I thought, geez, how quickly you get kicked off these meetings. Look at that. Brian, welcome to the other side. Sorry. Just kidding, not yet. Councilor Paul, we're so glad to see you. Well, that's close. It's Pee in his four letters. I'll take anything. All right, do over. I mean, let's, I gotta pull it together or else the mayor's never gonna be able to go on his anniversary dinners again. So we should start the recording now. Exactly. Happy anniversary, Mayor Murrow and Stacey. And with that, I'm going to call to order the Board of Finance meeting at 5.07 PM. Is there a motion on the agenda? So moved. Thank you, Councilor Paul. Is there a second? President Tracy, all in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say nay. That motion carries. And as President Tracy noted, there is a sign up for public forum. Could you share with us who that is, President Tracy? All right, Kelly Devine. Excellent. CAO Shad, we also have a sign up from Gary Scott. Yes, I'm aware of that as well. Okay, I'm going to enable Kelly Devine, you to speak first and then Gary, you will be second. Okay, Kelly, I've enabled your microphone. Great, thank you so much, Catherine. Yeah, I just want to let the members of the council, city council here who are present, I spoke last night at the electric commission for BED and just recently came aware of the proposed electric rate increase also became aware about a week or so ago of the proposed water rate increase. And in addition, as many of you know, because it's been discussed certainly at the Board of Finance and many councilors have gotten outreach from constituents about possible increases in property taxes that will be coming as a result of the reappraisal. And we've done some analysis on the reappraisal numbers and it does look like, well, some of our commercial properties won't see an increase most will. And just want to remind the council that all of our commercial property owners pay an additional 20% over their appraised value. So if they get a 10% increase in their tax bill, it actually ends up ratcheting up to more when you add that extra 20% multiplier on. So I'm just really concerned about our small businesses that are trying to get back up and going. It's been an incredibly tough year as everybody knows, it's been an incredibly tough year for our entire community. We have people we know that aren't able even to pay rents right now. We have a lot of landlords in Burlington who have accepted little or no rents from their commercial customers this last year to help those people stay in business. And so it just generally feels like a lot, a heavy load to have three different possible increases in costs coming down. Following a year where many of our small businesses had 50% of their normal revenue levels, maybe even less. And most people did not have a profitable year and are just hanging on. I do really believe that our businesses across the city need to be able to come back strong for Burlington to be a vibrant community. And I was done in the New North End just this past week, went to the Bagel Cafe, they're doing takeout, but no indoor seating. I've been in a lot of places this last week watching downtown open and most places still are not able to operate at capacity. Bards and restaurants are not able to operate after 10 PM. So there's lots of restrictions that are making it very hard for our friends and neighbors who own and operate our local businesses. And I just, I asked the council to really ask some questions about these proposals. And if there's any way we can figure out a way to soften some of these increases, I think it would really help our entire community come back. It would help those that can't afford to pay rents. A lot of landlords haven't received any rents for a good part of last year. So economically, it's a very challenging time. And I just, it's hard to imagine that people are gonna be able to absorb costs that are going up in the face of a year where people just don't have a cushion. They really don't have one. And in almost all cases, not so much water, but most certainly electricity gets passed onto the tenant through the triple net. So just asking the counselors that are present to consider that as you review these budgets and work towards moving a vote on them. Thank you. Thank you. City Clerk Bovee, I neglected to ask you to put up a timer. I was keeping track and that was just at about three minutes. So I am going to make sure that you can share your screen and ask if you could set up a timer so that we can make sure that we're all sticking to three minutes. And Mr. Scott. Thank you. I want to take a moment to appreciate the tough 18 months we've had. We've all experienced through strong collaboration and leadership, the medical center in partnership with the city. The state of Vermont and our numerous community partners. We've made a difference. We've saved lives like the city of Burlington and so many others. The pandemic has caused significant financial uncertainty for the medical center. And we too are working to have a balanced budget for next year. I'm here today because the rate increase proposed by the Burlington Electric Department represents for us and unanticipated, but significant added costs. While we are working with the city of Burlington, I'm here to share a little bit of a little bit of the added cost. While we were informed early in the process that this could happen until last week, we did not know the exact figure for us which is expected to represent a significant cost increase. We're asking that the city find a way to use other funding sources to make Burlington Electric hold, so that a smaller, more manageable increase can be considered. We're in the same boat as the city, the state and other community partners and businesses. We too are reeling from last year and the uncertainty that lies ahead of us. We only just experienced a positive quarter which was in part due to the one time relief funds. We appreciate the partnership with the city and the strong communication we've had in place. However, with not receiving a specific number until last week, there isn't sufficient time for us to plan such a significant cost increase for the budget. We ask that the Board of Finance look at the relief funding for other sources to offset the cost of the increase. This seven and a half percent increase, this seven and a half percent increase is across the board. And we are confident that other institutions, businesses and other customers are in a similar boat as us. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any other members of the public who are wishing to speak? If you are here with us on Zoom, you can use the raise hand function. Okay, seeing none. We will close public forum and I am happy to introduce our first speakers on our last evening of budget conversations. And that is our friends at Burlington City Arts. Director Kraft and Assistant Director Katz have prepared a presentation for us. Who would like to share their screen? I can do that. Am I enabled? Nope, not quite. You are enabled. Take it away. As usual, please go ahead, Sarah, and we will save our questions until the end. Okay. We're not going to go through every single slide in our presentation because we recognize that it's a little long and instead want to make sure that you have have a copy of this for reading at your at your leisure for a little background info when you need it but I don't know if you want to start. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Sarah. Well, first of all, I have remembered from other years of presentation before city council that you there you're receiving so much information and for us to just repeat what you have in your packet just doesn't make sense. You have more time to go through this and so please feel free to call us at any time or email where available for any questions any and all. And so we thought we'd just take you through a couple of the highlights like what are the three most important things for you to think about BCA when you're looking at FY 22 budget. And I think one of the accomplishments that I feel stands out so significantly as I have worked with statewide partners. Over the last 16 months in a much deeper and greater way than we ever have is how much we were able to provide to the Burlington greater Burlington community during COVID. So many people now in the arts community and other sectors talk about coming out and bringing their people back and so forth and what I want to say to you is that we have, we have been there. We've had programs all through COVID our classes our camps, our extra programming with the school department murals in the city's great online virtual programming that had, you know, close to 10,000 viewers and participants and so right now the real challenge for BCA is in this next period we're bringing back all of the programs that are part of our events and festivals. So jazz is back festival of fools the brand new collaboration with REIB of Juneteenth. And there's a real challenge with our current staffing to be able to offer that program. One of the lessons that I think you'll hear from all departments is that in the future we're going to live in two worlds we're going to continue to live online because we understand how much greater accessibility that provided and people still love that and are going to want it, but then also being live and doing in person events is going to be a significant part of recovery, not just economic but emotional and social. So that those are going to bring significant new cost in programming to our departments. But it's exciting. It's truly exciting to have all of these things to share our events team are staffing up. And for those that we're going to kick off the summer. Very soon with the Discover Jazz program and then move through, as I said, a festival season, with of course the newest being City Hall Park and the programming there and for those of you who've had the pleasure of being downtown on one of the warm days. What an amazing opportunity to share that park with our community. So Sarah is going to talk a little bit about what that new driver to our budget means in relationship to City Hall Park. Yeah, so like Doreen said we're bringing back a lot of the events that were dormant during COVID. And so that's certainly adding adding to that that area of our budget significantly just to bring it back to where it was but we're also taking on a significant amount of new programming with City Hall Park. It's going to be activating the space in various levels of activity for five days a week, most of the summer. And that that new program really ripples across our budget so we see it in the events department specifically in the programming and in some additional staff temporary staff and a half time. New staff position well it's not it's a added existing staff position that is being increased to full time, we hope. And it's also, we're really at a point where we can't really take on new programming without acknowledging the impact on our marketing, our marketing activities and our fundraising activities, and we really need to start both spring that those areas of who we are to add those pieces to our budget. So, we've, we've included new revenues in this budget associated with City Hall Park. Sponsorships that we think are what's possible in a tough year coming out of COVID from the private sector. It's, it's asking for it's acknowledging a greater contribution from the general fund then we have had in the past for events and long term it will clearly need another funding source, in addition to our ongoing fundraising efforts. But I think that it's obviously something that we think is very important at this time as we're coming out of COVID all of our events and the park activities are going to be very important for our downtown and for helping to bring back that that sense of vitality that we all, we all think of in in Burlington, all throughout the city. And yeah, that's, that's the, that's one of the major drivers in this upcoming year. The important parts of embracing our whole community has been for us to look at everything we do with a new lens of racial equity and inclusion. We're not, we don't have a specific slide that speaks to this but it's really just to understand that every staff member when presenting budgets when designing new programs when putting an exhibition together. Those are considerations, and that is significantly changing and will change over the long term. And that's the kind of programming that we do. Juneteenth is a major new addition for the Burlington community. The collaboration with REIB is significant. It's hard, it's driving, it's exciting, it's incredible learning. Our programs take time to stand up and to learn how to do them well and to make sure that we are doing the kind of outreach so that every community member feels that there is something for them for them in this programming. Alongside this, and I'll be brief now, is we, as you know, are in the midst of a capital campaign to expand our programming at 405 Pine Street, where our studios are. We can look at that beautiful building and what it might look like in the future with those gorgeous solar arrays on the roof and outdoor sculpture park and a sort of a diaphanous inside outside feeling of even if you're not in that facility taking a class or a workshop or the many things that will make sure that there are activities on the outside of the building as well. And we are striving for a net zero plus facility. It's going to add some significant fundraising to our budget, but we are committed. We believe that it strongly embraces the city's climate action plan, which is very aggressive. And we are committed to making sure that we reach that goal through our fundraising and through our programming. We believe it there and open it for questions. And if you could just stop sharing. Thank you. Any questions for the BCA team. Yes, counselor pine. Thank you to what's your projection for how private support and private sort of sponsorship for BCA's efforts is going to fair as we sort of come out of the pandemic and what you, what's your forecast for that. We're statewide we're spending a lot of time talking about this because, as you know, some organizations have been completely shut down and the anxiety of how their health philanthropy will come back for them. Is it big unknown. We've tried to keep our relationships alive, active engaged through this. I think our funders will be there with us. But I think our funders are also embracing a community that has greater needs now. And so it's, it's a sense of hoping you can make the pie bigger and not have the divisions remain small. And I think that that's what we've found so far, but we also don't know what it's going to be like after after everyone feels like they're back two years so we know the next two years will have this slow build up. It's a little hard to predict that sort of post COVID environment. It's also a completely changed equity and inclusion environment. And I think we have to account for that like we're like running as fast as we can but also trying to make sure that our outreach and our embrace is is comprehensive. And that is just going to take time but back to your question about funding, you know, our balance with the city has always been somewhere around 40 to 60% that we raise about 60% of our budget. Some years it's a little different because council asks us to do different programs and when there's specifically city programs that there's no public fundraising in that. I think our request for additional funding right now makes a lot of sense, given, you know, and Sarah explained, as the community comes back, but I think we hope to get back to that balance in the long term. It's important for us I think that our donors need to feel like that the city provides the basics, and they're able to support the things that they love in the programming. That's helpful thank you. I think we're also very aware that in order to be successful and in advancing our development efforts we do need to make sure that we're we're staffed up in our development department, the more relationships we're managing which there's there's many, many new ones coming down down in this next year, the more support we need to make sure that they, that people are happy with their engagement. Great, thank you counts, President Tracy. Thanks for the presentation. It's great to hear about all the work that you're going to be doing in this next year. One of the things that I feel like has been pretty evident throughout this pandemic has been how hard artists and particularly performing artists have been hit by the pandemic on an economic level. And so I'm curious as to how you're seeing BCA interface with the local arts artists, local performing arts community but also just their community in general in terms of that providing opportunities and support coming out of the pandemic. And then as a part of that if there's any coordination between you all and the resource and recovery center, and the work that cars do that director on this row we I'm sorry is doing in that department, or in that area, and just wanting to understand what that kind of what that work looks like. I try. That's a lot of questions in one, and I'll just do my best and Sarah please jump in. So, we started out during COVID with immediately providing emergency grants to artists and that's artists that means visual performing spoken word, any, any type of artist and gave out over 80 grants up to $500. We created a resource center within BCA so that other statewide resources were made available and encouraged and, you know we supported helping people figure out how to get at those other funding sources. And now we're going to go into another round of that so we're going to be working with our partners statewide to make sure that all artists are aware and have accessibility to those funds. We continue to put as much money in artists pocket. Whether it's a visual artists or performing artists, musician, etc. over COVID. So any chance that we had to do that we did, I think I talked to that in the highlights of our accomplishment that we get close to $300,000 to musicians performing artists, painters teaching teaching artists this year. We hope that will increase significantly as we're able to open up our festivals and invite more people into our studios. So that those numbers will increase. I think there's a part of the arts community that's been particularly hit hard and those are small arts organization. Darren and I are going to be coming back to you in the summer and advocating for a significant chunk of that. ARPA $10 million that we do some re granting. We've been advocating on a state level for additional funding. We're working with Darren to look at how the ACCD is going to handle the next level level of ARPA funds and make sure that Burlington and Burlington artists and arts organizations have additional access to that fund. What was the last part of your question max. I think you answered it. I was really wanting to see what kind of coordination you've had with the RC. Yeah, we've definitely been talking quite a bit. And really see a lot of the performing arts programming that we're talking about City Hall Park Festival schools jazz festival and highlight as part of the recovery effort like getting artists back on their feet is just as important part of our mission as activating the downtown.  Absolutely. And I'm glad you're focusing on those smaller arts organizations I think one of my concerns coming out of the pandemic is that we'll see continued consolidation within the arts, and specifically the performing arts with a few holders kind of using the pandemic as a way to take to extend their kind of holdings and that to me doesn't feel like the greatest kind of way for Burlington to kind of move forward I think we're strongest when we have a wide variety of large and small organizations that have a huge impact on the institution. So I appreciate the focus on those smaller organizations that have, like, I think you're totally right have been really hard hit. So thank you for that. Yeah, and we were actually also fortunate to get our community fund grant budget restored for this, this current fiscal year so that we'll be able to start distributing grants actually in June. So thank you to all arts organizations and individual artists. We do need to get moving on. Is there a final question for BCA. Excellent. Thank you so much Doreen and Sarah, and happy birthday again Sarah. And thank you for your celebrations. Thank you and thank you for all your support Catherine and team during the budget preparation it's been wonderful. Thank you so much for saying that and especially to rich and his team but yes, we appreciate it. It's part of our job but it's not the most fun part so thanks for the kudos. I was trying to sneak in one last thing and I'll just say, of course, we probably should address the loss of North End Studios as far as performing space that Max was talking about with far smaller venues and neighborhood based places that I think we as a community are going to have to grapple with that loss of that space. So I just, I don't think it's a budget issue but just want to put it out there. Thank you. Thank you.  And next up. We have john vickery and talking about one of everyone's favorite topics as of late the city assessor's office. John, I am going to enable you. Thank you. There you go. Okay. So you're somewhere hold on. You'll just I thought I put it up, but I'm not seeing it. Oh wait, hold on. I got it. Thank you. And I think there's a way to expand it. Okay. Can everybody see this. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. Well, the Burlington assessor's office is still in the process of a citywide revaluation. And we are asking for to keep the same staff levels so that we can get through this final phase of our, the reappraisal. And there will be like any reappraisal, a large number of appeals moving forward to the, to the next level. And so we're want to maintain that level of, of support for our office. This screen is basically what we do. We do a lot of different things we value real estate of course, and business personal property. We hold property appeal hearings, and that's what we're doing right currently. And then there will be a pause and notices that will will send out and those folks and then folks will move to the next phase of the appeal process. And that'll be held this coming fiscal year. We conduct market analysis and very importantly, we also do a lot of work for the state education funding formula to determine our level of appraisal. Currently we're at 100% of market. That is our goal. That's the goal of the reappraisal. But we annually, we submit our sales to them, and they, we run studies for them, and it determines our state education funding formula. And of course we maintain a public database that we leave for the public to view. And our property database online for over 10 years now, and we try to provide as much information at our website as possible about what we do and our processes and how to appeal property values. Again, what I'm asking for is the there are two full time temporary appraisers with us. And we're asking to maintain that these two staff members for another year till we get through this process. And then we can move back to a more traditional staffing level that we have in the past. We have a group of city assessor, which is myself, a deputy assessor who appraises commercial properties and residential real estate images preparations for tax bills. An associate assessor that picks up most of the phone calls or the front line front desk and that person also is an appraiser with courses taken and does inspections. And a temporary part time person that comes in for a few months to assist with business personal property and year end stuff are what we do is very cyclical. And there are times of the year where it's, there's more deadlines, and it's in preparation of tax bills. The budget trends I guess we are asking to maintain the current staff levels. The cost of the two appraisers the commercial appraiser and the assistant residential appraiser is about 95,000 a year. And we receive over $105,000 each year from the Vermont State Tax Department. It's called that 60 funds. We do need another $5,000 for overtime work, because a lot of the hearings will be held and after hours in early evening. Our goals is to have a successful reappraisal project. And that is to allow a reasonable time for people to have their appeals to listen to them to gather information. And to sufficiently staff this higher volume of hearings that we know we're going to have and to complete them all by December 31 2021 at the end of the year. That's required by law. And then there, there will be a need for some consultant fees for more complex commercial properties. And that's in the budget as well. And then the last part is that we want the Vermont State Tax Department to pass this reappraisal. We conduct what they call a three prong test. And it is mostly a statistical testing package. And they run three dependent or separate tests. And they're an independent body. And I am certain that will pass, because we have run those same tests ahead of time. The budget expenses and revenues are again, keeping staff full. We do spend a little bit of money on operations. And there are revenues of approximately $105,000 annually from the state of Vermont, specific to reappraisal projects. We anticipate a high volume of appeals, which means that preparing for those. There's a lot of review. We create narrative reports, we make presentations, and we try to settle some of them that are we're able to settle. That is my presentation. And I'm happy to answer any questions if anyone has any questions. And thank you for your consideration. Thank you, John. And if you could just turn off screen sharing that makes it a little easier to moderate. Thank you. Thank you. Any questions for our assessor. We have asked him a lot recently. Yes, counselor carpenter. I think I mentioned this in an earlier conversation, but the fact that we waited 15 years for this appraisal is very problematic for me. And this is maybe not a this year's question, but I guess I'm just more rhetorically want to say that assessor victory I think we need a plan of how we can do assessing more frequently. I don't know how this all works, but I would say starting, you know, going into fiscal year 23, the city needs a plan for setting aside the funds we need for a pre appraisal. I don't have a real answer for that. In two or three years from now, four years, I don't know what the right answer is, but I guess my request is that during this year, once you catch your breath and get over this appraisal, that we start thinking of a plan for how we can do this more frequently on a rolling basis. And it just occurs to me that the city financially has got a plan for that. And it will be more cost if we do it more frequently. And I think this is something we have to build in our future budgeting to get to that goal. I guess that was more of a comment than a question but and I'm not sure if you agree or disagree with that but I just would ask that we start looking at that. I appreciate your comments and as we know reappraisals are expensive, especially when you do them once every 15 years. This appraisal was mandated by the state, and it was because we weren't met meeting measures of equity, and there's different multiple different types of measures of equity, but we were no longer meeting them. And then you think when the, when they send us the letter, it's still a two year process, because it takes time to convert the data and then to, to find the appropriate vendor to do the job and then it so it's a process. And so one thing that has changed with the state law is that one of the rules was that if we if the municipality falls below 80% of the level of appraisal to the market. Then we'd be mandated to do reappraisal they've changed that to 85 so that should shorten the timeframe, especially if we this market continues to move in the direction that it's going to move will be doing one in much shorter time I'm sure. I'm hopeful that this market will calm down a little bit and level off, and everyone will be able to breathe. I would welcome more frequent reappraisal I think that's better for equity, regarding how the markets change over time. So thank you. I had one more question, which isn't again really budget related but at in June or whatever you settle in after most of your adjustments. Will you be doing an analysis of the burden shift. Which everybody I've spoken to has insisted their taxes are going to go up. And if we look at revenue neutrality, somebody's got to be going down so, and we've had the conversation that there may be a bigger shift to residential, because commercial values are down so we'll be preparing for us some kind of overview of that, or can you. And I will. I've also put some information about residential manual on the website, so that people can read and understand a little bit more because I think there's questions around that. Yes, we'll have better answers. As we firm up the budget, where the tax rates going to really land. We're using the best information that we possibly can. And to understand the grand list change from what it was a month and a half ago to today to to several weeks from now, when things are resolved. So, then we can really break these things down maybe even graph them and work on that that piece. I think that's that's important. I'll tell you from my experience and from talking with others in this business is that it's not uncommon for there to be a shift from commercial to residential, just because of the fact that commercial properties values are driven by the revenues that they make, and it tends to be over time a little more modest than single family homes and that type of thing. So, you know, without the data in front of me, there's probably some shifting because of that. We will look for that report. John, any other questions. All right, seeing none. Thank you so much. John, we appreciate that. And next up, one of my very favorite people in the city city attorney Blackwood, who is so excited for her final budget presentation. Thank you. Make sure I can share my screen city attorney's budget. Our budget is very driven by personnel. Since that's what we do is we are people and do and do things. We are working at full staffing for for FY 22, which is really exciting to everyone in the city attorney's office, which is a full staffing means six attorneys, one paralegal a legal assistant and the public records person so the big changes you see, Jared, Helen is going to start on Monday and we are getting ready to go to the mayor with a candidate for the other assistant city attorney position. We are conducting interviews for the legal assistant position that Linda Blanchard held for 44 years before retiring a couple of weeks ago, forward. So we are general counsel for that for all city departments. We also hire conflict council, which means that if, for example, we are coming to you or to one of the commissions for a contested case, somebody's appealing the dial of a plumbing license as an example I give here. Then we hire outside council to represent that board because the city attorney's office has worked with the department. In addition, some of the specialty areas like electric utility regulation airport regulation. And some others we regularly have outside council handles those any insured claims are handled by council chosen by the insurance company and then we also have bond council that sits the court treasurer's office with funding issues. Here's a list of the outside legal firms that we used in FY 21. Most of these will look very familiar to those of you who've seen this in previous years. We, we have used a lot of the same firms partly that's because some of the matters have been continuing over that time. But don't kill Saunders for example does a lot of the environmental work they've been working on the Champlain Parkway for a long time, and are still working on that. And Jackman is our primary insurance defense council the travelers uses so they handle the vast majority of our litigation in our outside cases. There are a few cases where they've had some kind of conflict and one of the other firms has picked up the case. Ian still does substantial work for the city. In particular, Bill Ellis represents Burlington Electric Department and Joe McNeil does a fair amount of airport work for them. Susan go fill and handle some tax collection bankruptcy and miscellaneous matters that we don't have expertise for in our office. Jeremy Farkas still does a lot of our commercial real estate development. As you know Tim Samson from down track line has been working on the city place project recently. Paul Frank and Collins is bond council and we've also been using them for several Union arbitration matters that that we've been handling recently. Pete is a real estate attorney in South Burlington who did a lot of the airport real estate around the issues with the Kirby Cottages most recently in the last year. Primer and Primer Piper does our legal representation they also we retain them on a short term basis do some research on ARPA and how we could spend it that's the funding, the COVID funding bill from January. Our key functions and activities on each department has a primary legal support attorney. I give you a few examples there, we have specific projects or boards that have a primary legal support attorney or paralegal elections planning commission, for example, then we have, then we have some folks who have some specific tasks that have a primary legal support attorney or an assistant like parking ticket appeals of at least a handle. All city council motions and resolutions are prepared or reviewed by an attorney all city contracts are prepared to review by an attorney and all major employee discipline matters and discharge matters are reviewed by an attorney. So it's sort of a lot of our primary activities are expected internal projects and goals for 22 is settling in from the turnover in the department with two new assistants, new legal secretary and a new city attorney hopefully. We were have new brand new offices in city hall which we are trying to get settled into right now. We have been working since Sarah the guide Tano joined us on reorganizing and reviewing the city attorney's archives records we have like huge archives of records that are now in a, in a space back behind the women's bathroom in the city hall. We, with full staffing one of my key hopes is that they're going to be able to decrease individual workloads because people have been working really long hours and putting in a lot of a lot of time. We have, we continually are trying to review city ordinances and charter provisions for sections that need upgrading and removal and that's a project that I hope will continue further in into the future. We've also been working very hard on creating some standardized provisions and practices so we, we have a number of different contract forms that the city does with standard conditions, and we have set up a process to review those annually so that we can make sure that we're keeping the one of the big projects for FY 22 is going to be that all the union contracts need to be negotiated so that will be a big task, and then we are in the middle of a comprehensive review and revision of the personnel handbook with human resources department. It's already underway and way I'm hoping we get through the having a draft before I go I'm hoping that happens and that it will then be moving through the process of having input from other folks other than HR and legal starting in FY 22. And in terms of our budget. We wanted to build in some money into the salary so that the next city attorney can create a deputy city attorney position with by reclassifying one of the existing ACA positions, hopefully promoting someone from within. For that position. I think it's really critical to have somebody who's identified as the deputy and who takes on a little extra salary and a little a few extra duties within the office. The other primary increases are related to salary and benefits where we also want to make sure that we get people cell phones because well, you know and throughout this year as we've been at home all the attorneys views their personal phones, because we did not have funding for that. So, those are the major elements of our budget. And that's my presentation. Great questions for city attorney Blackwood. Yes, counselor Jen. Thank you. Thank you. I was wondering knowing that we use a lot of consultant, you know, when it comes to laws and regulation. Is there any discussion around having the enterprise, you know departments who have their own lawyers, instead of, you know, using your office for. Um, so, essentially, BED has Bill Ellis, who does, who does all of their utility work and they work with him. What we, one of the things that I mean partly your counselor Jen you're going to hear my opinion about this also is. Is that I think it was critical for both the airport and BED. When I came on board that we brought a lot of the work in house, because it brought those departments into similar practices and, and standardized contracts standardized issues. There are lots of, for example, bidders and contractors that that work at the airport that also work at DPW, etc. And our office was able to make sure that there was coordination on a lot of those things. But I think that's been really helpful what we are constantly looking at is the need that those and those departments. The city does an internal accounting so they pay in on the, on the revenue side to our department so that it's not that the general fund dollars are necessarily supporting them. And, and I, and we do use them so for example Joe McNeil has long been the negotiated contracts with the airlines so he continues to do a lot of that relationship for the airport. And we, a lot, another, another big set of issues is the environmental issues and, and don't feel Saunders has been working with the airport on those for a long time as well. Thank you. Other questions. As up. Yes, President Tracy was a follow up to that and I really appreciate that that question counselor Jane I think it's a good one is, you know, about the transition that we're about to have in the city. I think about these this this contracting that's taking place. What kinds of things do you think we should be looking for in our next city attorney to help us bring more of these to bring some of these functions and house or to just continue some of the work that you've been able to do in house because you know I think that you've probably got a very intimate knowledge of that and I just want to hopefully get a sense of what we should be looking for as we as we go based on what you've experienced. It'll be very because we've been down an attorney for a while where it'll be very interesting to see what happens with new folks coming in we also have a much better plate of some experience folks applying for these positions who are going to be able to in it a little bit more experience level and that will I think help the department be able to expand its reach into some areas that it right now, we just don't we don't quite have the knowledge and expertise. My sense always has been that one of the big areas that we need more in house assistance with is in the real estate world is with projects that CEDOS working on and the but that there's also a butt around that because it's very useful for us to have multiple outside counsel that we work with on those because then we get people who have done a lot of different kinds of deals in different areas. And that that that's helpful but that's one of the areas where we haven't had much expertise in house that we could use its heart we don't have enough like specified air, air, airport work for us to have someone who's a real specialist in in court law. And I think bill does a nice job with the utility but that is one that I had discussions with prior BED folks of prior directors, whether or not they wanted to bring an in house council that maybe it could be said at BED and do some other work as well for the city. Okay great well thank you so much for that that's that's very helpful. Excellent. Any final questions for the city attorney. Just for tonight, we still have a little over a month. Alright. Thank you so much, Eileen. And with that, prepare to be dazzled by Darren and his team as we talk about the electric company. Good evening. Thanks for that introduction Catherine appreciate it. Good evening Board of Finance, I am joined by several of my colleagues this evening. Paul Alexander, when you're casting Emily Stebbins wheel lock, my canary, James Gibbons and Cheryl Mitchell, all of whom have played an important role in putting together a very challenging f y 22 budget for us. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen we've prepared a presentation for you. Just a moment. Okay everybody can see the slides. Excellent. We're starting here really with the pandemic and the impacts that the pandemic has had on Burlington electrics, financials obviously it's been an incredibly challenging moment for the community for a number of our customers facing economic hardship. And here you can see that even prior to the pandemic we had a decline over a period of years in our sales to customers which is our primary revenue driver. We've had some customer losses that we expected some additions coming on that hadn't happened so we had a little bit of a trend of lower energy use over a period of years. You can see the coven impacts are actually now more than 2.1 million now that we've gotten our most current financials probably closer to 2.3 at this point, lower sales than what we had budgeted and f y 20 and 21, due to the pandemic. We have seen some uptick in residential energy use during the pandemic but a significant downturn and a sustained downturn in commercial use and commercial is a far bigger portion of our load than residential so for every single month during the pandemic our net sales have been down. And that continues today and we're projecting it to continue into fiscal year 22. Another impact of the pandemic is customer arrearages are up significantly. We currently have over 1.3 million and customer arrearages folks who have been behind on their bills. We suspended disconnections for non payment through the course of the pandemic, even when the public utility commission moratoriums had expired we've continued that policy all the way through to support our customers. The last month that we had normal arrearages pre pandemic arrearage levels. It's spiked towards November you can see it declined a little bit in December and January. That's because the state v cap program provided over 300,000 in support to help pay down those arrearages that program expired and now the arrearages are climbing higher again. I'm just with the board of finance over the past several years but it's important to note that we've done a lot of work to try to reduce the growth rate in controllable expenses. If you compare the period between fiscal year seven and fiscal year 2016, we had a 5.84% growth rate. The year 2016 through today it's been 3.55% and some of the reasons for that include a reorganization that we undertook in the fiscal year 16 timeframe that reduced our employee count from 133 to 120. We're currently at 118 so we're a little lower even today than we were then we also, as counselors may remember had done a blend and extend renegotiation of our contract with Sheffield wind in 2019 late 2019 that helped reduce our power supply costs and further contributed to this reduction in the growth rate of controllable expenses. So here we're starting with the FY 22 budget. Because of the COVID impacts the arrearages the lower sales and also reduced customer contributions for capital projects. We're starting fiscal year 22 approximately 5 million lower with cash on hand and we would have absent the COVID impacts which is a significant number for us. You can see the operating revenues are a bit higher than FY 21. That does include the proposed 7.5% rate increase that that was announced earlier this week and that the Electric Commission recommended to the board of finance and city council by a vote yesterday evening. That rate increase item is on the board of finance and city council agendas for the 24th for Monday. We are assuming some continued deterioration in sales relative to non COVID budgets. But we're hoping and assuming that there's some moderation in the COVID impacts as we enter FY 22 as the economy is reopening. We are seeing some increased revenue from our renewable energy credit markets participation operating expenses as you can see, still with the rate case significantly higher than revenues. The other point is that we are facing 1.5 million in increase for state and regional transmission costs that's a significant increase for us. We also are including here a more accurate forecasting for pension liability. We previously had had sort of an unbudgeted impact each year of over a million in pension liability that hadn't been accounted for in our budget so that's part of the increase here. The actual increase it's just the way we account for it, but it shows up in the higher operating expenses. And then we've done some forecasting to better allocate our labor relative to capital projects. We're also seeing increased depreciation. Since we made an advanced meter technology 10 years ago, those, those assets are seeing, you know, some depreciation as we move 10 years out. So net income for fiscal 22, even with the seven and a half percent rate case would be a little over 800,000, which is 1.1 million lower than what we had budgeted for an FY 21. So if we were to expect us to meet that FY 21 budget number, we're probably going to be lower than that in 21, and we would be at 808,000 in fiscal 22. That assumes as well that we're able to file the rate case by June 15, which would allow the first surcharges to show up on customer bills in August. The FY 22 budget assumes is that the surcharge for the seven and a half percent would show up in August. And then the PUC process would play out from there. And if it ends up being a different rate, ultimately than the seven and a half percent customers are credited on their bills. That's, that's how the PUC process works. Additional assumptions in this budget in the mayor's recommendation memo, we are assuming 1.3 million of ARPA funds could be utilized to help support a rearage assistance and pandemic relief. We understand that decision is obviously subject to council approval, but we've assumed it in the budget as it's part of the memo and it helps us to keep that rate number at 7.5 as opposed to a higher number so we are glad to make the case for that. We also for the first time in fiscal year 22 to help offset the impacts from this proposed rate increase are going to offer funding through a monthly bill credit to customers who are low income customers currently enrolled in the state fuel assistance program to offset the rate increase precisely on their bills during fiscal year 22. We project that could help up to 1300 customers, residential customers of ours who are at or below 185% of the federal poverty rate. Over the longer term, hopefully starting in fiscal year 23, we're pursuing a option for a low income rate that would provide discounted electric rate for low income customers. In this budget, net of customer contributions is 7.9 million, which is precisely the same as the FY 21 budget that does assume that we're able to fund a portion of our capital from a net zero energy revenue bond, which we plan to propose to the council and ultimately to the voters in the fall. And that net zero energy revenue bond is a step we would take that would help mitigate some future upward rate pressure by better aligning some of our expenditures with the revenues that come back from them. Just as an example, if we provide an incentive and somebody switches to a heat pump, for example, the revenues from that heat pump come back to us over a 12 or 15 year period. It makes sense to have a debt service model to help fund that incentive instead of spending all of the cash all in one year upfront. So the revenue bond could be useful in helping us mitigate future upward pressure. The credit ratings factors are here at the bottom. You can see that are even with the assumed rate case, our FY 22 number for the adjusted debt service coverage ratio is just slightly above the three year average and still below the metric that we would like to be at for the a rating for Moody's which is 1.5. On the other hand, days cash on hand which is a critical number for us. We always try to stay above 90 days in order to fund operations have a cushion and meet our a rating metric. This budget would deliver a 97 day days cash on hand, lower than our three year average but above the a rating metric. So those are some of the impacts, even with the rate case on our credit ratings metrics. Just some more detail on our capital budget as I mentioned it's basically identical to FY 21. It does assume that we are able to pursue that net zero energy revenue bond. It does equate to roughly 10% of our utility plant, just to give you a sense of how much investment is going in to the utility on an annual basis in capital. We would be funding things like an electric bucket truck with a state grant we can actually replace one of our bucket trucks at lower costs than typical, because of the state grant program. We're funding critical it upgrades for end of life systems, and we are funding our Velco equity investments and maintenance of our system. I'll pause I see a counselor pine had his hand up let me pause here. That's an error on my part. I'll continue. Notably, despite the challenging and lean budget that we're producing, we are continuing our progress with net zero energy, we will of course maintain 100% renewable electricity. We've committed to continue the green stimulus programs through calendar 21 and hope to continue them further pending some ability to utilize our efficiency funds for that purpose. We are funding the district energy phase three feasibility work that's ongoing. We are continuing with efforts to promote rebates for electrification and energy efficiency, and we are, we have a sustainability position that's been open previously that we are able to fund this year with revenues, mostly from the energy efficiency program which is a separate line item it's not from general operating. A good addition for our sustainability team. As we work on net zero energy progress in FY 22. I wanted to provide as well some detail. I'm happy to cover this again on Monday but I think it's critical that we provide some detail on the rate case. I do appreciate the public comments. We certainly heard as well at the commission. We do understand that this is a challenging moment to bring forward a rate case. It has been 12 years since our last rate increase, which was an 11.33% increase back in 2009. This gives you a sense of some of the increases over time starting in 1980. We've had a number of double digit increases during that time obviously that's not something we want to pursue at this point in time. From a regulatory analysis perspective we actually could justify a double digit rate case in FY 22, but balancing the impacts that that would have for our customers we're seeking a 7.5%, which we think is the minimum necessary to provide stable financial metrics for the utility and fund our operations in FY 22. So we can compare as PED's electricity to other prices, including inflation, including the rate of inflation in red. You can see our line in green at the bottom, even with the proposed increase. We are well below what we would have been had we just risen with the price of inflation over those 12 years. Residential rates for Burlington Electric, even after the proposed increase would remain far lower than the Vermont utility average or the New England utility average. About 11.5% lower, I believe, than the Vermont average. Our commercial industrial rates were far higher than the Vermont average after we had last raised rates in 2009. As you can see holding rates steady brought us a little bit under the Vermont average by 2019. With the proposed increase we would go slightly above the Vermont average still well below the New England average for commercial and industrial rates. And these just are our total cost to serve residential commercial industrial. Our rates would continue to be below the Vermont average and below the New England utility average. This shows you in blue our current rates and in green our proposed rates just summarizing some of the information from the previous slides as you can see even with the proposed increase for total rates and for residential rates we remain quite low relative to Vermont and the rest of the region. We're a little closer to mid tier when it comes to commercial and industrial rates. In terms of residential rates, we have an inclining block structure the first 100 kilowatt hours are less expensive than the additional kilowatt hours after. Here you can see the tail block which is all those kilowatt hours after 100. The blue line being our current rate and the green line being our proposed rate. You can see our residential tail block rate would remain lower than most of the other larger utilities in Vermont. And for the purposes of supporting electrification we noted where our EV rate is in a line on each of those on the blue and the green you can see the line in the middle shows where our EV rate would be considerably lower than than any tail block rate of any utility in Vermont. We do understand that to promote electrification it's important that we maintain low rates competitive rates to support customers who are switching from fossil fuel to renewable electricity. These are the bill impacts for all residential customers the average bill impact around $4 and 92 cents a month. For low moderate income customers our analysis shows it would be closer to $4 and 27 cents per month. And as we noted in the public announcement for our small general service customers which is our commercial the bulk of our commercial customers but not all of them. The bill impact would be closer to $6 and 60 cents per month. That's for about two thirds of our commercial customers on the small general service rate. And final slide here just summarizing the energy assistance program that we are planning to offer in FY 22 would offset that impact for low income customers at or below 185% of the federal poverty rate. If they are a participant in the Vermont state fuel assistance program. We do believe we can help potentially 1300 or more residential customers to see no impact from the rate case during FY 22, based on this program. And those are my slides I will exit the screen share here momentarily. And we'd welcome your questions. Yes. Thank you. Councillor Hanson. And then Councillor carpenter. Great. Thanks, Darren. One of the concerns I've been hearing from folks is just from customers just the amount of time that they've had to kind of adjust and adapt to the the new reality of these new rates. Can you kind of speak to that and what are some of the things that you've been hearing from the city council? Is this a public utility commission or is it a public utility commission? Is it a public utility commission at any time or is this typically how it's done? And if it was unusual, why? Or I guess even if it's normal, why is that if you could speak to that? Absolutely glad to speak to that. As a municipal utility, of course, we have to seek approval for a rate change from our electric commission, the board of finance, the city council and the public utility commission. And as we discussed, there's opportunities for intervention at that level. We sought to provide as much notice as we could to customers, even ahead of the electric commission meeting. The electric commission's had probably four meetings over the last two months with us to discuss the potential for a rate case and talk about the budget impacts. The number, the 7.5%, we were able to come to, but we had to figure out what state and federal relief we could count on what local funding might be available before we could put that number together to ensure it was as low as possible for our customers. We were working right up until last week, essentially, looking at what a rearage assistance might be available in the state budget that's pending in the legislature in the ARPA funds from the city. And we were able to make our final assumptions around those just really in the last week or two and put together the proposal for the 7.5% increase. Obviously we had a public meeting yesterday evening with the commission. We're having a public evening public meeting this evening and we'll have one again on Monday. We certainly welcome customer comment and feedback. But really this is the beginning of a lengthy process for the rate change. As I mentioned, if we were able to file June 15. The surcharge would take effect starting in August. So we're still several months away from that. And then at that point you're looking at several months, maybe till the end of the year, litigation process at the public utility commission, where the public service will review all of the rate change requests that we've made where public participation is possible and welcome. And we're ultimately the PUC will decide if our rates are just and reasonable under Vermont utility standards so really this this is really the beginning of a half year or more process to determine if this rate change is going to move forward. So we do have shared even more notice with the public, but given the pandemic impacts and how hard we were working right till the end to keep the rate change as low as possible. The notice we gave was the maximum we were able to. Okay. Great, thank you. And what exactly is the council's role in determining rates, like what authority do we have if say we just say the council disagreed with this rate change would we have the authority to to change it, I guess. So in order for us to file for the rate case we need approval to file with the public utility commission from the electric commission the board of finance and the city council. We've done quite a bit of work and I would I would want to be able to explain all the work that's gone into the rate change and the analysis and the implications of changing the request with the council, if the council was considering trying to recommend a different rate change going to the PUC. But my understanding and others can certainly weigh in is that the council and the board of finance would have to vote affirmatively for us to be able to advance that filing to the PUC. Okay, great, thanks. And then my other question is around just assistance for customers to help deal with the impact of this so I think you said the mayor's proposed budget already includes 1.3 million for that and then additionally you all are planning to have for people receiving fuel assistance they would also get relief as well and how well does that demographic correspond with low income customers in general. Yeah, so that that's exactly right on the mayor's budget the 1.3 million for a rearage assistance and pandemic relief is included. And in terms of the low income energy assistance program. We looked at various programs. Vermont gas and GMP both have a low income rate. No other utilities in Vermont have one that I'm aware of. We use different metrics. I believe the Vermont gas program is is at the 185% or below of federal poverty, which is similar to what we're proposing, which is also similar to the state fuel assistance program. I believe GMP may use a slightly different metric it might be 150% of federal poverty. So you might capture some fewer customers if you use that metric. That's the most generous metric that we had seen in practice for Vermont utilities and for the state fuel assistance program so you know 1300 residential customers. We have a little over 17,000 residential customers so that gives you a sense of how many folks we would be helping out of the total number of residential customers with that 185% of federal poverty rate metric. Great. Yeah, I mean, I, we've been having this conversation with the water rates as well and moving towards a structure that does differentiate by income, which I think is really good. So I'm glad to see that we're starting to do that on the electric on the electric side as well. But yeah, I think those are my questions for now. Thanks. Thank you. Excellent counselor carpenter. Thanks, I had similar questions that counselor has and so I won't ask again. Can you clarify when will customers see the rate increase. Right, so the first month where the surcharge would be active, if we file by June 15 would be the month of August. So August of 2021. So just to reiterate, that's under under Vermont utility law municipalities that run a utility like Burlington Electric, we can file and then have a surcharge show up on customer bills within 45 days. That is not the rate change, that's just a surcharge. We go through that month's long litigation process at the PUC, and ultimately they determine what the rate is and it could be a different number than the 7.5 and if it is a lower for example, there would be a bill credit on customer bills to cover the difference between the surcharge and the ultimate rate at that point in time. Can you understand this is an unusual year and a lot of the drivers were COVID and lack of use. But can you speak a little bit to the strategy of not raising rates for 12 years. And then having a bigger rate increase. Certainly. You know, I think absent COVID, we might have had a rate increase still in FY 22. I mean we've certainly signaled to the Board of Finance in previous years that we felt we were near a rate change. I think even since FY 19 we've been signaling that but absent COVID we might have had a much more moderate, perhaps two to 3% rate change. With COVID we can, you know, using the utility metrics that the Department of Public Service uses, we could justify a 12 and a half percent we tried to moderate that obviously at the 7.5 figure. Our hope is is that this is an anomaly in terms of the magnitude, because of the pandemic. I don't believe it's our intent to go another 12 years. That was a pretty remarkable period. We would have had a rate case probably in the middle of that period absent the reorganization efforts and we would have had one in fiscal 20 absent the renegotiation of the wind contract so there were. There are a few times we were able to buy our customers a little more time with steady rates and I certainly believe we delivered a really strong financial value for Burlington during that time. But that said, our strategy going forward would be following the seven and a half percent rate change to pursue more regular and much more modest adjustments going forward. And in fact there's a law that was passed this year and signed by the governor that would allow municipal utilities to raise rates. So we're less in a given year with local approval only not having to go through the very lengthy and expensive PUC process so that could be something that we might want to utilize going forward to raise rates more regularly and at a much lower level. So that customers can absorb those cost increases more easily. Thank you. Great. Other questions for Darren. Councillor Pine. Darren, I think everybody, Councillor Carpenter just stole my questions but I still want to know if you have a way to promote additional either efficiency improvements people could make or if you are going to really, you know, reach out to customers to show them how they can actually maximize the impact on their actual bill because even though rates determine what our bills are it's the bill you pay that counts right so if you have aggressive efficiency efforts and you really, you know, help folks get to the higher efficiency that they possibly can get to then your your bill impact is minimal or perhaps even cash flow positive so could you just talk about how you're going to do that as well. Exactly right. You know rates and bills are different things and bills is what you know what matters at the end is what you're paying each month and we do have over 2 million in funding for efficiency rebates and programs and, you know, close to 700,000 budgeted for electrification incentives on top of that in fiscal year 22. So we will continue our active work with customers whether they're residential, small business, commercial or larger commercial customers who are interested in working on efficiency, and, you know, try to do things that help save money even, you know, despite the rate change and I think that that's something that we are very, very interested in our energy services team even with the pandemic has been doing first virtual site visits and now in person site visits following all health guidelines to help customers who are interested in pursuing efficiency improvements. And is that all those services are available to all customer classes. That's correct. Thank you. Other questions. Yes, Councilor Jang. Thank you. So, thank you Darren for the presentation and I was, it is really unfortunate that we are talking about your budget. And the questions are all around the rates increase that we're talking about. I was wondering if you have a plan be just in case the rate increase is failed from the console perspective. Well, if the rate change was not able to go forward we would be facing. I don't want to use hyperbole, but we would be facing the need to make severe reductions in our budget on the order of magnitude of probably three to $4 million and I can tell you that we've gone through multiple rounds of cuts in our capital operating expenses just to reach the point we're at today and part of our responsibility as utility. You know, I would much rather be here not talking about a rate case and talking about all the good things that we've been working on and I know I know you all would as well and I know our customers would appreciate that. That would be our preference this is always a last resort. Absolutely. But the reason we're proposing the rate case is because I don't believe we can make that level of cuts without either impacting our workforce or impacting our systems reliability and we just we were not able to find any additional areas to reduce expenditure in a way that wouldn't compromise our core missions and at that point I feel it's my responsibility as general manager to come to our regulatory bodies and say the time has come after 12 years for us to raise rates to ensure we have the revenues to responsibly fund our operations and there is no there's no plan B for us that would be the consequence we'd be looking at and we don't have a plan for how to do that. Thank you. So I think you know the rate discussion is we can have it another time but from my perspective and from what I'm hearing from people the timing is not right. And I would have love to console. And so this point you know for this discussion to at least started like in 2020 so we know people are ready and getting ready. And that's one and the second element that I wanted to talk about is basically people are saying right that their rates that actually bills has gone up during the pandemic. And based on your presentation it seems that like people are not paying their bills anymore or it's just a commercial aspect that has been down and that would impact your budget. Did I get that right. Sure yeah a couple things there I mean I would mention that we have been talking about the need for a rate change really for several years so I do understand that the 7.5% captures the attention and is much more specific figure. But we really have as a utility been signaling this for for several years that this was a possibility. In terms of the pandemic. If you're a residential customer and particularly if you're working remotely. It's very likely that your usage has increased. And therefore your bill may be higher than normal. You're probably saving money on commuting or other expenses related to to transportation but you're probably using more electricity. We've seen that on our system. But the the challenge is is that overall our revenues are down significantly because commercial customers were not open and not using the normal amount of electricity during that time. And so when you look at the total system effect. We're seeing less revenues even though as you point out correctly residential customers have been using by and large more energy during the pandemic not less. Thank you. Thank you Councillor Paul. I think in fairness that Councillor President Tracy had his hand up I don't know if he wanted to go next or. Thank you I did not see that President Tracy, please go ahead and then Councillor Paul. Okay, thank you Councillor Paul. So I was just curious, Darren, about renewable energy credits I know that's been a source of significant volatility. It's been challenging. And so I'm wondering what's happening in the rec markets and how that's impacting your budget. Great question. Councillor Tracy or Council President Tracy, the rec markets have provided, on average, 7 million to 12 million in revenue over the past, you know, six or seven years. Fairly stable. In fact, it's a little bit up this year, as I mentioned, compared to last year we've been close to the seven to eight million dollar a year revenue number over the past few years. There was a period of time a little further back where the markets were even higher and where we were bringing in, you know, closer to a 10 to 12 million figure, but we've sort of absorbed over a period of years the modest decline in those markets and now we're bringing in closer to 7 to 8 million in rec revenues. So we're still maximizing our participation there to bring in revenue that helps keep our rates lower than they otherwise would be for customers but that's not a proximate driver of the rate case. It's actually, I think we're seeing slightly increased rec sale revenues in FY 22 compared to 21. Great, great. Thank you. Am I okay to go? Yes. So I'll go to the furrows for a second there. Sorry. Councillor Paul, please go ahead. Great. Thanks so much. And thanks for that question, President Tracy that is one of the things that separates BED from many utilities are the rec credits. is what I'm hearing most from people that are concerned about the rate increase isn't the amount of the rate increase. It's the feeling that people have had a chance to yet adjust, particularly in a large organizations, businesses who pass budgets, who have fiscal years that are different from the average resident who goes month to month planning their finances and budget and things like that. And I'm wondering whether or not there is an opportunity to get a little creative and maybe come up with a way to and this is just sort of off the top of my head, a way to perhaps not start the rate increase in August or the surcharge in August, but to have the surcharge start in October or November to allow people a couple of months, hopefully to get a couple of good months under their belt of the return to a more normal cash flow. And then if need be in 2023 or 2024 in order to smooth that out because of the loss of a couple of months to do a 1% rate increase or something along those lines at another time. I think the idea of, despite the fact that I do agree with you, I think that, I mean, I was aware of the fact that you have mentioned a number of times at different meetings that there probably was going to need to be a rate increase. I mean, after 12 years, it shouldn't really come as a huge surprise that eventually we were gonna need a rate increase, bless you. And, I don't think that people are surprised by that. I think that whenever there's something that comes quickly that people are sort of caught off guard a little bit despite the fact that they know that eventually it might be coming. So what I'm wondering is whether or not some time could be devoted to thinking about whether or not we could put that off even for, even until the fall and just give people a little bit more time to adjust. I can speak to the trade-offs because we've, as you would expect, we've considered this from every angle possible over the past few months. Every month that we do not have that surcharge, and again, we're assuming it starts in August, not in July. So it would be one year or one month into fiscal year 2022. Every month that we do not have that surcharge in effect affects revenues by between around $250 to $300,000. So even putting it back a few months could easily wipe out the net income that we have, you know, 808,000 roughly of net income in fiscal 22 would also reduce our days cash on hand metric. We have it at 97 now relative to the 90. It would reduce that closer to 90, giving us very little cushion if anything goes awry. And it would reduce our adjusted debt service coverage ratio, which we have at 1.06 in this budget. Really, it should be closer to one and a quarter or one and a half. It would bring that back down closer to one or perhaps even below one. So I would feel, I feel I would need to raise that that would do damage to our financial metrics and that absent some additional funding source to bolster the cash on hand, we could see some severe impacts there depending on how other things are going. Cause we, in a lot of budgets, we try to build in some cushion and some contingency. And as you can expect, we did very little of that in this budget. If sales decline or stay lower than what we're anticipating, we'll be seeing some of those impacts regardless and we'll have to manage them and defer expenses and other things. But I certainly take the point that it would be nice to have a few additional months before that kicked in, but there's a real trade-off in terms of revenues. And it's a six to potentially seven figure trade-off depending on how many months you delay. Or, I mean, again, I mean, I'm just thinking of other ways that we can sort of ease this and ease people into a fairly significant rate increase. Would there be the possibility of just simply are we allowed to effectively sort of borrow from ourselves in terms of borrowing ARPA and then paying it back a year later? In other words, borrowing, it's not really borrowing, but using funds and then paying them back so that, I mean, my personal feeling about the ARPA funds is that other than what we must do in terms of meeting a budget gap or our unassigned fund balance, that I hope that the majority of the ARPA funds will be used for their one-time monies and they should not be used for anything like continuing expenses, like not having a rate increase or something like that. And I'm not trying to suggest that we shouldn't have a rate increase. I'm just trying to come up with a way to smooth this transition in a way that is a little bit more palatable. What I've been told is that there are, some businesses that I've heard from in a very short period of time, so it's by no means a scientific study that having a couple of months to be able to adjust to that, particularly those that have budgets, would be very welcome news. And we're a small community, I think we should try if we can. And I'm not suggesting that you wouldn't, but I'm just saying I think we should just try if we can to try to ease this for our rate payers. I think if there is an interest, I mean, we had originally mentioned that our lost sales revenue, had we been eligible for the Paycheck Protection Program at the federal level, our lost sales revenue would have been more than offset by that program. And we might be in a position to ask for something more modest here. I would be very leery of adding additional debt to the utility beyond the revenue bond that we've discussed, which is assumed in the budget. We do have an arbitration result with the union that will add significant additional potential pension liability for the utility going forward, which is not even really discussed all that much in this budget, but is a potential impact for us in fiscal year 23 and beyond. So I'm conscious of that and other kind of ongoing obligations that we'll have. So I know there will be a desire to keep, rate changes either modest or limited in future years. So if there's interest or if there's funding available that could help offset the lost sales revenues, we would certainly and had looked at that as an option to help moderate the rate case or doing a two-stage rate case at that point, having it split into two years. Absent having that revenue in hand heading into FY22, we would face that same challenge of the six to seven figure depending on how long impact on revenues as we're delayed. So I mean, we've taken into account all the funding resources that we're aware of that we can count on at the state, the local level with the ARPA funds and the federal level and propose the budget and the rate case based on that, I guess, it's the best way to say it. Okay, all right, I've taken up enough time. Thank you, thanks very much. We may have time for one more if there is anyone else. Excellent, thank you so much, Darren and team. Thank you. I appreciate the thorough presentation. All right, Bill Ward, I haven't seen you in forever. It's so great. Please let us know what is new in the world of permitting and inspections. Tell us about your budget and what your hardworking team has been up to this year. Great, I will try to be brief and you all know me well enough to know that that's hard for me. I wanted to share this photo from these two photos from last year as we get started talking about the department. It's more or less a shameless plug for an event for tomorrow. This is the spring move out project from last year. Happens every year when the students are getting ready to move out. We partner with the University of Vermont. Tomorrow's event will be on Loomis Street starting at 11 a.m. and we'll have another one on Bule Street on Tuesday next week to help keep the neighborhoods clean and we hope to continue this partnership. You'll note with these, these were pandemic photos so staff was practicing social distancing and mask wearing. We are not doing a traditional spring move out again this year, this is really just trash removal. The dumpsters are paid for by the University of Vermont but we partner with them to help keep the neighborhoods clean and our staff works with them to keep things organized. The departmental core functions I've included are the things like the rental housing inspection with which you all know as code enforcement, the traditional role of the old code enforcement department. The functions in the code on the housing side are overseen by the housing board review. If a tenant or a property owner has a concern or they want to appeal a decision from our office regarding housing, they go to the housing board review, the five member citizen panel. On the health inspections that we do, we are, as you know, some of you probably are very familiar I'm Burlington's health officer and the inspectors are deputy health officers and that coordination is done with the Burlington Board of Health. If health orders are issued out of our office those are appealed to the five member Burlington Board of Health. We've got photo to the right of board member Ian McHale and the board chair Caroline Tassie. This was on a marketplace event we did during the pandemic to pass out free masks for residents and for visitors and we're grateful to have the marketplace coordination and we had a wonderful weather for it and we don't always get to share the great work that the board members do. And on the trade side, I'm sorry, excuse me, I skipped over the zoning and development. You're familiar with what was the planning and zoning department. Now the zoning team is part of my department for the last technically going on two years. We actually just got them in January of last year to be working with us in a one-stop shop. We only had a couple of months working together before we separated due to the pandemic but the zoning team, the decisions are made and citizens appeal those decisions. Those are overseen by the Development Review Board. The trades permit review, that's the two building officials, electric permits, plumbing, mechanical permits. Those are overseen by the Department of Public Works. And another core function which sort of fits into all of these is our vacant building enforcement. We typically have about 10 to 20 throughout the year and that's about the same number where we are now. Housing team members inspect and turn them over to either zoning or the trades division depending on the nature of it. If it's found that the property needs some work where it requires a building or a trades permit, it's that team. If it is a demolition by neglect, if it's truly vacant and going sort of downhill, the zoning team would take enforcement action to keep it in compliance with the ordinance. Quick overview of the actual team members themselves. There's working left to right on your screen. We've got the two front desk folks, our administrative assistants that are the two primary greeters that folks would see if they come into our lobby at 645 Pine Street. And then the trades team is the next group. The four aligned team members there work as direct reports to me. And the other two teams have managers. Scott Gustin is the manager of the zoning team. They have the planners aligned under him and the enforcement team. Patty Wayman is our housing manager and inspectors, one administrative assistant and the temporary seasonal graffiti folks that you heard about in Kara's presentation last month will be, I'd say managed and trained in part by our team and working with us. Gonna go back a little bit. I wanted to give you an update on the changes. You've seen this probably in most of the department's budget so far, employee expenses are typically increasing and some of the benefits are increasing. The drivers, those staff costs and we're returning to the pre-pandemic levels of where we were budget-wise. You know, that's a common theme, but for us it'll make a big difference. A lot of our team is overdue for some training. There wasn't a lot of travel going on and a number of our team members will be doing that in the upcoming year. Travel and training, budget return is a exciting thing for everyone. And on the revenue side, we do expect since we had a sort of a downturn due to the pandemic, we saw a pretty big drop in the number of large projects and the large projects are important because those large projects, the permit fees are built off of the estimated cost of construction. What we saw during the pandemic was a fair amount of activity, but they tended to be smaller projects, small additions or renovation projects where residents were home and getting some work done while they were home or things that they had available to them because there was a unique opportunity. We also have a pretty good economy for refinancing right now. We're seeing a lot of that activity in our office with folks doing title work in our offices to check whether all the permits are closed. That that's a good sign to us that people are continuing that refinance and the work that comes out of that ends up coming back to us in advanced permit fees. We didn't see a lot of new construction of rental units during the pandemic, but we do expect that more are coming online. I had actually been a little bit too conservative in last year's budget. We're already over for rental registration collection this year and we do expect new units are coming online this year to increase that budget. For focus areas for the upcoming year, you hopefully have all seen it both in media releases and on front porch forum and perhaps even from some of your constituents. We have a new online permitting system. We refer to it as OpenGov. It's the system that we were trained in and the link is on our website. Right now folks that want to come in to issue a ticket of permit can actually do most of those things online. This is what they see that the white screen is what they'd see if they log into our permitting database and they can start a project like a combined construction and zoning permit like you'd see on the left and other projects like roofing and windows, decks, some of those other projects that are more of the homeowner type project. We have some carve outs for them with some simplified permit processes. We've seen some pretty good success with the system. We've just started it on May 3rd and customers have been, I would say very taken by it. Not everyone has been as happy. A lot of people like the old way. A lot of people like paper but I helped a customer this morning. He self-described as a plumber who was not tech savvy but I said, I'm not particularly tech savvy either but I'm sure I can help you. We used the tablet, got him logged in and once I had him in the system he walked himself through answering the questions and was done in less than 10 minutes and had paid for the permit and was walking back out. Now that he's taught how to do that those are the types of things he can do from his office. I'm not sure if he's a Burlington resident but he is a contractor who works in the area. Many of the folks who do this on a regular basis don't need to travel to come to our office. A good sign of the changing times is that we've been tracking because of the pandemic the number of guests coming in because of contact tracing we have a pretty good track record of how many customers come in on a typical day and because of that same tracking system the first two weeks of May showed me some interesting data. The first week of using this system are in office visits to the lobby from citizens, residents of Burlington and customers, they dropped by 22%. And the second week the number of visitors to our lobby dropped by 29%. So we're in the third week I'll have some new numbers after this but I expect that trend to continue. Folks have found some real time-saving ways to get things done and even print their own permits from home. I have a quick trigger finger there I go in one too many as I click the second area of focus you'll be seeing these in more depth but we've already seen building weatherization but we've been talking about building electrification. We were at the ordinance committee a few weeks ago to give them a sort of a heads up and a first look at what we intend to have as certificate of compliance improvements where we are essentially raising the bar on rental housing standards that will change the threshold for the number of deficiencies that are allowed but have to be corrected before we issue a certificate and the next one will be sort of a combined building and electric permit overhaul on the building permit side. We have some language change that sort of more closely aligns with the state division of fire safety requirements which we are obligated to uphold because they're the ones who authorized that the team that I supervise to issue permits on behalf of the state but our ordinance language is a little outdated to include some things we're cleaning up where we have a female building inspector and we realized all of the language currently is gender specific so that's gonna be coming to you along with some updates on working with the permit advisory permit reform advisory committee on trying to find the right types of permits to eliminate those low level permits if you will things that don't need specific work by either the building official or the electrical official and we can simplify it for homeowners or for residents and even contractors and make it a little easier for the electrical inspector who has a very busy job. The other area of focus I think you're all probably interested in is graffiti we've heard a lot about it. We are working with Kara's team and looking to get those staff members on board with us but I wanted to give you a quick update because you probably know the pandemic really hurt the cities efforts to stay ahead of the graffiti vandals and we had fewer businesses open and the streets were pretty empty for a lot of time during the pandemic and not a lot of people out after dark meant that some of these folks were roaming the streets and causing a lot of problems but the successes like the photos you see here we had teamed last spring with the VFW post commander Michelle Caver and the senior vice commander Kevin Fleming who was on the right in the after photo that was before the three of us worked on that project and it's only if you look at the timestamp from 11 30 to 12 45 so about an hour from start to finish with cleanup we took care of the whole front side of that building. Good success to teamwork with people and to help teach them that it's not as complicated but we can work together make Burlington look better. The other ones are more recent you'll see the cleanup that had been happening at the consolidated communications building that photo on the right was just last weekend on Saturday that those graffiti tags there were dozens and dozens of them on the union street side, the main street side the consolidated communications building that's on main street but has a side that faces Memorial auditorium and this is the side that you're looking at. So that work is ongoing and quick update I know that since you'd seen a lot of it you may not have understood that the work was still happening our C-click fix data shows that city staff had cleaned or covered 294 incidents of graffiti in the last 12 months. So close to one a day and probably one a day when you count work days getting done even though we were a little overwhelmed by the quantity of new tags that were happening but 83 of those issues that were resolved were just in the last few months in 2021. I think the actual numbers are a little bit higher than that because some of the things that we have covered or cleaned were re-tagged within 24 hours and we recovered them without creating a new issue and creating a little bit more public awareness or in these cases we're somewhat making celebrities out of the graffiti taggers and we prefer not to but we wanna make sure the public sees this work so they know it is going on and we've partnered with a number of other team members but to me overall the picture is much brighter now that we have businesses open partnerships to help things move along where we can report track and remove cover graffiti and the administration's proposal that you heard from our marketplace director we've only had a couple of applicants to those positions but we have a meeting next week to move that along but we've already got fully staffed operations ready to go with the city team we partner with the parks department Burlington public works and I know that the electric department and the school department have their own team members that work on this so I know that's been a big area of concern I wanted to give you that quick update and give you an opportunity to ask questions. Excellent, thank you. Questions for Mr. Ward? Yes, President Tracy. So one of the things that was in last year's budget was an increase for recycling toters to purchase more toters and so in order to get more of those on the streets and I know that you've taken an integrative approach working closely with the folks at DPW who do recycling pickup to really have that approach so I'm just wondering if you're gonna continue with that additional with that additional allotment of toters and then how much longer do you feel like we're gonna need to do that if so in order to really make sure that all properties are covered? Yeah, I will probably have to defer to Chapin for a little more detailed answer. I know that his team has been waiting for weeks now for another shipment of those large toters. They've got back ordered toters, people that have requested them but they've got not been out there. We've had complaints about them and people that are ready to buy them but there's just not a supply. I can't speak specifically if it was pandemic production related that's why there's such a delay in getting the new shipment but they've got a pretty vast area in their DPW sort of warehouse where they keep their trucks. It's completely empty right now and it's really shameful because we've got a lot of customers who both need them and others that we could enforce against if they don't get them but we really struggle on the code team to enforce against something that members of the public actually can't even buy from us. So we've got them in sort of a catch 22. I think it would probably be the type of thing that we should give regular updates to you so you know I really don't wanna predict but I think that once we get this next shipment we could probably do a much better assessment of the number that arrived, the number that immediately go out because of the back order and where we still have potential problems. Okay, I'd really appreciate that just cause I continue to hear from constituents concerned just around blown recyclables and the impact that it has on neighborhoods and just trash. Excellent. Director Spencer, do you have anything to add? Sure, as last year we have budgeted an extra $10,000 so it's $50,000 in this proposed line to purchase more toters. Yes, we've been out for a short period given the popularity of these toters they will be in soon, they're on order and we'll be looking to continue the partnership with DPI fundamentally driving problem properties towards purchasing these toters. We offer them at 50% of the cost that it takes to make them so we for each toter are losing $20, $25 but obviously benefiting management of recyclables. Great, thank you. Councillor Carpenter, I believe you are next. A couple of things. I've heard it said that maybe inspections or trade inspections could move a little quicker, faster if willing to look a little harder at delegating some of that. So I'm just kind of curious of your opinion on that and kind of that same day that we learned anything through COVID about what we might be able to do remotely in that same day. Yeah, for me this is one of the silver linings of the pandemic. I think that the trades team has always been really solid performers. I know that they have been reluctant to do remote inspections. At the start of the pandemic, the folks at the national level who oversee the codes put out a guideline on doing it properly. It sort of set the tone to say, it's okay. And along with that came their willingness to say, well, if it's happening in other places, I guess we can have more trust too. As that's worked out, there's a lot more trust happening. So for example, we went at one point where you had to wait six weeks for an electrical inspection. We had it about a month ago where it was only about a week out. And unfortunately, the only reason it's a little further out it's almost three weeks now. And that's only because the inspector is desperate to get some time off. He is taking some time off starting tomorrow but he'll be back June 1st. And that's really only a full week and one extra day. But I think folks are seeing that sort of stretched out into June and they think, oh, it's getting longer. He deserves some well rested time. We have a backup inspector for emergency needs from South Burlington that we can use. But we've come a long way from where we were a year ago. And in that case, there was one blessing from the pandemic that we've learned a number of ways to do inspections either with FaceTime inspections, a video link or with photos. Once the inspector worked with the contractors who a lot of them work with us on a pretty regular basis. Now that they understand the photos they need are an overall from the outside, a close up of the actual unit that was installed. And in some cases, it's the specific tag that was on the sort of manufacturer stamp that gives the specifications. So those things got a little bit better organized once the workflow happened. And now there's a much greater comfort level. And I would say that the contractors are more proficient in providing those, the photos that are actually acceptable to the inspectors. What we don't want is to have something sort of be done willy nilly and have the inspector just sign off. And confident that that doesn't happen. But I think as a result, you end up seeing folks who are waiting longer, but that has changed pretty dramatically. And we hope to make that part of our routine going forward after the pandemic to continue doing as many remote inspections as possible. There are some projects that we're gonna continue to have to go and look at because they're just too big and the inspector needs to see a variety of different things and might be quicker to even walk through than it would be to have someone else check all the different things or send them a hundred different photos. So we'll always have some in-person, but I think we're gonna continue to do a lot of remote inspections. Councillor Cheng, did you have a question? Yes. Thank you, Mr. Bill for being here. And I was just wondering about the solar panel setbacks some burn-in-tomians are experiencing. And it seemed the state doesn't have the shared addictions here. And was just wondering if what can we do to mitigate this concern from some people to install solar panels? Yes, we've got a staff meeting set up. The fire chief has called that for the city team to get together. I can't say that I know exactly the day that it's coming up on my calendar, but it's been a pretty busy stretch. Last Thursday, I had a meeting every night. So it's coming up in the calendar, but I can give you an update that after that internal staff meeting. I know there are concerns on that from the safety aspect from firefighting, but I don't think I could speak as eloquently as Chief Locke could, but we will work on it from the code perspective to make sure that when we have an understanding with the fire chief and his team and the fire marshal, that our trade staff can inspect to those standards and find something that is both safe, but acceptable to the code. Thank you. Any other questions? Great, thank you so much, Bill. And I am pleased to turn it over to Mary and for us to be able to hear about Fletcher Free Library, a resource we all love. Mary, take it away. I don't think I can share my screen. That's because I got so busy during bills. I was so absorbed. I forgot to make you co-host. There you go. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Can you see that okay? Yes, it looks good. Okay, thank you very much. Libraries are cornerstone of democracy. The free access to information is important for our citizenry. Anyone can enter and get access to that information. And I guess what I would ask you all now is if you could think about a book that you read that gave you greater empathy, something that you learned about, inspired you, changed your behavior, gave you respite. And then think about if you didn't have access to that book. That's what we do is we give access to these materials for folks. We have had our strategic plan that went to 2020. We did a great job of clicking through those goals and we're looking forward to another strategic plan hopefully in the next year. Our various library departments provide all kinds of services to the community, obviously books, materials, online resources, programming, meeting room space. And our access to the computer center, to the internet and computers is very important. As we know during COVID, the digital divide really became more apparent. And one of the things that the library does is not only do we provide those computer services, but we provide a library nearby who help folks when they need to apply for a job, when they need to learn how to put an attachment onto an email. And one of the projects we're particularly proud of that we rolled out recently is the digital provide project, which allows laptops and hotspots to be loaned out for a week at a time. This is our organizational chart and I almost thought of making another one that had all kinds of red lines crisscrossed because during COVID, everybody was doing all different kinds of things. And one of the things we're proud of is that librarians really helped on a city-wide level. We had a librarian who was on the mayor's analytic and research team, a librarian at the RRC, five librarians helped with contact tracing and two librarians helped when the first two days of the BIPOC vaccination clinics came up. And when they were helping out on the city-wide level, that meant that the librarians back at the library were helping out with their work that wasn't being able to get done or needed to be helped with. So it truly was an unusual year of people doing all different kinds of jobs and helping out. And here is our lovely staff during one of our Zoom meetings that we have to have now and our library commission that I'm so grateful for their advice and counsel as we continue to grow. And I did wanna share this one infographic because listening to the other presentations I've been hearing, what have you learned through COVID? And one of the things that I think I've learned is how agile our city is and our library and that outer circle is the city system. And all through this COVID, the city system was constantly changing as COVID changed. And when I talk about the city system, I'm talking about the mayor's office, the HR department, and even the city council, the things that you folks did, like the emergency COVID leave, those systems were going on. And then the library system had to take that information and adapt it to what we were doing. And every department within the library was constantly innovating and adapting. We would try things and sometimes they wouldn't work or we would try things and then sometimes it changed because COVID had brought us new challenges. And it really showed that having these high working systems in place before we got to this crisis moment and having that trust between these systems was integral. And that's what got us through, I believe. So as far as the budget, a few things to point out is the library is now fine free. We had been working on that for a while with the mayor's office. We had started with going to find free days at different times, volunteer away your fines, read away your fines. But finally it was time to go all the way. And with help from the mayor's office and CAO Shad, we were able to do, we were doing a reorg through attrition. We were able to totally get rid of fines. And that for us was a huge equity piece. So we find that most folks who have the social economic challenges need the library the most and we don't want them to be fine. We want them to come back. So that was wonderful to have happened. The other thing that's happening now that doesn't really affect our budget so much but the city budget, as far as the technology and innovation department is we're moving over into a new integrated library software. And it is an open source software and it's a consortium software. And so there's a savings of about $70,000 over five years that I know some of you folks on board of finance heard about a few months ago when I brought this forward. And we're very excited about this project. Not only is it saving the city money but it's a better system. It's a more intuitive system and it's a collaborative system with other libraries. So folks can see holdings in other libraries. And in the fall, we hope to be part of the home card system which is many libraries in Chittenden County and that will allow for reciprocal borrowing. It's open source software, which I'm a big fan of. I don't wanna talk about it here but if anybody would love to talk to me about it outside of this presentation I would be happy to do that. The other thing as we look ahead is digital resources and digital resources, e-books, e-audio books, movies, things like that is different for libraries than it is for you. So I'm sure many of you at one time have bought an e-book at one time and it maybe cost you about $12, nine, 10, $12. That's not what it costs for the library. For us an e-book costs $45. And that's because the publishers are banking on that we're gonna be loaning it out many times. So it's a very complicated market. There's a lot of different licensing models and we're always kind of grappling with them but what we know is it's more costly for us. And that really is coming into play because during COVID we saw that people were using online resources more. It was only just a couple of years ago we maybe would have 2,000 in a quarter people using the different resources and in this last quarter of 2020 we had over 20,000 people accessing different resources. We're in good shape for now but I don't know what it's gonna mean for the future. I can't predict how people are gonna behave. Are people going to be sticking with these digital services? Are they gonna come back and be reading actual books? I think we'll see a hybrid moving forward but it's definitely something that we're keeping our eye on. So as far as our budget goes, very similar I think to what you've been hearing in the past few presentations is very much about our personnel is over 82% of our budget. Our next biggest part of the budget is our collection which is funded by the dedicated tax and then the next biggest part is our utilities. We're 46,000 square foot building we're open seven days a week and so utilities are a big cost for us. There we're not expecting any major changes for next year. We're happy that we're getting back to pre-pandemic levels of funding and just the usual increase in personnel costs due to steps and benefits. And we don't really generate a lot of revenue but we do have the friends of the Fletcher Free Library that we are so grateful for. There are 501c3 non-profits supporting agency and they just keep doing all kinds of things, book sales and events and appeals and bringing in revenue so that we can spend them on things like programming, professional development and different odds and ends throughout the year. And that is really all there is to it. We are opening up more and more and looking forward to after July 4th we'll be back to open a hundred percent. We're excited to see everybody coming back to the library. We have a great summer plan and that is it. And I will. Awesome, thank you, Mary. I always love all the photos. Who has questions? Yes, President Tracy. So one thing, I noticed that the outreach position is vacant and just curious on where that is and then also sort of more broadly how you see this budget as supporting that work of really bringing people who may not be currently accessing your services into the library or trying to involve folks who aren't using your services to actually enjoy some of the different things that you offer. Yeah, that's a great question. We just offered the position this morning to somebody so that we hope that they're coming on in a few weeks. And a lot of what that person does is just senior outreach. So at any given time, I think there's 10 different senior centers or senior housing places that we go to and we bring books. Some of them we do book discussions with, but the hope with that position is always to even do more outreach to we really wanna start to connect with the Old North End Center, the One Center as well. So stay tuned, I would say on that because I think the new hire is gonna be great and we hope to do more. This summer, I will say last summer we went to all the rec and nutrition sites throughout the city. And that was a great partnership with Parks and Rec and the Burlington School District. And we're hoping to expand that outreach this summer as well. Okay, and do you know, do you have specific, like is there ongoing collaboration with the RAIB office and just really trying to make sure that the library is a place where that is particularly specifically reaching out to and including BIPOC folks in our community? Yes, so, our commission was really excited to look at our policies again. And we had started to go in that direction. We were looking at through an equity anti-racism lens. And we had started to go into that direction even before Director Green was hired. So we were really thrilled when she was hired. We were sorry that the pandemic happened right after she was hired because we all got super busy, but we're really looking forward to using the toolkit that they developed and really looking at all the different library policies. The other thing is we are helping to participate in the Juneteenth celebration. The library is hoping to take on an education part role in it. And so we're having an event on the front lawn and I'm sorry that I don't know all about it, but it is about equity and racial justice in food and agriculture.  And we're also doing a book discussion and we're just in final negotiations with the author to see if they can come. So yes, we are definitely looking forward to partnering more with them. And of course we do have somebody on our staff who it's the RIV and there's a certain committee for them. I can't remember the name that there's all different kinds of representatives from the departments that go and then they report back to us on the different work that is happening. Okay, thank you. Excellent, other questions for Mary? All right, seeing none, you are free to go. Thank you so much, Mary. Thank you. We are going to move on to water, stormwater and wastewater with our favorite duo, Chapin and Megan. Great, we're excited to be here. Division Director Megan Moyer is gonna run our sixth slide presentation and open up for questions. Let me just get myself. Can you guys see my slide, Chapin? Yes. Awesome. Thank you so much. I'm apologizing in advance for lots of tiny footsteps above me since my home office is in the basement and I have two small children. But super excited to talk to you guys about what we've done for FY21 and then looking ahead to FY22. I think everybody's spoken about the fact of how hard FY21 was, but even with everybody, well, largely the technical staff scattered to their home offices, our essential workers kept providing critical water services 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, seven days a week and I'm super, super proud of them and they deserve all of our thanks. In addition to just doing that day in and day out, we did complete recently the first of our clean water resiliency plan projects at the wastewater treatment plants. We completed the disinfection upgrades, most significantly a main plant, that's the picture that's shown and also at our smaller plants, East Plant and Norse Plant. This is the system that at the end of all of the treatment that we do, make sure that any remaining bacteria is killed appropriately. Some of the upgrades are obviously upgrading the pumps and making sure that we don't have some of the mechanical failures that we've had in the past, but also having a smarter system. In particular, our smaller plants didn't have good analyzers that really gave the feedback to our operators to be able to be proactive in catching a violation before it occurred. So very excited about that. We also completed the SCADA PLC upgrade. This is the computerized brain of main plants, which also had an issue in 2018 and that project was completed recently and so far so good. Everything is running well. On the planning side, while we're also, while our engineers were building these projects, we also were starting and completing the preliminary engineering for the next tranche of wastewater improvements, what we're calling phase two and we'll likely be bringing that to you pretty soon to kick off the sort of final design piece so that we can go into construction next year. This is some of the less big picture projects but still nonetheless very important. All of the parts and pieces of the wastewater plants need to work in order to make sure that we can produce that clean water before we discharge it to Lake Champlain. A project that we certainly might not have gotten involved with if not, but for COVID was our staff getting involved in using our wastewater to surveil for the levels of SARS-CoV-2 in the wastewater stream. And we believe that that provided a great value add to the city's response and understanding of what the levels of COVID were even before the case numbers were showing up. So it's pretty cool, sciency, geeky nerd stuff. For the past few years, and I think a number of you engaged with our public outreach efforts, we, so we've been working a lot on making sure we're investing in our existing infrastructure, but as many of you know, we have numerous new regulations that we have to comply with. Chief in our minds are the phosphorus Champlain, Lake Champlain TMDL, which is the limit of the amount of phosphorus that our whole city collectively between wastewater and stormwater can discharge. And so we've been going through a whole cost benefit, really looking at all the different scenarios of what we could do as a city to reduce that load. And the good news is we do have a strategy moving forward, which you will hear about more in the future that involves there's a graph there showing what our current loads would be at 2040 flow. So if we projected out to 20 years, given our current technology, how much we would be discharging and with the implementation of a tertiary filter. So this is a third treatment step at main plant. We would be able to significantly decrease our phosphorus load below the target that's been given to us for the whole city. And then a lot of you have participated in previous conversations about our water and wastewater rate payer restructuring and affordability program. The key piece of how we are going to be mitigating what would otherwise be a rate increase for water resources. We're gonna be presenting to you all on the 24th in more detail about that program. So I think it's gonna set you up nicely between this budget presentation, that presentation, which Juliet will help you all understand the details of how people will be impacted or actually benefited by the program will set you up nicely to then hopefully be able to prove the rates that we're requesting when we finally get to the budget process. So I think you've seen a lot of these graphs, maybe not as cool, but we in water also have experienced revenue shortfalls. Our primary revenue shortfall, I don't know if you can see my mouth came from this time period. So this blue line is a moving average of our flows over 2020 and 2020-21, the pandemic period, compared to our three year average flows, which is this green line. So you can see usually in the spring we're up in this area, but we really took a hit there. Fortunately for us, the summer was quite warm and so our overall usage went up more than it traditionally had and that really kind of saved us, at least in that time period. Our revenue shortfall likely would have been much, much worse. In FY20, we did have a shortfall of about a total of about $482,000, but again, it would have been much worse. So far for FY21, you can see that the lines are kind of trending a little bit more towards normal. Sometimes it's above, sometimes it's below, but overall we had originally predicted sort of a worst case scenario of some substantial deficits and thus far our end of fiscal year 2021 predictions are looking much better. We actually look like we're gonna be up in water and only down a little bit, we're gonna be down quite a bit less than we thought we were going to be in wastewater. We do still have about 472,000 in arerages and those of what have accumulated since the beginning of the pandemic were hopeful that some of the programs that the state's putting out as well as the feds may help that. Our users did participate for the brief four week period that they were eligible, but we had been previously sort of left out and it was only the electric and private water utilities that customers that were eligible for some of the VCAP money initially. There was a bill that just got passed, I believe in the legislature. Originally the language didn't include us, but we were able to advocate to make sure that public water utilities were also included. So on the expense side, as others have mentioned, we have a lot of sort of base operational increases, salary benefits that should say utilities, not utilizes, I'm sorry. Indirect allocations as an enterprise fund, we do pay into the clerk treasurer's office, the city attorney's office, various other entities to support that work and also to receive that benefit, sorry for any screaming you may hear. And we also do pay a pre substantial pilot to the city general fund. We are restoring previous training and conference budgets. We do have a number of new staff and it's very important that we make sure that people are up to date, not just for their licenses, but also just for making sure we're feeding the innovation engine. And we also have reestablished our repair and maintenance in our pay go capital budget. Although I will say that in water, our full sort of intention, capital improvement plan for FY 22 is dependent on some of the local ARPA funding that we requested from you all in previous presentations. Some of the drivers are, we do have some new debt service and wastewater for those projects that I mentioned were funded through SRF loans. And so the year after those projects are completed, we need to begin payment. And then also we are working on, I think many of you have seen the large water storage tank on UVM's campus has been under construction. We are working on getting that painted this summer and all of the crown removed. And then we're gonna be moving over to the redstone tank, which is the smaller tank on the redstone campus that all of our cell antenna, all of the AT&T cell antenna are on. The funds in the water budget also include some capital funding on the meter side, which is part of a payback. We, some of you were around for the unfortunate, but you know, these things do happen uncovering of some meter to bill errors. We ended up owing UVM a fairly large sum of money. And then we owed UVM medical center a smaller sum. And what's cool in collaboration with some of the technical folks up there, instead of at this point, just paying them back the money, we are working on an MOU, which we brought to city council. And should you approve it, we will be able to repurpose the money that we owe them into looking at some sort of meter modernization pilot, which could provide the foundation for us being able to eventually someday provide smart metering. So that's real time control or knowledge of what your water usage is to a larger portion of the city. We're also gonna be using that money to mutually look at what I call hospital water supply resiliency. I wanna make sure that we know everything we need to know about the pipes around the hospital and inside the hospital, so that that facility, not that I ever want anybody to run out of water, but that facility in particular can never run out of water. There's money in for two new super excited about this customer assistance programs, which I believe is the first time in history. We're gonna be putting in $40,000 to be able to provide rebates to customers so that they can fill in their sewer line. They can use a local company and depending on whether they're income burdened or not will either be covering 200 of a typical $250 charge or full $250 charge so that people can do that proactive work to understand what their sewer lateral looks like. It is a private lateral. We do not own it, but we wanna be able to facilitate people being able to plan and hopefully we'll collect some data that may be able to help the water resources utility, perhaps develop a grant or loan program to help people be able to actually replace those. We're also putting in 15 grand on the water side to help pay for water since fixtures. One of the best ways that people can implement to control their water usage, to bring their water bill down, you can try to get your kids to turn off the faucet, you can try to take shorter showers, but just actually limiting the amount of flow that can happen when you flush the toilet really is the best way to do it. There's also some money in there for fully funding one of the last phases of our 2019 staffing plan. Some of you are around for that where we had gone through and kind of identified the key places where we needed to increase staffing. And in particular, one of the positions was a water resources technician. So this is a technical person who's not necessarily an engineer but who can do some of the maybe less technical work going out doing surveys, checking out a storm drain and then bringing that information back to the engineer so that they're not constantly running out and having to do that work. We also in that program had identified a wastewater operator in training. And one of the things that I'm trying to bring forward instead of just adding a position and then having that person potentially be stuck at that level, been working with Lynn Reagan and understanding the tiered approach that BED has been applying. And I think that this is really a great opportunity to have those operator and training positions also be tiered. So somebody comes in at a lower level and as they get their various licenses, they can move up even if we don't have an actual full blown operator position open. Another position which we hadn't talked about in the past and I've tried to look at it a whole bunch of different ways but I think at this point I'm landing on the fact that the water plants in order to provide overall some more operational resiliency and in particular to get the senior plant mechanic back on during the days. We're also looking at a tiered water operator and training position as well. Both of these operator and training positions are also key to build the workforce to hopefully get in folks who may not have the may not meet the minimum requirements as is but we can get them in, train them on our system and grow them in our organization because it's getting really, really hard to find these operators. From a fiscal health perspective, BED talked about this all three of our funds water, wastewater and storm water have significant capital improvement needs in their future. And with that in mind, even if we're not funding all of them right now we need to make sure that our coffers are robust, that we have healthy cash reserves that help us when we go to even the bond bank for loan underwriting. And then also even just from a cash flow perspective making sure that if we're doing these large projects most of the projects that we do are reimbursement based. And so we spend the money and then we need to go through a process to get reimbursed from the state. And so we need to make sure we have robust cash flow to be able to pay those invoices. For the first time in the FY22 budget we're going to be looking, I had this as a goal for a while to establish dedicated capital reserves. Right now in the budget I have about 50,000 bucks that's going specifically to water and storm water. And then putting in $100,000 to start off this capital reserve sort of bank account or savings account if you will for wastewater. Because wastewater has the smallest operational cash reserve of the three funds. It has about a hundred days of cash on hand. We're also looking to try to program with your support about $100,000 of a budget surplus to build their days of cash on hand. Anything that you all can support from the ARPA funds the local ARPA funds to replenish that FY20 lost revenue is obviously also going to help bolster our overall long-term financial health. Getting to the retail revenue side which is where the rates come in. When we look at the usage and whatnot we often see a flat or even a slight decrease in overall water usage trends as people build new buildings even if there's new units being added people are putting, they are putting in more efficient water fixtures. And so we don't see with development necessarily an upward trend in our water usage. And so we're constantly fighting that battle. In our FY22 budget we are not currently programming in COVID specific declines. We are hoping, keeping our fingers crossed that the trends that we've been seeing in that graph I showed you in the beginning are going to continue. And obviously if that doesn't happen then we will have to retool. If we were just following our typical rate structure which I talked about the fact that we're doing a rate restructuring we would be, actually we need a 6% increase in retail revenue overall for water and wastewater and then about a 5% for stormwater. We were able to not have a rate increase last year and move some things around. So we do need to have that this year. The increases in the revenue that we've put in does include conservative assumptions regarding the uptake rate for the water resources Fixie waiver program. So we'll talk about this a little bit more on Monday but part of our program is we're setting our rates to be a certain amount. But if you demonstrate that you are incumberdent because we don't want to be checking income and we're trying to keep this as administratively simple as possible this would take the form of somebody actually showing proof of being eligible for some other federal type program. So we've done some assumptions about how many people might be eligible for that and how many people want to actually come in and apply and those assumptions are pretty conservative. So we feel pretty comfortable that there should be enough money to cover the amount of people who may come in and not be contributing to that overall retail revenue. At the end of the day, even though overall like if we were doing a regular rate increase folks would be seeing about a 5.9% increase in their water resources bill. But with the adoption, if you are supportive of the 2021 rate restructuring and affordability program specifically for residential property owners the overall impact is going to be significantly minimized and in many cases reduced for the typical user, single family user, they're actually not gonna see an increase over their FY21 bill assuming they use the same amount of water. For duplex and triplex customers I believe they'll actually see a bit of a decrease. It's hard to tell say what everybody's impact is going to be and that's why we do have forms available on our website where people can actually request an estimate of what they think their bill is going to be based on past usage. And lastly, looking ahead we have to continue to reinvest in our existing infrastructure. I talked about the phase two clean water resiliency plan that we're currently in the planning stages of which w