What's going on, everybody? It is your man, Corey. And today, I have a very special announcement for you guys, especially for you producers who've been following us for a while saying, man, the Brain Man Network just shows so much love to artists that never really show any love to producers. And today we got something that's going to be showing a lot of love to you guys if I say so myself. So, Corey, what are you talking about? What is this beat battle contest that I keep seeing these thumbnails about across this video? And that's exactly what I want this video to be about is to explain what this contest is, pretty much give you all the details on it so you can go ahead and enter, man, and get your best chance at winning. So we are doing a beat battle contest for all of you producers out there. All you have to do to submit is to go to brandmannetwork.com slash beat battle. The link will be in the description below and submit your best work to be voted on by fans and us at the Brain Man Network to win over, you know, I think the monetary value is about over $4,000 worth of value of prizes. That's what we're going to be giving away because we love you guys, man.  So if you stick around to this video, I want to run through exactly what the contest is for, what you'll be winning, how you can enter the contest, what the prizes will be like, what the deadline will be, all that good stuff. And then once I'm done, you can click out this joint, go in there and go ahead and get your best shot at getting some of these prizes to you. All right. So deadline for the beats will be December 15th. You have until December 15th to submit as many beats as you want to. Now I would get into that a little bit more specifically because there are some caveats to it. But overall, you have as many beats as you want to submit. That's how many we're willing to take. So winners of this contest will get access to the brand man networks cutting out the middleman marketing toolbox. This is what the grand prize is. Now what this is, it is essentially a marketing agency in a box. We have been working hard to create this product, to create this service for people who want to be able to put together their own marketing department for their labels or their artist teams or just other marketers who are trying to learn these things. So we've actually put together a box that we're going to be selling at some point that would allow you to create your own marketing agency. It comes with contact lists, foundational things like ads and YouTube ads, Facebook ads, all that stuff, pretty much everything that you would need to go from A to Z in the heartbeat with setting up a marketing department for yourself. So the winner of this contest will get that absolutely free. We're going to be taxing for that joint when it comes out too. So the winner of that will get that absolutely free. You will get an interview on the brand man network. We will interview you here on our YouTube channel and have it also in the brand man network. Pretty much letting people get to see a story, how you came about, even knowing about the contest. Just pretty much us giving our audience a chance to get to know you, the winning producer. And your beat will also be used for our upcoming rap competition. So all of you artists that are watching this right now thinking like, dang man, I wish I could win some prizes. We would have a competition for you specifically in about a month and a half. And the beats that are chosen from this competition will be the beats that will be used in those competitions. If you're an artist and you're feeling like you're going to want to enter, you better get in here and vote for some of these producers man. Vote for the one that you feel like going to give you your best chance at winning the overall competition once it gets to you. And on top of that man, we're going to be giving you guys some great, great, amazing free exposure for every producer that is a part of this contest. Us being marketers, of course we're going to be running ads on this stuff. Come on now. So that's thousands of dollars of free exposure for you guys pretty much. And all of these artists that will be coming through looking at these beats, voting and everything, that's pretty much putting in front of a clientele man. You know the rappers love us, bro. Like they love us and we're going to make sure to push them your way as a thanks for you for rocking with us. You know what I'm saying? So like I was saying, those are the prizes. The cutting out the middleman package and interview on our brand man channel and and and having your beat used in the rap competition that will be coming up in a couple of weeks. And if you don't happen to be first place, we're not going to leave you out. We do have a second place prize. Second place will get access to everything that first place gets to accept the cutting out the middleman package. But instead of that, we'll give you like two free months of access to the brand man network. So you can still come in and check it out, learn some stuff and it'll still be our big thank you for even taking the part. So how do you enter the contest? How do you the aspiring producer whose hand is going? Yo, you already sold me, bro. I'm down. What do I need to do? Like I said, if you would like to submit your beat, go to brand man network.com slash beat battle. The link will be in the description below. All deadlines must be turned in by December 15 at 1159 p.m. All of these details will be on the link in page also on the submit page. So if I miss anything from going too fast, you can check it out. But the deadline will be December 15 by midnight. Pretty much to submit your beats. It is $2 of submission. So that's what I was saying. You can submit as many beats as you want to, or pretty much as many beats as you're willing to pay for. There will be two separate factions on the way that we pick beats. There will be a fan voting process. So the beat that you submit for the fan voting process must be different than the beat that you submit to the brand man judge side of it. So what they will look like is we'll have a section on our website where people, your fans, other producers, fans or just general fans of the network can come in and vote on the beats. That's where you can push all your people to that joint. Get your name out here.  Get us looking at you like they ain't broke out of out here. But there will also be a section where we, me, Sean and the rest of the team here at the brand man network will physically go through and listen to each beat and decide which beat we like the best, which beat we feel like deserves the most attention, the most recognition. Like I said, it is an individual beat submission for those. You can choose one beat for your fan submission. You can submit as many beats as you want for the brand man network side. Like I said, all of those are pretty much $2 of submission and they have to be in by December 15th. Guys, December 15, December 15, December 15. And after that, we're going to let the process run for about two weeks. And then we will choose a winner. Now, like I said, all the details will be on the submission page. So when you get to it, man, read through everything. I ain't trying to get no angry dins for none of y'all. Read through everything. Make sure I didn't miss anything. Make sure you don't miss anything. So if you give yourself the best possible chance at winning this contest overall. Oh snap. I just forgot about something. Other stigma. You also, also, also must follow Brand Man Network on Instagram. So the rules to this contest are follow Brand Man Network, submit your beat for $2 and get all your fans, your friends and your family to come over and vote and give yourself the best chance of winning. So yeah, man, that's pretty much it. Like I said, I'm looking forward to see what work all the producers submit to this contest. This is something that we've been working on for a minute. It's pretty much our chance to give back at our producer community so we can then give back to our rap community and we can all have some fun here. We can all win some stuff. I think this will be pretty cool. I think this will be something. I'm definitely looking forward to voting on everything. So if you have any questions, if you need to look through this process again, like I said, please go to brandmannetwork.com slash beat battle. Read through that entire page. Read everything. Make sure you give me yourself the best chance to win because these prizes, man, these prizes, you're going to want those joints, man. So hopefully y'all win or hopefully one of you guys wins and I'll see y'all next time.


It is Monday, March 11th at 6 p.m. I will call to order the liquor control board meeting. Please join us in the Pledge of Allegiance led by Deputy Mayor Thomas Werner. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All right, thank you. So on deck this evening, we have a number of renewals. The last on sports bar, big seven main, average warehouse, sneakers, monkey, same as quick stop and Asian bistro. Wood, is Jenny in the room? Would staff like to let us know if there are any concerns with any of these renewals? You will approve on January 2nd for their outside consumption restaurant licenses. Okay, thank you. Are there any questions from council? Why did you vote for the rest? The Asian bistro one? I forgot to add the restaurant. Okay, so that'll be next time. That could be next time or make that an emotion that you're approving the restaurant license as well. We can have it back worn properly next time, but if you'd like to approve it so they can start operating. I'm fine with that. Yeah. Okay. Is there any public comment questions about this item? Okay, would someone like to make a motion to approve items A through G including a restaurant license renewal for Asian bistro? So moved. Second. Motion by Charlie, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Was that everyone? Sorry. Yes. Motion carries. Thank you. Recording in progress. That is the end of the control board agenda. Do I have a motion to adjourn? So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Bryn. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Meeting adjourned. So it is 6.03 and I will now call to order the city council meeting. Are there any concerns about the order of this evening's agenda? Next up is public comments. This is faced for any members of the public who wish to speak on a topic not on this evening's agenda. If you are here for an item on the agenda, please try to wait for that item. We invite public comment at every agenda item. Is there anyone in the room who wishes to make public comment? Not at the moment. Thank you. And anyone on Zoom use the chat or raise hand for future? Okay. Seeing none, we'll move on to our consent agenda. We have our council and cannabis control commission meeting minutes from February 20th, payroll warrants from February and March, accounts payable of March and subsequent payout for September, October, November, December, and January. Are there any concerns on the consent agenda this week? No. Do I have a motion to approve the consent agenda? So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Charlie. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Council reports. Aurora, could I start with you? Thank you, everyone, so much who came out and voted. And we left me for a second term. My update for a Safe Healthy Connected People Commission is we are meeting tomorrow, March 12th. We are going to be in person at the O'Brien Center. The meeting is taking place at 5.30pm. We're trying to move our schedule to this earlier time to make it easier for the commissioners in attendance to attend based on their feedback. Items on the agenda include amending the commission charter to include the inclusion and belonging commission liaison as a voting member, as well as reviewing our scholarship policy and recommending any edits to that. The inclusion and belonging commission doesn't meet this month. Thanks, Aurora. The airport commission is meeting tomorrow, the 13th, on Wednesday, the 13th. That was delayed. It's usually the first Wednesday of the month, but it was delayed from March. Regular agenda items include noise complaints, progress on sound insulation, and updating the noise exposure maps. So that is in person, as well as online. If anyone is interested in sharing comments ahead of time with me, please send them my way. The infrastructure commission is scheduled to meet on March 21st, 6.30pm at the pool community room. We don't have an agenda set, but it will be noticed on all our regular social media channels and the website when that's ready. First, I'd just like to thank residents of Wanooski for electing me again for another term. I'd also like to thank everybody who showed up for all of our different budget meetings. It was really great to see such a turnout from the community to learn more about what you're all going to be voting for. Downtown Wanooski will be meeting next week, but I do want to let everybody know if you haven't seen on their social media that downtown Wanooski is participating in the Better Places project. It's a great opportunity for our downtown to receive some state funds. The caveat to that is that downtown Wanooski is fundraising for half of those funds. So if you go to downtownwanooski.org, you can learn more about the project and see what they're hoping to do with that money that they would fundraise in the grant. Thank you. All right, Charlie. The Wanooski Housing Commission met on February 27th at 6pm. The Commission reviewed updated landlord survey data, which is available on the city website now. The Commission also discussed the progress made on updating the Housing Trust Fund, and also reviewed a memorandum on replacement regulations and inclusionary zoning considerations to be presented to council at a future meeting. Our next meeting is next Tuesday the 19th at 6pm. There's an online option as well as in person here at City Hall. All right, thank you. A big thanks to the clerk's office and other supporting staff and our Board of Civil Authority members for pulling off another successful town meeting day. My one update to share is that I recently authored a letter to state legislators requesting that they look at the state statute that could allow a reduction in the Wanooski match share for the bridge project. We are continuing to reach out to our legislators and advocate for some forward action. That is all for me. We'll move on to city updates, Elaine. I have a very short one just to say that if folks want to see the official results of voting, they can visit the news updates section on our website at WanooskiVT.gov. Thank you to voters for passing the city budget and the bond votes. And on behalf of staff, I welcome our 2024-2025 council. All right, thank you. So our regular items first up for discussion is the fiscal year 2023 audit report. Will Angela be welcoming a guest? I will be. John Boulet from RHR Smith is here to give you their audit opinion for our 2023 results. Hello. Thank you, Angela. Thank you, everybody, for taking the time out of your day to listen to this. We audited the FY23 financial statements for the city of Wanooski. And I will just run through pretty much the major changes from prior year and a couple of the schedules throughout the audit. I'm not going to go through the whole document, but a few pages here and there we'll discuss. So I am going to start on page 24 of the audit. This is statement E. It is the income statement for the governmental funds. Basically, we have the general fund, TIF, a community development loan, capital reserve fund, and some other non-major governmental funds. So the major thing on this schedule right here is I look at the very bottom right. You can see the fund balance at year end is 8.2 million in totality. That's an increase of around 1.5 million throughout FY23. Last year, the fund balance actually increased 815,000. So year over year, watching this increase is always a good thing, especially two years in a row with over 5,000. After that, I'm going to move down a couple pages to page 28. And this is another income statement, but this one is for the proprietary funds, water, sewer, parking fund. Same goes here. Bottom right is the fund balance or net position with capital assets included 21.1 million. This is a decrease from last year of around 800,000. In 22, it also decreased around 639,000. I'm not too worried about this just because of how healthy these net position numbers are. So I would keep an eye on this year over year if we're seeing some negative changes in net position or fund balance. It would be good to get ahead of it, but with the healthy numbers that we're seeing here, it's nothing to raise a red flag or raise an eyebrow over really. After that page, just a little note on page 41. This is where we start our notes to the financial statements. On the bottom of page 41, this is where you can see total cash, cash on hand or investments, things of that sort. The 9.5 million is a $2 million increase from prior year. And I think a lot of that is due to the accounts receivable received before year end.  AR was down a little bit from prior year and that's where that balances out. Skipping around a little bit. We're going further down to more notes to the financials. Page 68. Page 68, 69, and then the very top of 70 is a breakdown of your restricted, non-spendable committed fund balances. So when we were looking at statement E, statement G, those total fund balances there, you can see this broken down even more for the TIF district, capital projects, anything that is basically committed for a specific reason can be shown in this statement right here. Next, we're moving to page 82. This is your budget actual throughout the year. It was very good looking at this, seeing that you received more than anticipated in revenues and you spent less than your budget expenditures were. These two go hand in hand, especially if they're both on the surplus side. It's a recipe for success. Last year, it was noted that the budget was overspent by 74,000. So it's good to see these things turn around. Since expenditures were under spent by 109, total revenue, about 90,000 more, it's always good to see that equates to around 200,000. And then further down in this audit, we have schedule A on page 87. When we were looking at statement E, there was the non-major portion of everything. This is where you can see that broken down. Schedule A is your balance sheet for your non-major special revenue funds, Justice Center, Asset Forfeatures, your JAG fund. The page right underneath that is your income statement. So basically, you can see the fund balances again at the bottom of page 88, an increase in every fund here. It's always good to see. And if we keep scrolling down a couple pages to 90, it's schedule C. This is your balance sheet for the proprietary funds, parking garage, on-street meters. And the page underneath that, 91, is the income statement again for the proprietary funds. At the bottom of that page, you can also see your fund balances and net position with your capital assets included. Everything seems to have go up except, I know this is where things were getting decreased, but I would say out of every single fund that the city maintains, the only negative fund balance I'm seeing right now is the on-street meters. And it's very immaterial, 16,000 really. It doesn't mean a whole lot, but I would just keep an eye on it, make sure it doesn't get too large. But yeah, one fund out of that many funds is really good to have positive fund balances. So next page 90, last comment I have is on page 92. So a couple pages down. These are the federal awards throughout the year. Last year, there was over $750,000 spent, which triggered the single audit. This year, $51,000, it was well below $750,000. So we didn't have to do the single audit this year. I remember last year was the coronavirus relief funds, tested that, no findings. This year, we didn't test anything. So that means next year, we will test if it's over $750,000. And yeah, we provided a management letter comment. I looked at the cover sheet that was provided by Angela. She hit the nail on the head there. Management letter essentially states that there's no recommendations for improvement at this time. Through audit field work, we do a lot of our internal controls testing, making sure policies, procedures are all up to date. And in my eyes, it didn't case that the city has very sound financial policies and practices, and that is what Angela had put on this cover sheet. And I would say that is a very accurate statement. I've been auditing the city four years at this point. First couple years was under a coworker, kind of took the reins over from him. And it's been nothing but good news, progress moving forward. And I have no internal controls, internal control comments for Angela at this time. I'd say it was a very, very sound audit, same as last year. And I'd love to provide a little bit of context for some of the statements that John just gave you. He mentioned how we had a surplus in the governmental funds of 800,000 for FY23. That is specifically related to ARPA dollars. We did not raise $800,000 too much in property taxes that is related to grant funds that we received. And he mentioned that in fiscal year 22 that we had overspent in the general fund, those were over expenditures that the council had authorized to come out of reserves. So those were not things that the council was not aware of having occurred. So we're adding on that clarity. Kudos to you for another very good audit, for good work. And to RHR, thank you for continuing to look after our details. We did accept this report at a prior meeting, but appreciate the walkthrough and there's an opportunity if council has any questions or wants any more detail. Yeah, anytime. Appreciate you taking the time and working with my schedule as well. So I'm glad I'm here and able to present. Are there any questions from council? I don't have any questions. Just thank you as always, Angela, for keeping everything, keeping the ship steady. And John, thanks for your work. Thank you. I have a question about bonds and if bond management is anything that's looked at as part of the audit? It is, yes, long term debt. So we basically create an amortization schedule based off of what Angela provides to us. We then look at the documents and let me see if I can find it in the audit really quick. Because we basically, Angela does most of the work, we review and audit the work she does by looking at amortization schedules, agreements, debt payments, and bonds. Let's see if I can find it really quick. One thing that I would like to comment here is we were recently rated by Moody's investment services for our debt obligations for the Main Street project, the short term issuance. We received a rating of AA3 issuer with a big one short term rating. So those are both very favorable ratings from Moody's. They actually mirror those received by the city of Burlington, which has a much larger staff. Yep. So the bonds payable you're talking about are going to be on page 66. It's kind of just a summary of everything. But yeah, what we do, and I would agree with that note from Angela, debt payments or bond payments more specifically are all on time. No late fees that I've seen. These summary schedules and if you scroll above those pages, it breaks down between business type, which would be water and sewer and then governmental would be more just general fund and other funds that constitute as governmental. So, you know, there's some leases in there that constitute as notes payable. But yeah, no, nothing that raised red flag when completing the debt work paper. So that's all good there too. In addition, we have some pretty robust post bond issuance compliance regulations that we follow with the Vermont Municipal Bond Bank. It requires annual filings, not only of our audit, but also disclosures regarding the use of funds and the documentation that we maintain regarding our bonds. And I want to make clear that my asking the question is not a reason for concern or expressing any reason for concern on my end. We are going to be undertaking some additional bonds for the Winnieski Bridge and just curious about the way that's managed and the way that there's annual review of that. I've said it before, I'll say it again, I'm not an expert in financial management by any realm. So really just kind of curious. So thank you. And congrats on the double A3, I think, as though the term you used. Something good. Yeah. Any other questions from Council? Any members of the public who wish to make a comment or ask a question? No questions. Okay, great. Well, thank you all. We will move on to item B. This is on for discussion or approval. The Winnieski Falls East revised design. John, will you be introducing guests as well? Introduction. Paul, can you bring the bill forward to the panelists? Great. So before and tonight is the latest update for the design plans for the Winnieski Falls East project. So that's the City of Parking Garage, the hotel on the south unit, and the proposed housing on the north unit that has come before you a few times. So hopefully this is the last design review that you will see. The purpose tonight is we're looking to finalize this design approval and just make sure it's syncing up with Act 250 filing that we have to do to make sure that all the permits are sort of synced up before finalizing the project as it moves into the next phase of construction. So what you'll see tonight in these renderings and Bill can go over in a little more detail, but basically it's the same footprint and amassing that you saw back in the fall. I think September you all saw a version of this. So really the only changes are the facade material types plans. So kind of with that overview, Bill, do you want to give an update? And I don't know if we can show it on the screen. Paul, can you bring up those plans possibly? Yes, give me two seconds. I also have them. I have them available in order to if it'll help me to share. I just don't know how that works. Bill, I got you covered in two seconds here. Yeah, and as that's queuing up, so Bill Nikhet is our partner on this. He's representing the real estate project manager for folks here. And John, I don't know if Doug is in the audience or if he is. Maybe we could promote him as well. I think I see a Doug that just joins. So while Paul is bringing that up, I just say hello. I'm Bill Nikhet and I think I know everyone here. I appreciate your continued consideration of our efforts here. And Doug and I wanted to bring these relatively minor aesthetic revisions forward because we've now arrived at a time in the project where we want to start we want to start gearing up for construction of the hotel and housing elements specifically. And we always imagined that at the time those plans were close to final, we would then return to Act 250 with an updated set of renderings and information that would in effect true up the project with the original approvals that we received back in 2020. So John's correct. We've been back in front of you two other times since then to kind of get your general approval of the design elements of the project so that we kind of knew at different milestones that we were in the right pointed in the right direction before finalizing plans. These plans we're sharing with you tonight are effectively substantially final in terms of what we imagined building. John's right. The scale of the projects overall hasn't really moved since last September when you saw them last. But we have added some material callouts and some made some changes to the housing building in particular to create sort of a different aesthetic feel than the more modern interpretation that we had just got back in September. And that was effectively just the internal choice on our part after looking at several different ideas. This is the one that kind of resonated the most with the ownership group. So with that being said, what we're looking at here is the west elevation of the building on the left hand side that white cube is CCV. On the right hand side that cube is the edge of Riverrun. The building on the left is the housing. It's five stories of residential construction over the podium with an entrance and lobby level that opens up onto Community Way, the new street that'll exist between CCV and the housing building. And on the right hand side of the rendering is the hotel. It's six floors above the podium, a total of eight floors. And originally was nine now eight. And the top floor of that building is all of the public space for the building as it was originally. So the restaurant in facing south, the outdoor seasonal patio. And to the rear and the other elevations, you'll see a set of meeting spaces that can be demised as one to three spaces. If you want to go to the next slide, please. This is what I call the the the back view. So this is looking at the project from it's the east elevation, looking at it from the parkland, kind of the most honest interpretation or what the project looks like showing the garage, you know, sort of unscreened on this side as it was originally the hotel on the left and the housing on the right. But this gives you an opportunity to sort of see in true form how the garage works. And you know, for those folks watching who are in attendance who haven't seen this previously, the the lowest level of the garage exits to the left to the south onto Wunuski Fallsway, that center level exits directly onto Abenaki Way and the top level exits on the community way to the right. So we're sort of using the slope of the hill to our advantage. Next slide please. This is kind of a made up view in the sense that this is the north elevation. This is what CCV would see from their building. There's there isn't really a public perspective where the building is viewed in this kind of way because of where CCV's building sits, but this represents the rendering of that building on that side. The building is effectively very similar on each of the five floors except at the top level. We've opened up that corner unit into a public space for all the residents within the building, including a little roof deck. And it creates an opportunity to kind of lessen the scale of the building at the corner and also have, you know, some some gathering space for people who live there, both indoor and outdoor space. Next slide please. And finally, this is the south elevation. What you would see if you were standing in front of River Run, looking up, this is effectively the the main entrance of the hotel. You can see the Port Couchere and sort of the garage being effectively 100% screened on this level. The elements that have the vertical elements coming down the front of the building represent the floors that are built out over the parking deck. And you can see to the right hand side as the grade drops off into the park that a portion of the building is built out over that hillside at the edge of the wetland area, as you may recall. So from a overall point of view, the footprint of this particular project or this particular execution, the way that it sits on the site and the scale and feel of the building, the uses is the same as it was in September when you saw it last. But from a permitting perspective, as most of you know, the original use of the North site was for commercial office building for BEIC. And so now that we have these plans in substantially final form, we will be working with staff to submit an updated package of civil and site plans and these elevations that will change that use formally at the permit level from commercial to workforce housing. And once those approvals are obtained, we will then bring those back to the city zoning office for revised approval at the city level. So those steps are things we're hopeful that we'll be able to file a revised package in the next several days, assuming of course that we are fortunate enough to have your approval. And we're currently hoping that the both the hotel and the housing project will effectively break ground, although of course they're built over the garage this summer as soon as the garage is able to support it. So we're hoping that there'll be no break and in construction activity that that will simply continue to flow forward. And that's why we're kind of in a place where it makes sense to finalize these things. So with that, I'll appreciate your indulgence. I do have on my side of the ledger, I can share from my screen any pictures about the original approvals or anything else you may want to see for reference purposes. Thank you, Bill. Looks very familiar to me. Are there any questions from members of council? And Deputy Mayor Renner, if you could please assist me. Yeah, just one question. I can't tell from the renderings if there are balconies that are proposed, especially balconies proposed as part of the renderings for the housing portion of the project. There aren't balconies on these units. What we've generally done at NETI in terms of how that tradeoff has gone as we try to create these public spaces at the roof that allow people to have a lot of amenities afforded to them up there. So there's usually associated with those fire pits and grills, things of that nature that we can control and sprinkler and kind of handle in an organized way as opposed to having an assortment of whatever sitting out on private patios. So that's just the design and sort of management choice that we've made. Yeah, I'm actually happy to hear that because I have fellow questions if there were balconies. So I'm always quite conflicted, Fred, to be honest, because from a personal point of view, I do like the idea of having one if I lose it in an apartment. But on the other hand, they do come with a sort of rather long slew of code issues and enforcement problems that we find that are just easier to solve that we can give people a single space we can manage more directly. Yeah, exactly. Appreciate it. Thank you. I have two questions. One of them might be a little silly, but how are all these windows going to be cleaned? Especially I was looking at the ones over. I don't know if that's going to be built in as part of the architecture to make that easy. I've seen that on some buildings. Yeah, I don't think it's silly at all. The windows in the hotel at the top level, many of them, the larger ones, many of them are set back from the main facade and they're facing out. There's a patio in front of them, so those obviously can be cleaned in the normal way. But there are services that provide, there aren't a ton of tall buildings in Burlington area, but there are enough of them that there are window washing services where people effectively repel down from the roof level to provide that service, and that's how we manage it in other locations. Okay, sounds good. Yeah, I was just really curious, what's the one facing the wetland? I can assure you it won't be me. Very fair. My other question, and this is just around the materials, just making sure that kind of fire safety was taken into, I assume it was taken into account, but I noticed it doesn't look like there are any staircases on the outside, so just wondering a little bit about that. Sure. Well, of course, these are all buildings that require a pretty detailed review at the state level, and of course the fire marshal reviews them locally, so the hotel has a total of three elevators in it, and as well as two egress stairs that sort of line up with the code, and the housing building has a single elevator and two egress stairs. Both buildings are in the garage, actually, are fully sprinkled in all locations, so that also provides an additional element of protection from a fire point of view, but yes, the hotel, particularly because it's a Marriott product, also goes through a very rigorous review at their headquarters to assure that it meets all of their standards, which in many cases exceed the base code because of their, you know, lots of experience, obviously, on their end in terms of what they have seen work and not work with hotels. Thank you, that's very helpful, I appreciate it. Bill, really great to see the addition of the outdoor space in the housing section, and really awesome to hear that you're going to outfit it with barbecues and other things like that. You had mentioned it a little bit, was just hoping you could run over again just the timeline of what we're looking at. Sure. They quite often hear from folks is when they're going to start seeing that building rise up, so. Right, right. Well, I think for people who are in that area, you know, it'll feel like the building is going up when steel starts to be, you know, erected. They're just finalizing shop drawings for the garage to start that particular erection. I believe the current schedule is for that to start in early May. And, you know, that process will get us to a point where hopefully we'll be looking to, so the garage project will construct the garage and the podiums. The housing would basically be the erection of the, you know, the wood panel system that goes up above the podium. We're hoping to see that start to evolve, you know, as soon as July. Now, that's our target. You know, of course, that's all dependent upon the garage finishing on time and everything being smooth. I think that building goes up rather quickly because the intent is that these things are fabricated offsite and then large panels are brought in with a crane and erected quickly. Right. The hotel side of things is a similar start point, but that's a more traditional steel and prefabricated concrete plank construction. So, you know, that will sort of feel more like a conventional construction. People might, you know, imagine what they've seen in Burlington, for example, over the last year, you know, with the different buildings going up there. That's great. Thank you so much. Yeah. Everything looks good for Act 250. You're asking me? Anyone who would like to answer the question? Yeah, no, no, I'm sorry. Sure. I mean, from our point of view, this is a relatively, you know, it's a relatively minor change because the garage remains in the same footprint. So, Act 250 is principally concerned with environmental impacts. And, you know, because the things that are touching the ground are effectively not changing, there's actually very little that needs to be updated there. But I've been doing this long enough to know that I'm sure there'll be something that'll come up we'll have to address. But the hope is the original filing here was a minor amendment to the previous plan.  So, each of these things represents kind of an incremental change. And the last, the addition of this entire project was deemed a minor amendment. So, of course, we would imagine this to be minor as well. Great. Well, thank you. It looks great. I know everyone's looking forward to it. Well, we appreciate your continued support. Certainly hope the housing component will be favorable with the amendment review. Yeah, certainly an approved use. And as we all know, it's much needed. So, I think we're quite confident. It could actually, in theory, be pursued as something that doesn't need an amendment at all because affordable housing has certain special treatment with Act 250. But because this has already been approved as a mixed use development, we discussed it with staff, and it seems more straightforward to simply file revised plans for everything rather than to cut it up into pieces. Great. Thank you. Looks like we're all good on questions here, Christine. Any questions for members of the public who are attending? If you're in the room, raise your hand. If you're on Zoom, use the raise hand feature or the chat. No questions in the building. Oh, Mere, I do want to just call out to you. It looks like Doug is on as a panelist. Doug, did you want to add anything? I guess, okay, I can unmute myself. I didn't know that. Sorry about that. Yes, I want to say that we're getting more and more excited about this hotel and the housing, but specifically on the hotel, Marriott has over 6,000 different hotels around the world, and we're working towards having this hotel, Nwanowski, be the first all electric net zero hotel in the world for Marriott. And that's through a combination of geothermal and solar. So it's quite exciting for us, and we're looking to again do something quite special here, and we appreciate everyone's support on this project. All right, thank you. Do I have a motion from council to approve the Wimiski Falls piece revised design? So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Bryn. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you very much. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Doug. Thank you. Thank you very much, folks. Okay, we'll move on to item C, the sun for discussion or approval, local resources advisory board appointments. Eric will be introducing and I think a couple of our applicants are also in attendance this evening. Yes, thank you very much. This is an item on for appointments of membership to the local resources advisory board. As you may recall back in January, you approved resolution establishing the local resources advisory board to review projects that are covered under the newly created local resources protections regulations that were also approved by council and became effective at the end of February. So we put out a call for applications for this board. We received five applications. All of the applicants are qualified to serve on this board. So we're looking to appoint those members to the terms to one and two year terms respectively as outlined in the cover sheet. So I know Doug Johnson is in the room tonight and I believe Sue, Brian and Matt Shown are online tonight as well. So if you have any questions for any of those folks or for myself. Thanks, Eric. It does look like a very qualified group for this work. I would invite Doug Matt or Sue if there's anything you want to say, please feel free. Doug, here in the room, you could come up to the mic for the other folks raising hands in. You also don't have to speak. Well, I'll just go ahead and say thank you for giving us this opportunity, first of all, to form this advisory local board, but also to allow us to participate. We're excited. I'm excited. So thank you. Thank you. I think I see Matt's hand raised. Echo of that. It's really a great opportunity. I love spending time on Winooski and I really look forward to getting to work on this council. And Doug, glad to have you back around. Any questions from council for any of our applicants? Oh, you're up. Yes. Hello. Welcome. I'm not an entirely silent guy. I do want to say something about this. I think it's a great group of people, myself, not included in that statement, but it is an area that I've been extremely interested in for most of my adult life. So I look forward to being able to serve in this kind of capacity for as long as the city wants me. Thanks, Doug. Are there any questions from members of council? One question. Eric, can you refresh our memory on the roles that we had approved the expertise that we were searching for that wasn't included in the memo? Yes. So in the resolution specifically that created the, sorry, the charter that created the advisory board, we're looking for expertise in the fields of historic preservation, history, architecture, archaeology, and related disciplines. Great. I should also mention that we have five members that have applied. Those are the only five applications we've received. There are two additional alternate spots that we can fill on this board as well. So if other folks do apply, we will continue to solicit membership for those remaining two spots as well. Great. Good to know that those alternate spaces are still open. Yes, absolutely. Okay. Is that, Mayor, is that something, someone from the Inclusion and Belonging Commission would be asked to be a liaison? No, because it's not a policy advisory commission. It's a more regulatory, like the DRB, the development people. Great. Anyone else have questions? Well, thank you. Yeah. Thank you for your interest, all. Do I have a motion from, do I have a motion to approve the appointments to the local resources advisory board? So moved. Second. Motion by Charlie, second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed or abstaining? Motion carries. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay. Moving on to item D. This is city council orientation. All of you were here last year. So you have all seen these materials before. I won't belabor this. I will just say the orientation has a little bit of updated demographic data in it. And I also incorporated our engagement and equity assessment tools into it. Elaine, are there any edits that you made that you want to highlight? No, I wouldn't say so. Okay. These are included in the packet for your reference. Please refresh yourself on them if you haven't already. Anyone have any questions though or comments? Okay. We don't need to approve that. We are on item E. This is appointment of Deputy Mayor. I would like to make the recommendation that Councillor Renner continue to serve in the role of Deputy Mayor as he has for the past year. If someone is in support of that, I would entertain a motion to nominate Thomas as Deputy Mayor. I gladly move to have Thomas as the Deputy Mayor again. Second. Motion by Bryn, second by Charlie. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Thanks everybody. Moving on to the Council Rules of Procedure. Again, this is same things that we have seen in the past here as a refresher and also for any questions or if somebody wanted to change anything. Do Council have any questions? Okay. Do I have a motion to approve the Council Rules of Procedure as is? So moved. Motion by Thomas, second by Bryn. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Moving on to the Conflict of Interest Policy. I believe this is the same as last year as well. Can you confirm a link? Correct. All right. Any questions about the Conflict of Interest Policy? No. Do I have a motion to approve? Second. Motion by Aurora, second by Charlie. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Moving on to the Council Meeting Schedule. Is there any concerns about the proposed schedule? I'm curious why we're moving why it's proposed to have the strategies and priorities in the late June. I had discussed that with Elaine and wanted to have that after tax bills go out so we have a better sense of the impact of our votes this year. I'm not sure it's going to be, I'm not sure if the timing will quite work for that, but that was the goal. Right. They won't have gone out yet, but it will be pretty close to that. So it's because of the uncertainty about the statewide ed taxes. They, when I contacted our district advisor at property valuation review, which is the state body that sets the ed taxes, they indicated that they were still thinking it was going to happen at the usual time. I don't know how that's possible, but that's what they said. So just trying to maximize the amount of opportunity for them to set that before you all meet as context for affordability in the community. So May 9th is the usual day when they pass the yield bill at the legislature and then once that's done they can calculate the education tax rates. I do see a hand raised in the Zoom attendees list. Yes, hello. Can you hear me? Yes, welcome. All right. This public comment already passed for not on the agenda. So our open public comment was at the top of the agenda. I realized I did just move through several items without inviting public comment. My apologies. Okay. So please go ahead. Please go ahead. Okay. I can speak off the agenda. Could you hold until we adopt this item? Yeah, that's fine. No problem. Okay. Thank you, Andy. Did council have questions or concerns about the agenda, the meeting schedule? Yeah, I'm just unsure if it doesn't really, we're not going to have the information that we need by the 22nd. Does it make sense to really have it that late? I think we, go ahead, Kristen. I was going to say, I think we're giving us a better opportunity to have the information. It's not guaranteed, but we, but there's a chance that we will have it. That's what I was going to say. Yeah. I understand where you're coming from because I do feel from conversations between us that we have a desire to get to setting priorities and strategies like next week. So I understand the concern that it seems late to me as well. I like having more information, but if we may not have it, I do wonder if we just want to have our meeting ahead of time. I will say that Elaine and I are doing some strategizing at the beginning of April for how to approach this session this year. I would like more time for staff to be able to get information together since we're kind of looking at the conversation a little differently from the past. Timmy, I think that's a better reason than waiting for the information for the state. And then just thinking about that date and the residual time impact that it can have. So it's not just what comes before it, it's what comes after. Often we're asking the commissions to set a work plan in July. And I am curious if it's anticipated if the commissions or desire to have the commission stay on that timeline or if it's expected that a June meeting would delay the work plan development as well. I'm sorry, I also just have to throw a wrench in this. I'm not available on that day. I'm kind of getting to that. Like I can be available, but I cannot be available. I will not be here. So I need it. I need it either before or after. Elaine, did the leadership team, did you all look at other dates? I actually didn't run these dates by the staff where I was trying to aim for trying to maximize the possibility of having the rate. So I don't know that there's ever been a year when we had every single person there. Although that's ideal, we can try to get that input ahead of time. Do you want me to do it all up? Yeah, perhaps for this evening, we could adopt this schedule without that date and then do a follow-up doodle with Council. Would that work for folks? Yes. Do you want to include May 2 or just June Saturdays? I prefer June. I feel like May is not going to give us enough time to plan. If you all are meeting in April. Do you have another Council meeting? No. The rest of the weekends in June are all besides the 23rd. Here in June is preferable to later in June for me. Yeah, I can do of course the 8th or the 15th. For the purposes of this agenda item, would someone like to make a motion to approve the City Council schedule without the strategies and priorities date? So moved. Second. Motion by Charlie, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. I'm sorry. Andy, can I come back to you? We just have a couple more things and then we can get that's fine. I'll keep listening. Okay, thank you. Okay, so next up item aye. This is our declaration of inclusion. We previously adopted this as Council pending how many day election results. I just wanted to bring some of these items back so that whatever body was formed today, we could re-adopt this. Are there any questions about approving once again the declaration of inclusion? No. Do I have a motion to approve the declaration of inclusion? Second. Motion by Aurora, second by Charlie. All those in favor, please say aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Similarly, I have for item J our equity assessment tool wanted us to just look at this again and re-agree that we want to keep using this tool. Any questions or comments? No. Would someone like to make a motion to approve the equity assessment tool? So moved. Second. Motion by Bryn, second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. And then item K, the city council community access engagement procedure, same thing. We still want to stick with doing this outreach to folks in our community. Are there any questions or comments? I just want to say thank you to everyone who has engaged in me trying to find different ways for us to get out in the community. It's been a good way for us to connect with folks who don't usually come to these meetings. So thank you. Do I have, oh, these are, they're not, that's not an approval. Okay, but we have all just said vocally that we, we want to continue. And then finally item L, this is on for a discussional approval. This is a resolution recognized in March as Francophonie Montemune must be. And I have this on here at the request of the Alliance Francois is hosting an event at the school district. And they wanted to include a proclamation. It's not one we've done in the past, but specifically for this event I want to. Any questions from folks? No. Okay, do I have a motion to approve the resolution recognizing March as Francophonie Montemune? So moved. Motion by Thomas, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. And we'll invite Andy on who was late for the public comment portion. Andy, please. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak tonight. I had a speech here I wanted to read. I'm calling for the council to pass a resolution condemning the rise in anti-white hate. We have a right to address our grievances and regardless if you like or not, it's your jobs to hear those statements. White people are sick and tired of being attacked, robbed, raped, murdered. You can learn more at gtvflyers.com and go on tv.tv. I want to tell a story of Shannon and Christie. Shannon Christie and Christopher Newsom of Knoxville, Tennessee. They were a happy couple in their early 20s. They were murdered on January 6, 2007. The horrors started when they were carjacked and taken to a rental house. Both were raped, tortured, and ultimately murdered.  She sustained a severe head injury and had bleached four down her throat and had her body scrubbed her with DNA evidence. Christopher was sodomized with an object and raped by a minute of one perpetrator. He was then taken to a set of railroad tracks where he was forced to walk barefoot to a location where he was murdered. He was blindfolded with a bandana and gagged with a sock. He wore only a shirt and his underwear. After his murder, the kidnappers were set Christopher's body on fire. The criminals were, you guess it, four black men and a woman. A diary was found in the rental house and here is an entry in it. Last night was one of a kind. We stayed with a frat cat that is cool as hell. It snowed a little bit but it's already melted. Let's talk about adventures.  It's a crazy world these days but I love the fun adventure and lessons that I've learned. It's going to be a long interesting year. In Northville, Michigan, a group of blacks lured a white family to a home with a Facebook marketplace ad.   Just this week, at East Hazelwood High School in Minnesota, a white teenage girl was beaten by a black savage. All right. Sorry about that. We are at the end of this evening's agenda. Do I have a motion to adjourn? So moved. Second. Motion by Bryn Second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you all very much. Thank you.


My emotions and my mental pattern were really affecting my physical condition. I had IBS, almost my entire life, actually, that I can remember, and after one month of classes of really utilizing the training as much as I can, it was gone. I was a lost wandering hippie, and I found my life purpose and direction with Brain Education. My name is Hilary Ranglas, I'm from Chicago, Illinois, and I am the assistant manager at Libertyville Body and Brain Yoga Tai Chi. Before Brain Education, I was a lost wandering hippie, trying to find my life purpose, trying to find something to hold on to. So what I was doing was actually woofing Worldwide Opportunity on Organic Farms in California and Oregon, and then I went to go get my permaculture design certificate in Israel. So when I was in Israel, I actually went to many different eco-villages, and I was really able to receive a lot of amazing information, and I thought, okay, this is exactly what I want to do. But the way that I went about it was very ungrounded, and I sort of just went from place to place to place, connecting with these people, and then a couple weeks later, connecting with different people, different people. And essentially, I ended up really depleted of energy. My intestinal health was incredibly depleted. I had stomach aches all the time, and I would go from extremes to a gut health issue, you know, constipation, or IBS, and I really couldn't figure out what it was. I would try to stop eating for a while, or try to stop eating this, this, this, this, this. But actually what it was was simply I was not really grounded in myself, and I wasn't really taking care of myself properly in an energetic way, in a physical way, a proper healing way. So I came back, I came back to Chicago after traveling and wandering for a really long time and doing woofing, trying to find myself and find what I was supposed to do. And I actually received a one week free of classes. So I went to the local body and brain center and I learned brain education, which really helped me to look at myself and notice the things that were actually inside of me, instead of keep running away to the next thing and try to avoid who I really was and what I was hanging on to. And especially what I learned is through healing my body, especially my intestines, that was a big part of grounding myself, because the lower chakra system, after I think it was probably about one month, or even honestly less than that, my intestinal issues were gone. I had IBS almost my entire life, actually, that I can remember. And after one month of classes, of really utilizing the training as much as I can, it was gone. And I was like, I have to tell this to everybody. This is the most amazing thing ever. I could notice through the training is that actually my emotions and my mental pattern were really affecting my physical condition. And so the way that I changed this, of course, took some time. Certain things took some time. Certain things were quicker than others, right? But through doing the training habitually, my emotions started to purify. And what does that mean? It means I could forgive and I could actually let go of pain that I had with my family, pain that I had with my own internal struggle, with people that I had met throughout my life, whatever traumas I've had, you know, my parents getting divorced, I could really open that up, look at it and forgive and then be more unconditionally loving. My favorite brain education principle is choose it and it will happen. And then trust, trust my choice unconditionally. What I would tell my old self is don't be afraid to stay in one place and face everything because through simply facing the things that are coming up, you will open yourself, you will open to new layers of yourself and then uncover who you really are. You don't necessarily have to go out to go in. You can actually just go in and then everything else will come out. Love yourself a lot unconditionally. Don't look for love outside. Really choose to love yourself inside and receive love. Be okay to receive love and then give unconditionally also. Keep trusting. I was a lost wandering hippie. And I found my life purpose and direction with brain education.


Now, this is painting in our EMS Museum collections from the EMS Museum collections. This is a very early refinery, I would think. You can see the oil wells here and they're refined. The oil is refined right at the site, which is essentially distillation. You can see this must be the distillation tower. You can see the furnace here with the chimney to heat the crude to the required temperatures and then collect the fractions. At the time was kerosene, obviously, for lighting and then later on maybe light. Gasoline, you can see the storage tank, maybe for the gases and so forth. In the last lesson we've talked about thermal cracking processes to make more of the lighter stuff, essentially light distillates or gasoline from the crude oil by breaking chemical bonds. We mentioned that pretty soon the thermal cracking processes could not meet the demand for quality. What has changed in the meantime when we have now closed to the Second World War era where the motors now engines have higher compression ratios and they would require higher octane number gasoline. That means they would need gasoline that would not ignite spontaneously with pressure and it is pressurized with air. That's essentially what the octane number measures, its anti-knocking property. Most catalytic conversion processes were developed right before and during the Second World War mainly for making higher quality, higher performance fuels and in higher yields and higher quantities. So introducing a catalyst to crack the crude oil into gasoline boiling range is not done just to increase the rate of cracking or has anything to do with kinetics, really that's what catalysts typically do. In this case, introduction of the catalyst changes the whole chemistry of cracking. Now we have talked about having neutral reactive species, free radicals in thermal cracking processes. In catalytic cracking the reactive species are ions or cations actually, carbocations that are produced on catalyst surfaces. So we need acid catalysts typically alumina, silica or zeolites in order to create these cationic species. Why do we need that? Because carbocations go through isomerization reactions very fast. That means we will have now an opportunity to make branched alkanes or isoparaffins because of this isomerization of the ions as opposed to non-isomerization of the free radicals. Isomerization in free radicals is very very slow so it doesn't happen. So pretty much all gasoline production in the US is done through catalytic means. Fluid catalytic cracking is really the most popular process. It is the heart of a refinery in the United States, FCC process that generates high octane gasoline. It's a very flexible process. It could use a range of feedstocks in the gas oil boiling range all the way up to light vacuum gas oil. For heavier materials, something like heavy vacuum gas oil or vacuum distillation, we need to introduce hydrogen so that we could convert these heavy fractions without rejecting larger quantities or very large quantities of carbon. Then we get into hydrocracking processes. So in this lesson we will go over the historical development of catalytic cracking processes ending up of course with FCC which is universally used and accepted now and talk about the hydrocracking processes, some of the conditions that are necessary for treating these very heavy ends of crude oil into upgraded products without rejecting carbon. So in higher yields.


Dropshipping has been around for quite some time and in the past few years, a lot of people have been making some pretty good money with it. But going into 2023, that starts to raise the question, is it still worth it? Is there still money in dropshipping? Honestly, dropshipping can be a great way to get started in the e-commerce game without having to put down a lot of money up front. And right now there's a lot of entrepreneurs that are actually starting their own dropshipping stores in hopes of establishing their own successful online business. Today we're going to talk about what makes dropshipping profitable and how you can maximize your profits in your online store. But first, let's run that quick intro and let's get started. What's going on, everyone? My name is Mario with AutoDS. And if you like informative videos on the dropshipping business, or if you like tips and tricks on how to potentially maximize your profits, please make sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button. Let's get started. First off, what exactly is dropshipping and how does it work? Dropshipping is a fulfillment method where the retailer, in this case yourself, doesn't really carry any of the inventory, meaning you're not carrying any physical stock.  Now, let's take, for example, somebody places an order on my store for a hundred dollar pair of shoes. Once I receive that order, I'm going to go to my distributors website, place that same order using my credit card details. But instead of paying a hundred dollars, I'm going to be paying seventy dollars. Now they're going to go ahead and ship that directly to the customer. And the remaining thirty dollars are my profit. Having the right products in your store will help you bring in more customers, but then fulfilling all those orders on time will help you bring in some more customers. Word of mouth goes a long way when your customers could be at the gym when they listen to some music and their workout partner asks them, hey, where'd you get those headphones? And they're going to be like, oh, I got it from this website and they're going to refer them to your website. Now, remember that the only way that they're going to be referred to your website is if you do provide good customer service and fast shipping. So is it actually worth it to start a dropshipping business in 2023? Well, if you take a look at this graph that we have right here, the global dropshipping market is actually expected to almost double in size by 2025 from what it was last year in 2022. So if you ask me, yes, it's definitely profitable and worth it to start a dropshipping business in 2023 and beyond. The global retail and dropshipping industry is actually supposed to hit over five hundred billion dollars by the end of 2025 with an expected growth rate of about 8 percent per year. Now, with all that being said, let's talk a little bit about the benefits of dropshipping. Dropshipping has little to almost no startup costs.  Also, it's a very low risk and high reward business model. So you really don't have much to lose, but you have a huge potential to gain. Also, scalability. It's fairly simple with a little bit of work to be able to start scaling up your business and making some more money. If you want to learn a bit more on how to scale your business, please make sure to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out. Now, dropshipping is super easy to start. And the fact that you don't have any up front costs or any overhead costs makes it a great way to make some extra income. And as stated before, start up with minimal costs. Now, as you start to scale your business, you're going to notice that a few parts of it start to get a bit tedious. For example, placing an order with your suppliers as you're getting the orders from your customers. That's fine when you're doing one or two orders. But once you're starting to receive 20, 30, 40, 50 orders, that can take a lot of time. At that point, it's best to use something like AutoDS to just automate the entire process.  Now, how do you start your own money making dropshipping business? Well, it's fairly easy as long as you follow the seven steps. Now, if you want a little bit more detail into these steps, I'm going to go ahead and have the links to the blog posts down below in the description. First, we need to find our best sellers. So we need to do some product research.  One way is to use the AutoDS product research tool where you have a bunch of products that are proven best sellers. Another way is you're actually able to just spine your competition. Take a look at their stores, see what they're selling. You can go to your suppliers and you can ask them or you can look on their websites and see what their best sellers are. You're also able to check out Google Trends, which tells you what's trending at the moment as well as Google Lens. Social media is great to find trending products, especially apps like TikTok. On TikTok, all you have to do is search hashtag TikTok made by it and you're going to see a ton of trending products that people are going crazy for. And finally, you have dropshipping ads like the ads that you see on Facebook or Instagram. Just make sure that the ones that you're looking at have high engagement rates, lots of comments, lots of likes, stuff like that. Now, out of all the methods that I just mentioned, one of the more helpful ones that you can use is the AutoDS product research tool. As mentioned before, you have access to tons of trending products, but to make it even easier, you have things like one click import where you're able to just click on the item, import it to your store and have it lied within seconds. Now, after you have a solid list of products that you do want to sell, you want to narrow them down to make sure that you're selling products that actually have the potential to sell. For that, you can use the product research dropshipping spreadsheet. If you want access to that, I'm going to go ahead and have that link down in the description as well. Now that we have our products chosen, we want to go ahead and select a reliable supplier or suppliers. You want to work with multiple reliable suppliers so that when your customer places an order, they can get quality items on time. Working with multiple suppliers also gets you access to a larger inventory of products. When looking for your dropshipping suppliers, here's a few things that you want to keep in mind. First, you want to make sure that they have international warehouses so they can ship from any part of the world. You want them to have a wide product range so that way you can have access to a bunch of different items that you can sell and offer. You want practical returns with shipping and payment policies, affordable and quality products. You don't want to overpay for a product, make less profit or charge more for the products to your customer. You want them to have positive reviews. You need to know that they are doing a good job and they have quality materials. And you also want to make sure that they have excellent customer service. As long as the supplier that you've chosen checks off all those boxes, you can rest assured that you're going to be getting quality products from a trustworthy source. Next, we need to set up the store and select the selling channel. When it comes to the selling channels, you're generally going to have two different kinds.  An e-commerce platform such as Shopify allows you to customize practically everything of your store as well as give you different interfaces, templates and designs. On the other hand, e-commerce marketplaces like eBay don't give you that amount of customization but they have ready available traffic. A few different customizable platforms are Shopify, Wix and WooCommerce. And then the e-commerce marketplaces are going to include places like eBay, Facebook Marketplace and Facebook Shops. Now all the channels that I just mentioned are easily synchronized without ODS, which means that you can actually use ODS's Rich Text Editor and Advanced Image Editor to be able to create and optimize your product pages. On top of that, there's also ready-made templates that you can use to easily enhance your customer's experience. Now that you have your products chosen as well as the channel that you want to sell on, now it's time to bring in those products and import them into your store. Now there's basically two ways to do this. You can either manually import everything or you can automate it. When you manually import your products, you have to copy everything by yourself. So you're going to have to copy and paste the title, the description, the images, the variations and as you can see with one or two products, it's okay, but as you start to add more and more products, it starts to become very time consuming. Now you can automate the entire process and save a lot of time and effort. ODS's product importing tool actually features four different ways that you're able to do this. You have the one-click importer, the single product importer, the multiple product importer and you can also bulk upload using a CSV file. Let's go ahead and check out one of these options. Now let's say we want to import this blender from Walmart into our Shopify store. The first thing we're going to do is go ahead and copy the link. Then we're going to go over to our dashboard on AutoDS and we're going to choose the store that we want to sell it on. In my case right now, I'm going to go ahead and leave it under my e-commerce store. Then we're going to go to add products and you're going to choose which method you want to use. I'm going to go ahead and use the single product importer. That brings up this window asking for the URL. Now we're going to go ahead and paste our URL on there. You're going to notice that the supplier source changed to Walmart and it's shipping from United States. Now here we have two different options. You have the option to edit it now or to publish it directly to your store. I suggest going to edit now so that way you can optimize the title, the description and a few other things. Once you hit the edit now button, you're going to see that now we have the option to change and optimize the title, add it to a collection considering the fact that we're putting this into a Shopify store. You have the options for collections. Tags are automatically filled out. You have the shipping method, the country that it's shipping from, the city that it's shipping from and the brand of the item itself. From here you can either save it and keep it as a draft or you can save an import and it'll be automatically published to your store. Now what good is it to have a bunch of trending products in your store if nobody knows her there? Now it's time to start marketing your store. You need to start marketing your store so you can increase brand awareness, traffic to your store and a higher possibility to convert those visits into sales. For places like Shopify, Wix and WooCommerce, you can use PPC ads, which are pay-per-click ads, influencer marketing, content marketing like blogs, social media posts and email marketing. Now when it comes to marketplaces like eBay, you can do promoted listing standard, promoted listings advanced, volume pricing as well as order discounts. Now for Facebook marketplace and Facebook shops, you're able to use Facebook and Instagram promotions as well as buy and sell groups. Now once again, if you wanna dive deeper or learn a little bit more about these techniques, you can go ahead and check the description down below. All the links to the blog posts will be down there. Now we have our store fully set up, running and you have traffic being driven to there using your marketing. Now you get your first order, now it's time to start fulfilling. Fulfilling your customer's orders on time and accurately is a must. When it comes to fulfilling the customer orders, we have three different ways that you can do this. You can do it manually, you can do automatic orders and you can do fulfilled by AutoDS. When you're doing it manually, you're heading over to your supplier's website and placing the order yourself. So you're gonna go in there, add it to your cart, put in all your credit card information, the shipping information and do it that way. Alternatively, you have automated orders which fulfills all of your customer's orders by using your buyer accounts. So you sign on to your supplier account using AutoDS and when you get an order, AutoDS will log on to the supplier account and purchase the order for you. Alternatively, you can use fulfilled by AutoDS where AutoDS uses its personal buyer accounts to be able to purchase the products from the supplier's website. In both automatic methods, tracking information is automatically sent to the customer and both methods show order statuses. Now the last step is to provide exceptional customer service. You always wanna give the best possible customer service to your customers so they can have good word of mouth and they can keep coming back. If you don't have this good customer service, your business could potentially suffer with low conversion rates, unhappy customers and a lot of lost customers. In order to combat unhappy customers, you should always handle customer queries and complaints instantly. So as soon as you get any issue from a customer, try to take care of it immediately. If you accept returns, make sure to process the returns and issue the refund promptly. Send personalized messages. That actually goes a long way. Customers really love it when you send them a personalized message after they received their order, either thanking them or asking them what they think of it. Customers love it when they can quickly look up the questions that they need to ask without having to wait for a reply from customer service. And you can also use a customer service management software. With implementing all these techniques, you can ensure that you're gonna have happy and loyal customers that are gonna spread the word and bring in more. To help you out along the way, some of the more profitable and trending products to sell in your drop shipping store can include toys, health and fitness products, pet products, home decor and home improvement products, jewelry, automotive accessories like car seats and stuff like that, patio, lawn and garden equipment. If you wanna learn more about how to find the right products to sell for your drop shipping business, down below in the description, I'm gonna have a link to a blog post that can help you out with that. Now, what's a good profit margin to aim for when drop shipping? A general formula to know is profit margin equals your revenue minus your cost divided by your revenue times 100. Basically, it's the amount of money that you have left after you subtract your expenses from your business revenues. Some examples of expenses can include your subscription fees, marketing fees, channel fees, stuff like that. Since drop shipping doesn't really have any overhead costs, you're gonna see a higher profit margin than your typical mon pot shop out in the street.  As you start to gain social proof, then you're able to start increasing your profit margins all the way up to maybe even 60%. Now, you're also able to boost your drop shipping profits using something like automation. When you start using tools like AutoDS to automate the process, you're gonna notice that you're gonna start to have more time to be able to start scaling up your business. When we start scaling up a business, that means more profits. Also, automation helps you reduce your errors while importing your products and filling in your shipping details so you don't have the wrong product sent to the wrong person. A few of the things that AutoDS can help you automate is quick and easy product imports, complete order fulfillment, price and stock monitoring, automatic price optimization, inventory management, and the list goes on and on. Overall, all of these features can help you automate the extremely tiresome and tedious process of manually drop shipping. While at the same time it helps you focus on other vital tasks such as growing your business or spending some more time with your family. If you found this video helpful and informational in the drop shipping business, please make sure to hit that subscribe button as well as smash that like button. Once again, my name is Mario with AutoDS.


What's going on guys, Justin Henry here with the FanDuel Hurry Up and today we'll be talking about Devontae Adams in this upcoming offseason. Obviously there's a lot going on with the Green Bay Packers organization and Rodgers may not be coming back. Devontae Adams is a free agent. So let's dissect some potential options if Devontae Adams were to leave the Green Bay Packers this year. Obviously they'd have to make some kind of trade. He might be franchise tagged. So let's just hypothetically talk about these situations and what it would mean for fantasy. The first team I'd be interested in hearing about is the Jacksonville Jaguars. Obviously there's a lot going on there in Jacksonville with the rebuild. New coach Doug Peterson there. Trevor Lawrence coming off of a rookie year where he struggled quite a bit. But now this team is looking to turn in the right direction and acquiring a receiver like Devontae Adams would really leave the charge for the rebuild of this team. Now Devontae Adams for fantasy would probably have a little bit of a setback. Obviously we valued him as a top three wide receiver but joining a younger quarterback a new organization a new offense would obviously want to put that that's here a little bit back for Devontae Adams but have him still in that wide receiver one conversation. Now long term I think this is a great fit for Devontae Adams in his career pair up with one of the best young QBs in the game and then also have a chance to go with an offensive coach and Doug Peterson. So fit wise I think this secures his value as a wide receiver one for next season. Dynasty I think it would take his tier to keep him in that top five tier. The second fit I want to talk about is the Denver Broncos. Now the Denver Broncos obviously already have some wide receivers there. Cortland Sutton, Jerry Judy and their younger receivers. Devontae Adams there in the backfield. Noah Phant is tied in. There's a lot of weapons there for Denver but they're missing the QB. So this would be contention on Aaron Rodgers joining Devontae Adams there in Denver which is a potential destination for Aaron Rodgers should he leave the Green Bay Packers. This would obviously be tremendous for his consistency. Devontae Adams consistency would be locked in with Aaron Rodgers QB have the same go-to threat that he always was in Green Bay but there would be some extra amounts to feed there in Denver. So I would keep him in that top five tier potentially with the top three upside. The last fit I want to discuss is probably my favorite the Las Vegas Raiders. Now Las Vegas Raiders obviously have a need for a dynamic wide receiver. Hunter Renfro played really well towards the end of last season and Darren Waller was the de facto wide receiver one for this team most of the early part of the season. Devontae Adams shifting in there would now allow everybody to play their normal roles and also reconnecting with college teammate Derek Carr who has a familiarity with him. Now I think this would be an explosive duo. I think that Derek Carr obviously loves to funnel his number one targets his wide receiver one targets to one player as we saw Darren Waller and Hunter Renfro do last season. So I think Devontae Adams would be locked in for top three value as long as he was able to stay healthy and on the field. It would be a great fit fantasy wise and obviously my favorite out of the three if it were to happen. Who's your favorite?


Hi guys and welcome to House of Healer. Today it's a hair haul video in which I'm going to share with you the most recent hair care things that I bought the other day. I ran out of some of my deep conditioning treatments during the second lockdown which was really quite frustrating and so I have topped up to make sure that I always have at least four treatments that lie in the coming future. By the way, if you're new to the channel, this is my second channel where I share just a lot of lifestyle stuff and it's just really random. I cover a little bit of hair, a little bit of skincare, a bit of house maintenance, house organization, a bit of DIY stuff. Everything that you would expect that touch on the life of a mother of five young children living a very family-centered life, but also wants to learn how to look after herself. So if you're interested in that sort of thing, do subscribe. I put out content pretty regularly. So to start off with, as I mentioned before, I ran out of my deep hair conditioning treatment during lockdown. So my hair kind of had to do not a proper deep conditioning the last Sunday that I did it during my hair day. So I did a little bit of research and I found out that this ORS hair mayonnaise is very highly rated and I thought it would be a good idea for me to get this one, especially since I actually relaxed my hair using the ORS relaxer. So I got the big tub, which should, you know, keep me supplied through quite a long period of time. I've never tried it before, but I will report back on what I think about that. The other thing that I also got was some more live-in conditioner. This is the Cantu Argan oil one and this is supposed to have less protein than the shade butter one. And so this one is for my moisturizing and sealing routine, which I do every other night because I don't actually do it every night, but I had run out of this and now picked this up as well. I'm so happy. Something that's new to me is the ORS olive oil replenishing conditioner, which apparently I've read is supposed to be good. I'm quite keen to use this and see how that goes again because it's ORS and that's the relaxer that I use in my hair. So quite keen to try that. And then the last thing that I got was the Wrap Set Moose and that's because I like to do, you know, the vintage roller set on my hair, especially just after I probably do it about once a month. I do it once a month and to date when I've been doing it, I haven't been putting anything on to protect the hair, especially in winter. My house is so cold that I cut the hair just doesn't air dry. So I end up having to use my hooded dryer, which is very useful and I use it on the low setting and I will do 20 minutes under the hood and then an hour away and another 20 minutes. So it's done over a long period of time, but at least make sure that the hair grows dry. But because I'm using heat, I thought it might be a good idea to actually put something to protect my hair from the heat. So I'm going to be trying this out and I did try to stick as much as possible into the ORS range. So yeah, I will report back about how I got on with these on my hair and just for context, I had natural hair for the last eight years or so, but I just got to a point where I just didn't want natural hair anyway.  But the problem with the bald head was that my my hair just grows so fast that within two weeks it would need to be shaved again. And I just got tired of doing that as well. And so then I just let it, I just let it grow and after a few months I basically decided that I'm just going to go back to relaxing. But instead of relaxing, I texturized it. I didn't like the texturized hair because it required as much work as my natural hair. And the whole point of texturizing had been that I should be able to just easily comb my hair without having to do hours and hours of detangling. And then I relaxed my texturized hair and I've been happier with the texture then I really like how it's looking. So this is the hair two weeks post-relaxer. I relaxed it two weeks ago. Don't look at my hormonal acne. I've got a hormonal acne breakout. But this is what we have. And I'm very happy with this. And I'm enjoying looking after it. It's very easy to do the nighttime routine and to actually style it in the morning. Okay. So those, those are the things that I have. I will be back very soon reviewing the care care you make to a living conditioner because I bought that a few months ago and I've used that up. It's only a small bottle and I've got thoughts on that. So do subscribe for more stuff like that. And also remember to leave a like and any comments below would help the channel. And I appreciate that. Thank you so much for watching. Until I see you next time, guys. Take care. Bye.


What are three things that are absolutely smashing your glide? They're super simple and it's super common and we're gonna talk about it in this video. So check it out Here's a couple of key tips I always tell people when it comes to the glide shot don't bend at the waist That's the kiss of death you screw up the alignment angles and you change the trigger on your pillar one And it becomes very difficult to set up a dynamic throw and move with speed One of the other things is is the arbitrary kick leg dominant Where we're not understanding the action between the drive leg So the kick and the drive working together That's how we create that double extension So you want to avoid bending over and you want to avoid The pull in and just being kick leg side dominant The last thing that we want to really avoid like we said is that shoulder that hand carry position That elbow should be here carrying the shot in the right position is super critical for that We talk about that a lot of times people come in fact today I had a new athlete come in and And the athlete is holding doing the glide with the elbow up here and the elbow needs to be down here So that we can be in this position and we're gonna be able to hit that nicer Elevated line if it's here There's more of this kind of artificial Arcing lift and that's not gonna work even if I'm here That's not gonna work that elbow needs to be here because because it's a straight line This comes out of the way if you again we look at our top throwers in the world We look at all the best gliders It seems to still be more gliders on the women's side than on the men's side And I suspect that over the coming years that that's gonna be changing just like it has in the men's shot So at any rate take a peek at those throwers and look at what I'm saying Hopefully those that structure works and those three tips work for you If you'd like detailed information that starts to discuss the differences between the discus in the shot or more Information check out our website irritate throws nation calm We've got a whole bunch of free resources there for throwers and you can get more information remember again like comment subscribe Give that subscribe button a nice big hit. Thanks for watching. We'll see you in the next video This video we're gonna discuss is the inverted C or the C back We still hold by the inverted C position when you


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