because it's not about physically the ambulance we actually already have a 30 ambulance it's sort of a spare ambulance that sits out so that's not the expense about here it's it's the fact that we have we will basically need three shifts of the ambulance workers we have three different shifts two people staff each ambulance so that's six new firefighter DMTs if we need to hire one thing we've learned in the hard way is that if you need to actually hire more than that because you're in a situation where you have to bring in someone else on overtime every time someone goes on vacation or as a baby you just sends overtime costs through the roof and burn out staff so essentially the expense of this proposal is hiring nine new firefighters it is a more than 10% increase in the total size of the department and it's expensive and the expense is way outpace the limited reimbursements that we get for there are some fees that are paid but they're limited the cost is much higher and we'll have that broken out you know I don't have as we get a little closer to both we'll put out more detail back to you that's it I'm going to speak for myself when you come here you talk about affordable housing you get into the weeds and my eyes please as you said earlier homework assignment if you came to us like hey we have a great program it's a volunteer program we're going to give tax incentives to landlords to keep affordable housing we're going to give them big accolades you can come up like hey I'm working with EVM to take some of their endowment and refocus it on neighborhoods that are really simple programs and you are passionate and I do believe you but I don't think I'm a homeowner so I have a different opinion but most of the people I know who are renters they don't see that you are as passionate about it because the market is super tight and the rent is too bad it's still so if you give us more tangible rather than getting in the weeds rent control is super complicated that may happen but it's like 20 years from now how about there was a ton of really great ideas tiny houses are one of them it's a royal pain in the neck to hook up a tiny house in Berlin and it's still it's a total misery you could do that but there's millions of dollars really tiny projects that you could be like done we nailed it we nailed it I just feel like you're giving these massive totally petty political technical rock stuff and you're not missing all the little granular details of what actually if not contributed keeping affordable housing affordable but it would actually increase the affordable housing I appreciate the feedback Pastor Ken I've spent 20 years working pretty much my whole professional career has been working in housing I'd like to think although it's caught what we're talking about here is pretty close we're basically saying can we remove the barriers that keep these small tiny cottages or little apartments or garages from being built this is an ordinance that would do it and I think people hear from you that if somebody want done it's got a good chance of passage but it's hanging there's some political unpopular elements to it as well so but I hear your point and I might future future housing talks to try to try to keep this direction again alright thank you so much mayor next up we have our house director Kurt McCormick Jill Krawinsky, Celine Colbert and Brian Cina just making sure we're coordinated up here good evening everyone we're excited to be here we're in the first week of the legislative session I'm representing Jill Krawinsky I'm the president we were thinking today that it might be helpful to give you our reactions to the governor's state of the state address that happened this afternoon so I'm trying to remain a positive person despite what's happening in this country right now so I'm going to start off with what I thought was positive and then I will give you my response to my concerns about what was not in his speech or what he did not talk enough about one thing that the governor spoke about today and both House Speaker Mitzi Johnson and Senate President Tim Ash talked about is the importance of us being models and civility because of the rhetoric that's happening in Washington right now we are starting to see some of that seep into some of the dialogue in communities and at the state house and that's not okay so we want to make sure that we are studying a good example by not name calling by not using not calling people for acts but really being role model so I think that is a good thing that everyone is agreeing that we want to really set a good model moving forward one of the things the governor mentioned in his speech today is the importance and what he will put in his budget around after school programs or expanding opportunities which is something that I think we all agree on we did really great work last session increasing and investing in affordable childcare and workforce development and we haven't seen exactly how much and what he's thinking of in terms of scope but I think we all can agree that having options for kids after school and during the summer when they are not in school is one of the best preventative and supportive measures that we can do for our kids so I think that is a great investment to see what the governor is going to put forward in his budget around that some of the takeaways sitting from where I was on the floor listening to the governor today is that he was very very short on climate action and I know you'll hear more about this from my colleagues but all he really talked about is how we can do more when it comes to electronic vehicles and how great it is that we see some new EVs like 150s and formal stains and Holy Davidson's but the reality is they all use more money and we're not going to solve this problem with electric vehicles it's going to take a lot more than that and I'm excited about the work that we're planning around a climate energy or a climate prevention climate action package I've heard it so many different ways but I think that we have a really good package of bills that we all support and are working on to get across the finish line to the governor's desk what we heard from him today in that speech is that he's not going to be interested in backing a lot of the work that we're doing so I'm flagging that as a big problem and something that we're going to have a lot of work to do or he also talked about how he wants to make Vermont more affordable for families but yet I didn't hear any concrete for proposals or work that we've been doing that really does that so raising the minimum weight would be one creating a statewide paid family and medical leave insurance program he made a contract with the Vermont state employees association that created a deal that state employees would get access to a paid family leave program and then everyone else in the state could buy in so what's interesting right now for everyone to know is that if we don't pass a paid family leave program or we pass it and he vetoes it and we don't override it that plan goes into place so state employees have access to a program and people have it's voluntary to go in I think that's a bad way to approach this and it should be available to everyone and I think it makes the program stronger if everyone is in if we do pass it then the state employees will get we'll all get the same package and a more generous package and then the state employees will get a bonus on top of that so it was really interesting to see this new dynamic at play so there will be some sort of at this point some plan in place I think we all have opinions about which ones better than the other but I really think ours is important to have everyone in to have more weeks for people and including medical and the last thing I'll say is that there was no point in his speech that he talked about and reflected on the problems happening in our department of corrections and what happened at the women's prison in South Burlington that deeply concerns me because that is a problem and we cannot tolerate what's happening there and to hear him not mention that at all I just think it's a problem and it's a priority for us Thank you Jill to everyone's speech today when it came to transportation he acknowledged clearly that MIT was a little hot he stated that half of our CO2 emissions now are from transportation it's actually 45% but that was a good saturation but it's going to be too similar just a year or two ago it was 43% so it's climbing not descending and you all heard the TCR transportation climate initiative he did not express support but even though members of his administration have been working on it as have the legislature mainly perform the climate solutions of CO2 so I'm going to mention a few things and I think you've heard me say these things before but these are things that he didn't even mention Jill was right when it came to climate and transportation we talked about the electrification of Harlow Davison's Corvette Stingley I don't know I must say and I think they're a lot bigger than they were when I was young and then there's something else so I'm the chair of the transportation committee really for the following reasons to move more resources and do more for transit and that you have to speak to her why did she make me chair and that's more of those two reasons and so that's what I try to do every day of my committee it's just being a lot more difficult with the government's speech because it's very hard we're going to try and we're going to do it and most of these areas it's a lot easier when the government recommends them and maybe we advance them and we increase them and when we recommend no expansion of transit then we have to do it that's a little more difficult and therefore somewhat less likely we last year we had the administration do these studies and I know Brian's first it was on the committee that I used to be on artificial intelligence he had to settle for a study idea I remember telling him that's how things move here oh it was a task force we'll recommend it a commission but anyway this is now advancing and taking the next steps now thanks to that we have to take that first step so we have to do a transit ridership expansion study how do we expand transit ridership as you know mainly buses when we say rail so the study is good and it makes a number of good recommendations and I don't know if we're going to see them recommended by the governor those recommendations are education trying to remove the stigma for young people in transit I've heard recently a horrible name from the North Avenue bus to the high school this is true around the country and it's got to stop it's got to be considered cool if you're going on a bus not what how it's considered now and then we need to more so that people know where buses are don't know if they're late they're waiting for a bus to be dismissed things like that so these are recommendations in the governor's study we told them to do a study they selected the consultants and oversaw the contract and these are the results of that study expand service and seriously expand it and that takes money getting today that we know more money and fare free which we talked about before fare free actually works even better in urban areas but when I say urban, I mean Burma and I'm the inner of Chittlin County and fare free actually gets more riderships it gets more riders it gets even more 40% more in a place like Brompton however the study indicates that in other places you may have heard of Kansas City in Missouri at this point you may have heard of an entire transit system that's Kansas City and we'll see how that goes it hasn't even started yet but one time problem of that 40% it's not all new riders it's not all people that used to be in a car now they're on the bus unfortunately that includes people who just arrived with us in war you take the bus sometimes sometimes you watch oh now it's free I'll take the bus every time so there's that and then there's some people who make trips that were never made at all so instead of staying home they just went somewhere on the bus because it's free people like me love things that are free you just do it otherwise you wouldn't so I wanted to mention one more thing we certainly didn't mention this and it was touched on by a couple people tonight including Patrick I've signed on a bill signed the bill it might be tomorrow to authorize any city or town in the state to have them control now I know some affordable housing advocates have problems with that control I think it's all I was done and I'm trying to make it as local as possible that is create the authority for a town a city like Burlington to do it and a city of Burlington to decide what for capital D thank you are you looking for cosponsors for a bill or did you get it everybody this what happens when you support rent control it's okay it's okay it's on the record he didn't ask me so I was doing some research to make sure I was fact checking before I speak alright so when the governor gives his speech I've learned that it's best if I take notes to like process my emotions and express myself in a healthy way and usually it's more than one page and then you get it this is all we've got this time so it wasn't as bad as in the past we'll say that so speech was pretty minimal so did everyone hear his speech was interrupted by climate protesters yeah so there's a digger article you should check out what I will say is that I thought the governor handled it well he sat there and waited and the sign language interpreter which was kind of cool and then they started repeating themselves and then that's when people were like okay we heard this already what's unfortunate is that after both the governor and the speaker have asked us to be more civil that there were certain members and former members teasing the protesters as they were dragged out of the room so you might want to check out the video on the digger article which was disappointing and also telling especially people who accuse others of being bullies and then you watch now we've got them on video showing you what we deal with all the time when there aren't tears but that being said I'm going to be positive what I do is I write down quotes of these things the governor says and then I go meet with his liaison and I say remember when he said this I have an idea about how we could do that and so I plan to do that again so I'll share with you what those things are he said we need sustainable economic growth and policy that's truly equitable so yes it sounds really good and he also said we can be protecting the environment he said protecting the environment can be done in ways that strengthen our economy so I plan to meet with his legislative liaison and talk with her about the regenerative economy though which I spoke with you all about last time in length so I'm not going to give you the full explanation again but when we talk about having expressed concerns about uneven economic growth around the state and about how some counties have more economic activity than others and at some counties the real estates are more valuable than others so I think one way to solve that is to have regional peoples assemblies where people in regions identify the strengths and challenges of their counties and then create plans to hand the state so the state can make a world about where we look at how do we integrate our economy in a way that is equitable and is that making sure that every region is flourishing and so that's a way I think we could do it that would both create economic equity and social equity because not only are we looking at how we distribute resources but also we're engaging people on the ground level all over the state and the decisions that affect their lives so I'm curious what they'll say to that so and then one other thing I'll say because I want to make sure there's time for Representative Colburn is he talked about Iceland and he talked about how successful Iceland has been which I was loving does anyone know how socialist Iceland is so how Iceland is this model and how in Iceland the Iceland model they were able to turn the tide on substance use and I did some fact checking that youth in Iceland had one of the highest rates of substance abuse problems in the world and by implementing this new model they were able to totally turn that around and so what is the model? Well what it is there's different pieces and the main piece of it is giving kids things to do that are healthy like lots of things to do that are healthy there's other pieces so he's proposing a universal after school program which is great every child and youth in the state had access to some kind of after school program and they didn't have to pay for it so families in need could access it and wealthy families could access it or they could get their kids fancy ski programs or whatever wealthy families do I don't know I don't know so someone could share that but the point is that it would be great if every child in the state could have access to high quality after school care but is that really the only reason Iceland is doing so well so I'm going to ask because as far as I know and I checked Iceland has universal health care maybe that's part of the equation and Iceland locked up all their bankers and took over the banking system and completely changed their economic system over the last 11 years which happens to coincide with all this smart policy around children and after school programs so I actually think what's going in in Iceland is a lot more complicated than universal after school but I'm glad the governor is looking to Iceland as a model and I support that and I would urge all Vermonters to advocate that the state of Vermont look at Iceland as a model for how we should move forward in addressing climate change and addressing social problems and addressing economic problems and we should also look at Norway when we're looking at reforming our correction system so I'm going to hand the mic over to Selina at that point but those are just some of the thoughts I had with this region I plan to talk with his liaison maybe a little less sassy and showy but I will share some of those ideas so I'll talk a little bit about I think we're probably at or over time now but you heard I think from all of us concern about the governor's lack of vision or agenda around climate and it was so striking to have half the galley filled with young people who are like clearly desperately concerned and worried for the future because business as usual is unacceptable and then to have the speak, resume and have the most business as usual climate platform put in front of us it was just unbelievable and so what I've heard in that platform was a lot of enthusiasm for the modest investments that we made last year in electric vehicles and charging stations that I supported in our significant but are nowhere near meeting the scale of what's been projected in terms of the number of vehicles we need to put on the road to meet our emissions targets. I've heard a lot of enthusiasm for marketplace solutions in terms of like cool status cars that can now be electrified so I guess maybe that's part of the solution I did hear support for efficiency, remonts transition to what we're calling an all fuels efficiency model so that was one positive thing that I heard but I also heard very clearly that the governor said he's not going to support regulation or accountability measures I read that as a reference to our global warming solutions act that will hold the state accountable and get us back on track with our goals and I heard him say that he would not support any initiative that caused money essentially that would raise any cost for remonters so I think that was a message about what some of us have been looking at and the transportation climate initiative which would be a regional cap and investment schema and I know there's concerns you know on the right and the left of the political spectrum about whether that would be too regressive and approach if fuel suppliers had to have higher cost than they passed on to consumers but I think any carbon pricing scheme is all in the details of how you constructed and as a progressive any carbon I support carbon pricing schemes that are progressively structured that can be used essentially to redistribute wealth to our low income, moderate income and rural remonters to fund a just transition and so we've heard the governor talking a lot about affordability and concern about remonters you know who would be that he was concerned about in terms of the climate crisis but we actually but then he's turning his back on an opportunity to actually get resources in the hands of the remonters who are most disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis and that's a huge mistake I think the most regressive thing we can do and the thing that will most disproportionately impact low income remonters moderate income remonters and rural income remonters is in action and the plan I heard from the governor today on climate was in action and that's unacceptable to me I'm going to fight it I just want to say one more thing about his speech there's lots of things I feel like I can say but he talked a lot about regional disparities in the state he talked actually a lot about Chippin County and how good we have it and then how difficult things are in rural parts of the state where there's demographic shifts, there's job loss and I don't need to I don't need to minimize the challenges that rural communities are facing but I think we need to shift that narrative that's the second or third time in the state of the state address that I've heard that narrative from him and we need to move away from thinking about geographic disparities between disparities in the state we have poverty in Chippin County you don't need me to tell you that we have an unacceptable poverty rate in Burlington we have an unacceptable poverty rate in words two and three in Burlington and all across the city and so we need to be looking at not just a modest increase to our minimum wage but getting the state to a truly livable wage as soon as humanly possible in my opinion we need to be looking at a paid family program that is comprehensive in the universal and those are the things that will help homeowners thrive in all corners of our state and that will help attract new homeowners to our state so I think we need to shift the narrative as progressives as Democrats away from this kind of pitting us against one another in terms of regional differences and really talk about economic justice Any questions? We can maybe take two or three questions and I just ask that you keep your question concise so that we can get in as many as possible and still get out of here at a reasonable hour Thank you all for such great talk, I really appreciate it I just want to thank you so enough for your leadership on the sexual criminalization bill, I was really excited to see that when I look up and I'm going to take your view of it and I'm just wondering if you can talk a little bit about what you're working on with that Sure, the governor didn't mention that in his speech today but we had an amazing hearing actually in my committee on that yesterday my committee chair is really supportive of this conversation there's two bills in play so I have introduced your bill some other policies that would fully decriminalize sex work in the state of Vermont so how that works is it just repeals what has historically been called our prostitution chapter of criminal code and then it leaves all of our sex trafficking laws intact so that covers anyone who has a minor is being pushed into performing sex work and anyone who's coerced for any reason into the sex work we have really strong trafficking laws in the state and part of this effort is about clearly delineating between adult consensual sex work that many of us believe should not be criminalized and coerced forced sex trafficking and I can tell you that even in my committee I've heard real confusion from law enforcement about the difference between those things and who they should be holding accountable in those situations so I've heard law enforcement men and say boy we hope you know Sarah George will let us charge prostitution so that when women are being forced to trade drugs for sex we can get them out of the situation by slapping them with criminal charges well that's sex trafficking that needs the definition of sex trafficking in the state and the person who should be you know the person who should be subject to criminal charges in that situation is not the person who's been coerced in his training sex work for drugs so there's a second bill and I think that's the bill that's probably more on the track to passage this session that mirrors what they did in California and it actually goes quite a bit further so it's essentially mirrors are what's sometimes called the Good Samaritan law that we passed in Vermont around overdoses and it says that if you are the victim of a crime any crime you can report it and seek assistance from law enforcement and you cannot be charged with prostitution as we call it in Vermont law and you also cannot be charged with drug possession at the histamine and lower felony levels and we're looking at adding some other provisions so it's a pretty broad immunity to protect some people in really vulnerable situations and then that bill also has a full study that would look more closely at the question of well it says modernizing Vermont's prostitution laws but would hopefully look much more closely at the question of decriminalization there's a lot of conceptual support from it but people really want to hear from sex workers here in Vermont about what would be most useful and how to move forward and so introducing this bill has been that I have started to hear from a lot of sex workers in Vermont and nationally and so if you or anyone you know has experiences to share I would really invite you to be in touch with me or put people in touch with me as we think about how to move this forward so I think probably what we'll see this year is a commitment to further study and conversation and then some pretty broad immunity for people and I appreciate the support and the question on that and I'm going to keep fighting for it here and then thank you for bringing up the transportation and climate initiative I was curious about that do you see any hope of that moving forward as long as Bill Scott is governor and if it did if we didn't sign on to the TCI would we possibly get some funding to improve transit for rural Vermont for example if we signed on to answer a little quickly then it would be handed over to Kurt if we signed on to TCI we would not possibly but definitely get funding for transit that's what the TCI funds have a pretty clear criteria and it's around re-investing transportation initiatives and infrastructure and all kinds of incentives so we would definitely get money back I think there's questions about how much the legislature can move forward without the governor I don't know how much you all have been looking at that the executive branch really started and organized the conversation on TCI we do I know Senator Ash drafted a bill on TCI participation and maybe they're one in your community as well so the TCI Transportation Climate Initiative is modeled very closely after the regional greenhouse gas initiative which believe it or not was put into place by Governor Jim Douglas and that's just our electricity and very briefly the concept of how it works is it's regional which is really great we don't have that problem with different prices of the fuel at the border buying and gas or something like that so regional is more closely to the impact we're talking about in TCI 13 states and 40 DC and that's one of those states in New York on Spencer Lane in New Jersey pick states Reggie the first one has been extremely successful we won't pay a little more on our electricity bills it's really small that's why we've probably never heard of this before and never noticed it and we get a lot as a matter of fact both Reggie and possibly in TCI we would be what you might call recipient states versus a donor state that is if they can ask the entire cost to us pumps you get an idea then looking at three different scenarios and it goes up to the smallest scenario which would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% that's the lowest one if we did that one and all the cost of the program that we're hitting not these numbers but the vendors of fossil fuels at a wholesale level it's only 22 to 24 entities so it's not even Vermont companies it's not the oil companies it's not it would be Vermont's investors they bring it up so if they passed all the cars through and in Reggie they did not maybe all of it now but they took a long time and they passed none of it through so we don't really know what's the worst case if they passed it all through and it would be 4 or 5 cents more a gallon of gas and that would raise let's take the 4 cents that would raise between 18 and 20 million bucks that doesn't really raise it Reggie raises it we would get back 18 to 20 million bucks just to follow these numbers if we just raised our gas banks right now that would raise it so we are likely to get back more money than Vermont would say kind of a no brainer but I appreciate that explanation and I feel like I don't get enough of that when I read the news a lot of times if I read a letter to the editor a newspaper for example they're going to attack us and they're going to tell us money but I don't hear enough about the money coming in and what that's going to go for and I think that would be an important message to get out there that actually will be determined by the legislature and I think if the governor does not do this we're going to try to make it the best legislation will happen hey guys so from what I've gathered you guys talking about Governor Phil Scott's speech today it sounds like there's still difficulties in collaboration between the House and him and there's a history of that I'm curious I'm not sure who of you want to take this I'm curious if things have improved if there's been improvement in that collaboration if there's any feeling of that between the legislature and the governor I would say that the relationship is great compared to where it is in other places across the country and that if the speaker of the pro-town wanted to sit down with the governor right away it would happen and the lines of communication are open I think our challenges are that when it comes to issues like climate change we're very far apart and my concern is when he comes to the table already with parameters to say I'm really interested in talking with you about this issue just know I'm not going to support anything that raises attacks we've got to come to the table and know that we're going to have to compromise and it's true that we have our guardrails on what we're willing to give up or whatever but I mean the long term cost of climate change and to just to put that barrier up or the way it's just not helpful it's not going to help our economy and if he's only looking at this through the eyes of the economy that strategy is not going to work and so I will say that you know when things get really tough I think that we are going to try to at least our chambers and where we are in the government are going to do all of our best work to come to the table and be civil and have that conversation but like I said when it comes to issues like if you need and then among wage and climate change we're just very far apart from where we are so we have work to do on that I would just add that in my first year which was his first year as governor I believe it wasn't his opening speech when he said to us I want you all to go I want all of your school boards to create a new budget and have a special election and cut money so it started out with raise taxes you're going to go back we're going to have a new election and completely you know cut your school systems I'm going to force a health plan on teachers and then you veto the budget and so the tone I got from this speech was different it was softer it was a more human appeal to us stories of Vermonters and their struggles which we can all relate with so the sense I got from this speech is that the problems that we're concerned about are the same and what we want in terms of like an outcome in a very broad sense is the same we want people to thrive and to be healthy and happy and we want fairness and equity but where I see some challenges and this is both in his speech and in dealing with the administration is that there's a philosophical difference that's very deep and for me just speaking as myself one of the fundamental problems of our way of living is that when we talk about the economy we don't take into the equation the full picture of the impact of cost on people and on the planet and until we do that we're going to fall short and I feel like that's totally missing from his narrative like on some fundamental level so my estimate is that it might be more peaceful hopefully but I don't know if we're going to see much progress with him and ultimately as nice as he might be we may need different people in the administration to really make the progress we need I think just really quickly a lot of his speech focused on values more than actions and a value he talked a lot about was the middle he kept talking about how we need to reclaim the middle and I get that of the political spectrum I think is what he meant and he talked a lot about compromise when we couldn't find consensus and that is part of the process but when the middle is climate inaction I just think like we have to stand out for what we believe in that's our job she has spoken such a joke do you have any last comments or I'll just say that in the word money MPA they asked last month for legislators to be a little more communicative so I wrote a really long two-part update and posted it on front porch form and you only not get it because the way we're chopped up but if anyone wants it we didn't get it I'm happy to send it to you and that's just my own update oh thank you and I'm speaking for myself in the sense that everyone would agree that I would like to hear your priorities I know we talk a lot about what we're working on and what we're interested in but even if we disagree I want to know and even if you're not in my like carved out gerrymandered district you know ultimately like we represent the people and that's really broad if I could just answer your question quickly shortly after the government speech today I went to his office and spoke to his DS on and told I'd like to speak to the government and I cannot just be five minutes and when I'm going to say to him and I've known him a long time I was lobbying for the Monbo Lincoln advocacy council when he first got into the senate and he said it today about 20 years ago he said so I guess that was 20 years ago I'm going to tell if you need any political cover whatever I can do if you sign on to TCR I'm going to say whatever you want to say I'll sign here everything your stance on issues are really really really important and calls that you can make if you do care deeply about climate change action pay family leave raising the minimum wage your call to the governor's office or your emails all of that does matter so let us know where you are on those issues let the governor know it's just really important because this is it we are an election year this is going to be the last session of this biennium and then after November we start all over and so this is our time and we are all very committed to getting these really critical issues across the finish line but if you care about them too we need your help and we're all in this together so thank you representatives and think about this this late