32.  It's a robust crowd here. The first item on the agenda is the agenda itself. Welcome emotion on the agenda. So we have a motion from Commissioner Barr. Seconded. Seconded from Commissioner Fox. Thank you. Is there any discussion around the motion? All right. All in favor of you. Say aye. Aye. Aye for myself. In Opposed? The agenda is passed. Moving forward to Public Forum. All right. See we have a number of people perhaps in the room and on the phone interested in speaking. Lastly pleased to keep your remarks to three minutes or less. That's our last one to deny and the time here and the light warning of that in the interest of giving everybody space to say their piece. I couldn't probably use assistance from staff.  We're gonna go first. Good to go. Hello. Hi. My name is Brad Wolfong. I'm a citizen of Burlington and I'm here tonight in support of the North Manuski Avenue road improvements. That project, the implementation of bike lanes would enable me and my family to more safely and frequently use that road to get to and from businesses and recreation and our jobs in Burlington. My wife especially would greatly benefit from it and as a result, we would be able to more frequently go to restaurants and shops and all sorts of other things down there. So please, I would ask that you guys support as well and thank you so much. Thank you. Hello, I'm Michael Arnold, I'm actually a Manuski resident but I'm asking you tonight to consider the equity impacts of transportation as you look at the North Manuski bike lanes and parking management plan. We know that access to transportation in the region is critically important for economic development and the plurality of residents of the Old North End actually get to their jobs by walking. There's a lack of adequate public transportation and a lack of safe protected bike infrastructure. And I'd ask that you improve both of those and hopefully you can come to some solution with the parking situation with modern sort of management techniques like pricing, having priced parking permits and use those revenues to pay for improved public transportation, thanks. Thank you. Good evening, commissioners. I'm gonna read my comments. I've had the pleasure and the privilege of living on North Manuski Avenue as a renter for the past 27 months. My partner and I were fortunate to find an apartment we could afford when we moved here two years ago and we consider ourselves even more fortunate that in moving to Burlington, we were able to sell a car and save a considerable amount of money each month by meeting the vast majority of our needs by foot, bike and bus. Of all the benefits that we've discovered through transitioning to a one car household and driving less, the money we've been able to save and put to other uses has been the greatest by far. I have not calculated the amount of money we've saved but in doing so, we've been able over the past two years to start saving for retirement and a down payment for possibly buying a home someday. All because we're able to live in a neighborhood that permits us to walk and bike to the grocery store to our jobs, to friend's houses, medical appointments and more. We're not the only ones who have made this trade off. We know both through the anecdotes of friends and neighbors as well as through the work of studies like the Wynusky Ave parking management plan that more and more people are factoring in the cost of transportation when deciding where to live. Often coming to the same conclusion that living close to work and other amenities can save a significant amount of income even if the rent is higher than it would be in similar rentals further away. In the conversations around the removal of on-street parking spaces to make space for bike infrastructure, we often hear that making trips by foot, bike or transit is a choice reserved for those of privilege, physical ability and wealth. But the data whether from Burlington or nationally doesn't support that conclusion. Yes, due to local state and federal policy decisions, many in Vermont do not have a reasonable alternative to driving to meet their needs. And yet the private automobile remains an option that countless families cannot afford. As the Wynusky Ave parking management plan clearly shows there is a direct positive correlation between household income and car ownership in Burlington. We have a choice on Wynusky Ave and as a city we can choose to continue to serve those households with the means to make the majority of trips by car or we can recognize the needs of individuals and families living below the income threshold for regular use and ownership of a car which comprises roughly a third of households and much of the old North End. When this plan is carried out, my partner and I may spend a little longer looking for a parking space on North Wynusky when we do use our car as we don't have an off-street space included in our lease. We may need to park further away than we'd prefer during particularly busy times but we trust that our able-bodied neighbors can work together to utilize available off-street parking or to park in slightly less convenient spaces further away if necessary in order to make room for those who need a parking spot close by. We know this neighborhood and city is capable of working together to create an environment that better serves us all. I'm happy to see this project moving forward. Thank you. Thank you. For folks who just arrived, there is a supplemental sign-up sheet going around so feel free to sign up on that and we will get to you. Good evening, my name is Taylor Adams and I live on North Wynusky Avenue and I am in support of the changes to remove parking spots and replace them with bike lanes. Currently, I walk to my job in the South End every day. I walk to get groceries, run errands and if I need to go outside of Burlington, I use public transportation when I can. I would like to be able to bike safely in Burlington and with these new bike lanes, I believe that will be a step forward for a safer bike movement. While I do have a car, it is not my primary means of transportation because I am environmentally motivated and I enjoy being outside and engaging with my community on my daily commutes no matter the type of weather. The new bike lanes will allow more folks to get around Burlington in a safe way without harming others or their environment. I'm happy to give up some convenience of parking to allow my neighbors to travel safely on North Wynusky. I believe this change will enhance our street and city for the better and I am excited to watch it change as soon as possible. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Hi everybody. I'm also in favor of the proposed changes to North Wynusky. I understand that local business owners and residents may be upset with the loss of 40 on-street parking spaces but I feel that as a public roadway, a pretty major arterial road in our city, North Wynusky is public and should be managed by the city in a way that best serves the present and future needs of all residents of our city, not just the few that live there, park there, maybe some of the commuters that come in for work or for pleasure. I believe the road is more important to be used and cultivated as a public resource, a good for all residents and not just the few that have cars as other people have mentioned. For that reason I'm in support of the proposed changes and I hope that that's what happens tonight. Thank you. Hey everyone, my name's Colin, I live in Burlington. So I read through some of the public comment that you all received in advance of this meeting. I understand there was some opposition to this project to remove this park and create these bike lanes and concerns about equity were cited pretty frequently. So I'm gonna read some quotes from the Winoosky Avenue Parking Management Plan which addressed all of this in pretty extensive detail a year ago. So the policy recommendations in this report are expected to yield a variety of benefits with benefits accruing to underserved populations in specific ways. For example, the census data indicate the following. Black, Asian and residents of multiple races travel largely by non-car methods. Residents experiencing lower household incomes own fewer vehicles than households with hire and also travel by sharing rides, walking, biking and transit. The data implies that parking management strategies aimed at supporting multimodal access will provide a racial equity benefit. So there you go, this was funded in part by the Federal Highway Administration and the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission. So I'd consider it a pretty good source of information. You know, I think we should get real here, right? Like, state of Vermont has the fourth highest tax burden of any state in the United States. We have the highest post-college emigration out of the state, brain drain, in the U.S. For this state to survive, we need more affordability. We need a larger tax space in a denser area. What's gonna happen if we build that additional housing to bring these people here? And the only option they have is cars.  We need to build for the city we want in the future, not the one that we have now. So that's why this project should proceed. And as a side note, I know this has been in the works for a really long time. There are many opportunities for the public to give comment about this, which I think is kind of an issue in itself, but to see people coming out of the woodwork at the tail end of this process with bad information, it's really disappointing to me. I know I'm not directing this toward the commission here, just to the public. So proceed with this plan. This was called for in 2017 in the Walk Bike Plan with this parking management plan. This was called for by the Chittin County Regional Planning Commission, their guidelines, state's guidelines, and most recently, the federal transportation decarbonation road map produced by the Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, Department of Housing and Urban Development. We know we gotta get cars off the road. We know this is the way to do it. This is a very minor step. Frankly, I don't think it should be this difficult. Thank you. Dan Castragano. Hi, commission. My name is Dan Castragano. I'm resident of Ward 4. I'm a climate educator. I care deeply about biking and I urge you to proceed with the bike lanes as planned. I just wanna frame the conversation tonight on the climate emergency. This is what I do for work and I help teachers teach about climate change. But we are, when the IPCC report came out last August, the secretary general said we are on, quote, the road to climate hell. So he's not mincing his words. There was a report that came out in October, 2021, saying that we are going to far overshoot what scientists say we need to do to avoid the worst effects of the climate crisis. We're headed toward 2.8 degrees Celsius instead of 1.5 degrees Celsius. To kind of bring it back home. I know this is like not particularly persuasive as a communicator to talk about all this stuff, but to kind of bring it back home a little bit. January was the hottest ever January in Vermont. Today we broke the daily temperature record for February 15th by three degrees. It was 57 today. The previous record was 54. I moved to Vermont and I want to go skating at Star Farm Park with my son. There's been like four days of skating and I like dragging my son around in the bike trailer and I don't ride on North Manuski because it's not safe. So this is a step in the right direction but until it's protected as is outlined by the 2017 walk bike plan, I'm not gonna ride on North Manuski. We need this. We need a dedicated, protected, connected network so people can actually bike and get to where they need to go. So take this step tonight and show courage, show leadership and act faster in building out these networks. Thank you. Thank you. So next person, John Weber. Hey folks, John and Weber from Ward 4 and I work for Local Motion. Speaking in support of the North Manuski Ave project tonight, I also read a lot of the public comment that was received and this has been a challenging and long process and it's rough to hear from organizations and businesses along the corridor that I value and I think we all value who oppose this project and it's sad that these become so contentious especially because over and over again we see that we implement these changes and it all works out really well and nothing much negative happens afterwards. You look at South Manuski, you look at North Ave, those projects have been really successful. You know, we have a status quo based around driving and people in positions of authority and people with means tend to enjoy the benefits of that status quo and when it's challenged they come out to oppose it and I think that's part of what we're seeing. The data is indeed pretty clear that if anyone's going to be inconvenienced by this change it's folks with middle and upper incomes and white folks. The low income people and people of color are largely not the people who are reliant on driving in this area and we know that because of the data in the parking management plan which has been mentioned. This is census data and it really is pretty instructive, right? The number of vehicles per household tends to increase with income. Those making over 50,000 are significantly more likely to carpool or drive alone to get to work. White employed residents are overrepresented in the percent of car commute trips and underrepresented in all the other travel modes that we're trying to promote. The data also gives us a pretty clear picture about transportation for low income people and people of color in the neighborhood. Individuals who make under 50,000 per year are overrepresented in the share of transit for their commute trip and employed residents in the study who are black, Asian or identify as multiracial are more likely to get to work using carpooling, transit, walking and biking rather than driving alone in a car. So it seems pretty clear to me that if anyone's going to be inconvenienced by this change, the data in the case that it's gonna be white folks, middle and upper income households which tend to own more than one car and can afford to make the kinds of shifts in their transportation habits that we're working to achieve and encourage with this kind of project. So I hope we'll move forward with it. Thank you. Thank you. Next person, Tiki Arshambo. Hello, everybody. It's so good to see you again. Thank you. Real quick, who I am, I'm Tiki Arshambo. I live in Ward 2 on Cromby Street in the Old North and I'm fairly close to this particular project proposal here. So I wanted to speak out with my experience and taking a countercurrent through what has been testified so far in opposing the proposed bike lane changes for North Munezki Av. Number one, if anyone's rich, they're not living in the Old North that. So I'm just gonna get an FYI on that. And you can look at some of the surrounding businesses as a testament to that, as the Asian market, as that community center across the street from the Asian markets. A number of places like that that currently are in use of that transportation corridor, North Munezki Av.  I'm not gonna exceed my three minutes. I totally respect where you're at. I'm gonna note that I'm an avid biker. I bike all the time. I also drive. I own a vehicle. I'm a customer of Dolan's Auto. They're a longtime neighborhood business who would be negatively impacted by this change. I'm a former public works commissioner, as you serve for nine years. I chaired the commission for three years.  This is nothing new. So I know it's been a long time in the making. What I've found was bike lanes, as is, are not a panacea. If we're talking protected bike lanes, different story, right? But this is not a protected bike lane. I think someone testified to that earlier. If you go on North Munezki Av today, where there is a bike lane that has permitted for that road, and mainly the section from Colet Union to Pearl, the lane doesn't exist. The paint disappeared, right? As winter has come along, clouds have come along. That's come along. The inside lane for the paint just disappears, which effectively means there is no bike lane there. And if anyone has driven on that section of road, you'll know that cars, especially visitors to the city, are unfamiliar with that there is a bike lane there and they're using it as a second lane. So it's sort of a one and a half lane road right now. I have brought this up in my time on the commission, too, and there's a number of elements and it's a different conversation. But I'll remember sitting in this commission and hearing at one time, we had, I forget which bike lane project that wasn't here from former counselor, Sharon Busher. You may recall she was a frequent visitor of ours for our meetings and it was great to have her input. But she posed a question that I thought was important, which was not everybody can bike. And I pondered that a bit and I thought that was quite impactful because I became one of those pieces of population of people who could not bike in the summer of 2021 when I broke my wrist, couldn't bike. I got a good year and a half off of my bike, just couldn't do it. But Sharon, I thought brought up a good point is. Yeah, time is right. Oh, I'm sorry, all right, I'll wrap. There's a lot of people and think of demographics of people who can't bike. I don't see a transportation plan accommodating this year. As was discussed many years ago when we had gotten into this in the first place, there's been a multi-decade precedent for allowing people to park on the street. So I just say, this is a pretty drastic change and if we were to have protective bike lanes, it'd be a different conversation. But as is, I feel like it's a little too drastic and would have negative consequences. So I apologize for running over. Thank you. The next person is Ali Hamidani, good for her. You got, hello, my name is Ali Hamidani. I live in the Old North End in Ward three and I'm here to just voice my support for this North Winooski app project, mainly from the standpoint of safety, myself and most people that I've spoken with would be riding their bikes to enjoy the city for commuting and visiting businesses more often if they were protected bike lanes. I think this is a good step toward that. And I think painted lanes are not enough. I think anything that can make cycling more safe on North Winooski Avenue and throughout the city would be a great step for the city. Thanks very much. Thank you. Next person, Jake Tiano. Hi, I want to bid a lot into these three minutes. So I'll speak through the prelude and say, my name is Jake Tiano, Ward five, I'm in favor of the parking regulatory changes and that I lived on Decatur for two years and I visit this neighborhood very often. So I'm going to list some facts and then draw some conclusions from those facts. Number one, this neighborhood in addition to North Street is the only real neighborhood mixed use zoning corridor in the city and it is surrounded by residential medium density zoning resulting in one of the densest neighborhoods in the city. This neighborhood has one of the lowest rates of car ownership at 1.39 per household and commuting mode share at less than 43%. In the city, this means that at least 57% of residents are not relying on single occupancy vehicles to get to work and to many households don't have a car at all. Number three, according to census data for this neighborhood, the number of cars that a household owns increases with the household income. And so lower income residents have fewer cars and wealthier ones have more. Number four, car ownership is expensive. My experience in the past came to about $6,000 a year to own and operate a used Subaru Impreza when meticulously including hidden but real costs like depreciation. Number five, safety is frequently stated as the number one barrier keeping people from integrating more active transportation like walking and cycling into their life. Number six, active transportation infrastructure needs complete networks to be usable. Number seven, in nearly all cases, business patronage stays the same or increases when parking is removed in favor of active transportation infrastructure. Number eight, there is only so much room in the city and a new infrastructure will have to in some ways require existing infrastructure to be removed. Finally, it is February 15th and at 55 degrees today. I saw flowers blooming on my walk. Given all of these facts, it follows that removing parking on North Manuski Avenue to implement a new segment of our safer cycling network along a critical path to our city will make it much easier for non-drivers to access the businesses and services in this neighborhood while slightly inconveniencing drivers. Again, we must remember that non-drivers are a large proportion of the neighborhood and non-drivers are statistically more likely to be lower income, while drivers are statistically liker to be higher income able-bodied and own multiple cars. It will make the streets safer and have compounding beneficial effects on the city's bike network by connecting a major corridor from downtown to the Riverside path to Manuski. It will also contribute to reducing the overall pressure to own a car, which again disproportionately benefits lower income people because being able to eliminate that $6,000 per year expense counts a lot more. Since equity is a hot topic on this issue, based on the synthesis of these facts, the most equitable way to proceed is to accept that we must trade existing infrastructure for more diverse transportation options and make sure that the burden of decreasing parking demand falls to wealthier residents who have second or third cars that can be removed, not by excluding non-driving residents from access to safe infrastructure. In total, this project will expand access to this corridor and second order economic benefits to a new set of people that are statistically local and underserved by existing infrastructure and actually puts into motion a small piece of real change that tackles the climate crisis. Every level of global, national, state, and city government agrees that we need to take immediate and systemic action on the climate crisis and it is votes like this one where those changes actually become reality. Thank you. Thank you. Person. Justin Hudson. Addition. Yeah, are you ready? Justin Hyphenation here. Hudson Sabans, thank you. So I'm a Vermont resident by birth and after moving away from a year, I moved back to Burlington and I moved to the corner of Grant Street and North Winooski Avenue. Several months later, I was mugged on that corner. I can appreciate climate change issues and everything else people have brought up. But for me, one of my biggest concerns is that I can't go out for a quart of milk couple blocks without worrying about crime these days, especially on a street like that. For over 10 years, I biked to work in South Burlington and then eight miles away at Archie's Grill in Shelburne when I couldn't catch a bus or when they weren't running on Sundays. So I get the bike thing. Everybody loves making our climate better, but for me, it's an issue of when I get home from work, especially if it's at night, I can spend 20 to 30 minutes trying to find a parking place. Typically, now I live on North Union, but typically it's about 20 to 30 minutes to find a spot. Removing 40 parking spaces, if that's an accurate number, will force me to park further away and worry more about my safety. I can appreciate working on the safety of bikers. I've seen the protected bike lanes not work in that area, people mowing down the barriers and everything else, but I worked for over 10 years to be able to afford a car. And now I spend 45 minutes a day finding a parking space or walking to my car. And I'm concerned for my safety and that of my community. I've lived in that exact area for almost 20 years and while I can appreciate the things other people have mentioned, it's a concern for me, for somebody who's rented the same apartment for 15 years, but does not have a parking space. And when it comes down to it, if I have to park eight blocks away in some dark corner, I'm probably gonna sell my car and have to deal with that. But having a car has afforded me the availability to be able to visit my mother, to go to a family reunion in New Hampshire and really have freedom, you know? Made me feel like an adult. And as I mentioned, I can respect everything everybody said in support of this, but I would encourage everybody to consider people like me who I've been on my own since I was 18, you know? I worked hard to be able to afford a car so I didn't have to bike eight miles to work on Sunday when there was no buses running. And if anything, I think this type of time should look more towards supporting local residents having parking spaces than removing them. And if it comes to looking at students, whatever, but I jumped somebody's car in front of my house and halfway through it, he laughed about the fact that he was a student and he'd been out of town for a month. And that's why his car was dead. And to me, that's disheartening that being part of the community, that's the type of thing I'm dealing with. Thank you everybody for your time. Thank you. Next person, Chris Ewan. Hello, commissioners. I'm Chris Ewan of Ward 2 and I'm here to speak in support of this project and the bike lanes on it. I'll state the obvious that mixing bicycles and cars is simply not safe. And it should be obvious because by default, as a driver, if there's a bicycle in front of you, you have to take evasive maneuver. By default, you will crash into that bike if you don't do anything different. I know on the other side of the spectrum, we can have protected bike lanes where people on bikes feel safe and he gets people of all ages and abilities being able to use it. But somewhere in between as the plan currently has it, still is a huge improvement because by default, a driver that sees a bike on the road is not going to hit that cyclist. And from my personal experience, this whole situation has played out before. Just this fall as I was going home from a restaurant on North Winooski, a car went over the centerline to pass me and then immediately rear-ended the car in front of it at the stop sign. So cars hit each other. I mean, you can't expect them not to hit bikes when they're on the road. And I just urge you to do what is the right decision for safety and to bring this project, make this project go ahead. Thank you. Thank you. First, Michael Monti. Good evening, commissioners, and thank you for your service. Michael Monti, I'm the CEO of Champlain Housing Trust and let me just say that CST is not a climate denier in any way. We own more solar arrays on rooftops across Chittenden County than any other owner. We actually have 18 e-vehicles and their pumps and many of our properties being installed right now. We have two. We have one at the news garage in that building and one at the Old North End Community Center and we have two at our lot. So we constantly move people as much as possible into e-vehicles and to reduce so the impact on the climate. As a matter of fact, we actually are probably the only organization that pays people to walk a bike to work. I'm not sure if anybody else does that, but I know that we do and we haven't given free pus passes if they want to for the whole time. So let me just say that when this project was proposed, we raised serious issues about this and mostly in conversations with the various organizations that we worked with over the last three decades. When we first started working in the developing of the North Union Ski Avenue site, there were porn shops, there were scrap yards, there were abandoned buildings, there were gas stations. We began the process of bringing in childcare centers, senior centers, community health centers of Burlington, legal aid, food shelf and bring services to that street and that street then started to revitalize itself with restaurants and other kinds of programs and services and it's a success. Our concern though of this project has deepened really dramatically. Mostly in conversation with the various organizations that still are on the street. We own some property, we lease all of it. It's in control of these various organizations and their use. I would say that at this point, after working in the creation of homes and public parks, feeding Chittin' and Pathwright pathways, outright Vermont and community health centers legal aid in the various organizations, they have expressed those concerns to us and we want to pass that on to you as well. And I think they have written to you as well. And they've written to you in this process all along. We did not just come out of the woodwork. Somebody stated that earlier. We've been here for decades doing this, doing this work. So what I want to say is that I understand that there's some analysis done to determine the impacts that this project has had on the people of color. And they have, most of the folks have talked about the data of the neighborhood. First of all, we own more rental housing units and home ownership units in that neighborhood than almost anyone. And I can tell you that people have cars. Low-income people have cars. They use them and they use them when they need to for their convenience to get to and from work, food shelf, and other locations on North Wynoski Avenue. But really what's really important is that North Wynoski Avenue serves more than the old North End and that analysis was not done. Nobody ever asked the people who are going to the Richard Kemp Center, where do you come from?  Nobody asked the people from the food shelf who were not just coming from Cromby Street, but are coming from all over the county. Nobody asked outright Vermont, the only organization that serves and works for people of color. I was gonna wrap it up, please. Okay, I will wrap it up. Excuse me, I get a pretty emotional about this. But those folks were not asked and those organizations are being desperately impacted by this. You should have safety for bicycles. I ride a two wheeler, you know that, but with a motor. There should be safety for bicycles. And the city really wants to do something on climate. You just build 80 parking spaces on a waterfront. You're putting boats in the water. There's lots to do on climate in the city. Don't pick on the old North End and the low income people who are there or the people who are low income, people of color or gay people who are being served by the organizations who have spoken to you in their writing. Let me just finish that. In my lifetime, I tried to build a transportation center on the waterfront to eliminate all parking on the waterfront. Had funding, support, planning studies. City council pulled it out at the last minute and said it was not right. Okay, and you can do that too. You can send a message to the city council saying, we'd like you to rethink this. We'd like you to reconsider. Steve Norman? Oh, thank you. Steve Norman? Thank you. That's all right. That's good. Georgie Durram? Hello. My name's Georgie Durram and I'm grateful for the opportunity to speak at tonight's meeting regarding the changes to North Manuski Avenue, which I do support. However, I have appreciated listening to the different viewpoints expressed tonight and I recognize that equitable transportation is a complex situation. I am a resident of South Burlington and my husband and I commute to our jobs in Burlington by bicycle year round as we do not own a car. We use North Manuski Avenue approximately five to six days per week as we also primarily patronize the grocery stores in Burlington. From this personal experience, I can attest that North Manuski Avenue is a critical North-South connector in Burlington and a critical route to other towns such as Manuski in South Burlington. Investing in a bike lane will empower residents of Burlington to safely navigate the city without a car and will hopefully encourage residents of neighboring municipalities to use bicycles to reach the city. Infrastructure as it stands discourages bicyclists and pedestrians. I've spoken to many people who have expressed a desire to bicycle to work, yet simultaneously acknowledge that they don't feel safe on the roads. I believe a designated bike lane can help solve this problem. It may seem like a small thing that benefits a minority while inconveniencing a majority, but it is in fact a huge gesture that I believe would benefit many. Those already commuting by bike will feel safer and those who would like to do so but are fearful may be empowered to do so. There will be less traffic, noise and air pollution and the road will be friendlier to those of us who do not have the ability to own cars.  In fact, in the 2020 Old Spokes Home and Old North End Mobility Audit, which surveyed a racially and socioeconomically diverse group of one residents, 27% of surveyed households did not own a car. The majority reported walking or using the bus for transportation. Six out of 14 youths were surveyed and reported regularly riding a bike for transportation but sticking to the sidewalk due to a fear of traffic. I question how parking spots will serve these people. Change is hard. For generations, we have prioritized cars to the point where we have systematically devalued anyone who does not use a car or cannot afford one. I've witnessed this firsthand as I've walked through ankle-deep puddles on Burlington sidewalks, dodged traffic while biking on roads with no bike lane and poor signage and witnessed residents waiting for the bus at unsheltered and unplowed bus stops. However, I believe the DPW now has an opportunity to help make alternative and affordable modes of transportation safer for this neighborhood and finally bring equity to the table.  I urge you to move forward with this project and put actions behind the words of your mission statement to Stuart Burlington's infrastructure and environment by delivering efficient, effective, and equitable public services. Thank you. Thank you. Next person now, Liz Curry. Thank you, I'm Liz Curry. I work in Ward 3. I mean, I live in Ward 3. I own two bikes, an electric car and I used to work at Green Mountain Transit and VEC's Transportation Division. So I get it, it's complex. This isn't about bike lanes. This is what climate injustice looks like. This is what happens when, since 2015, there has been a planning process going on to bring this vision about that has only included white middle-class people. And I know this because I've been involved in this planning process. Between 2019 and 2022, I have been to countless meetings about this issue. And the reason why is because I've lived in the Old North End for nearly 40 years. And this neighborhood, as Michael Monty described, was an intentionally invested in to serve very poor low-income people. Over the years, immigrant families have moved in. They all rely on cars. It is unconscionable to me that people would sit here and cite census data to you without talking to Pat Bannerman, who owns Mowuhi Market, without talking to Phil Hong, without talking to all the businesses owners that wrote you letters that you have in your packet saying how disruptive this would be for their customers who come from Platsburg and Rutland. And do not, are not going to ride bikes. And it's not about bikes because bike lane infrastructure can go on North Willard or on Elmwood. There are multiple opportunities to put bike infrastructure in. I love safe biking infrastructure. I've had an accident and gotten a concussion on a bike. But this isn't about me because I have privilege. I'm middle-class. I can sit here and do this. I can be participating in this process. I'm not the voice that's getting marginalized by this process. But there are a lot of voices getting marginalized by this process and they have said that over and over to you. 20% of the health center customers are low income and people of color. They will, you are diminishing access to social services for our community. That is what this policy is doing. It is diminishing access to social services among the people who need it the most when we could have a bike lane on North Willard we could have a bike lane on Elmwood. We have options. But if we're gonna use our power to put the burden of climate changes on the people who experience the greatest harm then how different are we than any other white middle-class group of people in power? How different? Not different. We're just the same. We're just repeating the same behavior. So let's not do that. Let's take our public policy and look at the way we got here which was by marginalizing a lot of people not engaging with them. And let's say, wait, we don't have to do it this way. We can go and create an incredibly engaging process for the over 160 people who spend the day there who may not live in the neighborhood. They may work there. They may use social services. They may use all the offices at 294 and we can do this differently. We could bring the bike lane. You can turn left. You have to turn left on Pearl on Elmwood. You're gonna have a lot less impact by removing. Most of the park is gone on the east side. So a lot of people who work downtown park between Grant and North. That's all that needs to be removed. That would get you all the way to Riverside. So there are other ways to do this. This is hurting the lowest income people at people of color, immigrant families, the most. And it's a public policy choice. And I really hope that people take a left turn away from doing it this way. Thank you. Thank you. So there is no further names on the list. There is not a list here. Maybe while we're switching to that, do you wanna check on the phone and see if there's people online? She would have to speak. Chair Hogan, if you're ready for online speakers, I can bring them into queue. Please. Lauren Schwepp, you're next in queue. Hi, folks. Thanks, I appreciate the opportunity to speak tonight. My name is Lauren Schweppi and I'm a resident of Burlington and the New North End and I frequently bike on North Manuski Avenue. And I'm speaking in favor of adding bike lanes to North Manuski. I'm disappointed to see folks here tonight and in the comments online, taking a short-sighted approach on this issue, a position that goes directly against research done by the city in favor of anecdotal evidence that flies in the face of fact and damages our chance of equity and creating a more equitable society in Burlington. As many people have already mentioned, we know that access to multimodal forms of transportation like biking and bike lanes is the most equitable option. I wanna remind folks that while not everyone can bike, it is equally as true that not everyone can drive. Our current infrastructure is overwhelmingly car-friendly, so this change would be minor for those that can't bike and major for those that can't drive. The same tax care-funded studies have shown at this point multiple times that implementing bike infrastructure is the best option for a more equitable community. So once again, I would highly recommend that we pass this and add bike lanes to North Manuski. Thank you. Thank you. Connor is next in queue. My name's Connor. I live in the North End. I frequently bike and walk as well as drive on North Manuski Ave and frequent all the businesses there and as well as some of the services. I used to work at Old Spokes Home. I would have really appreciated having a bike lane on Manuski Ave that would have made my commute a lot safer. But I'm looking forward to the prospect of having bike lanes there again, and I firmly support the removal of parking in order to support creation of bike lanes. Thanks. Thank you. Jane Nodell, you're next in queue. Thank you. As many of you know, I've been involved with this project for a very long time from the very beginning. And I want to urge the commission not to remove the on-street parking before we're able to identify a meaningful number of off-street parking spaces to replace a meaningful percentage of the parking spaces that are going to be lost. I know that Director Spencer has worked hard to identify off-street parking. And we just haven't made much progress yet, notwithstanding a very sincere and energetic effort on his behalf. But I think the only responsible thing to do, given that we have not made a lot of progress on that, is not to move forward this year with removing the parking spaces and to continue to work on identifying where we can find new parking for the people who are going to be adversely affected. And you've heard from many of them, either tonight or in your written correspondence. The people who will be hurt are primarily lower-income people, people of color, immigrant, folks who own businesses. And in the long run, they're likely to leave. Because their lives just won't work. And if what you want is to have a less diverse neighborhood here, of primarily white, middle-class people, then this is a good thing to do. If that's what you are trying to, if that's what your goal is, then you don't really care about the people who live there now. And I think that we should care. And I think it's our obligation to care. If you do move forward, and again, I hope that you don't, will you try to assess the impact on people? Will you give them a way to tell you what's happening in their lives and what the impact is? Will you help them figure out who to call when they have to walk eight blocks from their car to their home? I think if we do move forward, it is incumbent on members of this commission and members of the city council to really figure out if it's going to work and what the impact is on people. I think a lot of people, there's a strong belief that's going to be fine because it was fine when we moved three parking spaces from Colchester Avenue. This is a completely different order of magnitude than anything this city has done to create a bike lane infrastructure, completely different order of magnitude. Thank you very much. Milo Grant, you're next in queue. Hello, I'm sorry, are you waiting for me? My apologies, I just got out of my car. My name is Milo Grant, and I am, as some of you know, running for city council in the central district. And this is an issue that I have been hearing a lot about in the last few weeks. And I've been paying particular attention to this area on my way to work. I commute from Burlington to Essex. And coming back tonight, I'm looking at the street, and the street is the parking is full, the parking lot next to where Old Spokes is and where some people park when they eat at Fohang. That's full. And then I'm looking at the parking lot where a town meeting TV is, and there's like a ton of cars there. And what really has me conflicted is that I do believe in our walk bike plan and I do believe in our net zero goals are very, very important. But I have to think that, you know, can we shift this over to a different street because we do have businesses that are affected when they rely on business that's coming from out of the area. And that's really important because when I'm looking at the studies that were done, there's studies done of the residents, but they don't seem to really fully take into consideration the people that come in to support the businesses. So that is my concern. And that's definitely a concern that I've been hearing. And I feel that if there can be, the city finds a way to work with some of the landlords that have some of these larger parking lots to say that they can be available to these businesses on the weekends or after certain hours in the evening. If you don't have that process in place, when you promise you would try to make that happen, it only makes people feel like the city isn't there for them. So I just wanted to say that and thank you so much for your time. Rick Bragg, your next in queue. Yeah. So I've been biking here for a long time. I totally disagree with this plan. This is crazy. And actually, I would really like to be able to turn off the picture. Yeah. Okay. So you're laughing now commissioner.  So you're just patronizing people that you do not agree with. Okay. That's what you are doing. Right. No. Okay. So that's all I've got.  You'll be up in queue and I see that someone joined us. On the phone. So do use star nine if you've joined us via the phone. If you wish to speak during any of the public comment periods today. Matthew Peterson, you're up. Hello, can you hear me? Hey, thanks for your time. My name is Matthew Peterson. And I own the new restaurant Mayday on North Manuski Avenue. This was all pushed through when we were kind of in the formation of getting the restaurant open. So I just wanted to make some comments now. So thanks for your time, everyone. I own Mayday on North Manuski Avenue live in Burlington, Vermont. I oppose the removal of the parking on North Manuski Avenue. The parking is already extremely limited. And no resolution has been made to offset the parking removal on North Manuski Avenue. One of the largest complaints I do receive as the owner of the business, I'm on the floor every single day is that there is already a lack of parking on North Manuski Avenue. The Old North End probably has the most independent restaurants in Burlington, I would say right now, independently owned and operated by people who live and work in Burlington. So it's a really awesome thriving independent restaurant community. It is creating a destination for all people who live in Vermont and in the Old North End and tourists that visit. The removed parking will cause a hit to all of the businesses in the Old North End. And I asked that you deliver on the resolution to offset the parking removal and provide an off-street option for those who rely on the parking on North Manuski Avenue. Thank you for your time. We have a Whitman up in queue. Can you, can you all hear me? Okay. Thank you. I've lived on the street for seven years and I don't think this has anything to do other than with the people who live and work on the street.  But if people who support this think that if it passes and people who need to park here because they live or work here will just sell their car because they can't park on the street anymore, that is ludicrous. Having accessible parking to work and live here isn't a luxury, it's a necessity. And anyone who thinks that the people who live or work on this stress of road are overly privileged clearly doesn't live around here. To the people who live nearby who are lucky enough to have a job also nearby who have had a relatively easy economic decision to give up their car, you are in the, you're lucky and you're in the minority. The vast majority of people who live here don't live in the same, don't have the same easy option. We need a car to get to our jobs. We need to make enough money to be able to live here. North Inuski Avenue is not the lack of luxury. I wonder how many of the commissioners or city counselors actually live on North Inuski Avenue.  Have they ever thought how many part-time city cleaners, the hundreds of thousands of dollars already sunk into this project could afford to hire? It's not just 40 spaces. There are approximately 60 spaces on the east side that would be gone immediately. Of the 63 remaining spaces on the west side, 44 will be regulated or paid and paid. That leaves 19 out of 130 approximate existing spaces and 85% decrease. If free parking spaces for people who need to live or commute here are gone, 85% of them that is going to drastically change the environment of this neighborhood. Lastly, does anyone remember the planters in the middle of South Inuski Avenue next to the city market or the white dividers on North Union? How did those go? Someone mentioned earlier how this is, oh, there's things like this happen all the time and they just happen and then afterwards, nobody really bats an eye about it. How do those go? We're all gone now because it was a horrible idea. Despite others' best efforts to stress the matter to revolve around race or climate, it has nothing to do with either of those. It's about the people who live and work here. It seems apparent to the people who live and work nearby have a relatively easy decision just to give up a car. That's not how it is. I think this is misguided. I think you people have wasted money. And I think after the vast majority of all the public hearings, all the public forums from now, the ones from last year, it's clear the community does not want this. And if the committee or the council decides to continue forward, all right. Yes. I think it's not too late to say, I think this is a mistake. Thank you. We have one more person in queue and they are at phone number<PHONE_NUMBER>. You're up. Hi. I'll make this quick. I'm currently a student at, oh, sorry, Brandon Kettick, B-R-A-N-D-O-N-K-E-D-I-K. I'm a student at the University of Vermont and I live on North Wenusky Ave. And implementing the bike lane would be very detrimental to a lot of what goes on here. I believe, thank you. There's no one left in queue online. Versus for several demands and needs along this section of North Wenusky Avenue. So there's kind of an overall timeline, how we got to where we are tonight, going back to the 2011 Burlington Transportation Plan and several other things along the way. The 2011 Burlington Transportation Plan listed Wenusky as a bike corridor that was in kind of the initiation of where we are with North Wenusky tonight. In 2017, Plan BTB Bike Walk envisions the development of a fully connected bicycle network that appeals to people of all ages and abilities. This connection along North Wenusky is a critical piece in developing this network. It's important to note that the adoptions of the Transportation Plan from 2011 and the 2017 Plan BTB Walk Bike demonstrate Burlington's residents want their city to be more walkable and bikeable as a community. So the 2018-2020 corridor study, straight from the 2020 corridor study, Wenusky Avenue is a gateway to the city. It connects diverse land uses along the corridor and those beyond it contains seven of the 20 priority intersections for safety improvements identified in Plan BTB Walk Bike. The corridor also includes six Vermont Agency of Transportation high crash locations. The study aimed to identify ways to address safety challenges and maintain a high level of multimodal mobility. The 2020 City Council resolution directed DPW staff to implement parking removal to make way for separated bike facilities along the entire length of the Wenusky Avenue corridor. So it's important to note that that we are taking a more phased approach to this work. Great. Thank you. One of the pieces that was called out in the 2020 Council resolution that Philip was just referencing was to do a parking management plan before any of that parking was removed. And so between 2020 and 2022 it got started a little late due to the pandemic. There was a parking management advisory committee and I do want to thank a number of the people who are in the room and who spoke tonight who are participating on that committee and who gave many hours in service to this work. It was funded in large part by the Chattanooga Regional Planning Commission matched by the City and it recommended in the end a number of strategies, multimodal strategies and shared parking and more active management strategies of the on-street parking so that the impacts of the installation of bike lanes along the corridor would be minimized. There was an equity evaluation that was referenced in a number of the comments tonight in the plan as well. The parking management plan advisory committee at their final meeting did vote four to three for the following motion. You'll see here that they found the plan fails to meet the essential parking needs for residents, businesses and service providers. And they were urging the Public Works Commission and City Council to take a number of steps that you'll see here including obtaining signed agreements for shared off-street parking, increasing transit service, piloting a temporary bike lane, et cetera. Based on that feedback, staff really took a step back and we did a number of things. First, we looked at the recommendations for the plan overall and thought that we needed to recommend that the plan implementation needed to be phased, that it could not responsibly be done all at once. So that reduced the proposed reduction of parking from 82 spaces to 40 spaces. We also proactively reached out to V-Trans and requested that they would they consider delaying paving for a year to give us more time as a community to work through this issue. And lastly, we engaged the council's Transportation and Utilities Committee because the 2020 council resolution said, you know, proceed once the parking management plan was done and the advisory committee was saying a different thing and wanting us to do more before implementing the recommendations. So with all of that feedback, they took the Transportation and Utilities Committee, put forward a, excuse me, put forward a resolution that the council considered and did support in March of 2022, advancing the implementation of the bike lanes. However, put several recommendations in that resolution including delaying the project a year, providing $15,000 of grant funding to adjacent community organizations and businesses, engaging CATMA, the Campus, excuse me, Chittenden Area Transportation Management Association in supporting stakeholders with transportation demand management efforts, making the GMTs, Green Mount Transit City Loop, fair free, starting this July 1 and attempting to identify off-street public parking options. We, at Public Works, and thanks to a number of other folks, including City Councilors and the Business and Workforce Development Department, have done a number of things over the last year. We transcended pushpaving back a year. We did operate a grant program thanks to Phillip and many who canvassed the community and worked with businesses and nonprofits to provide those to stakeholders to help in this transition. We have canvassed the street, I think, more than twice. I was involved twice. We emailed and called businesses and organizations on many fronts to get input on various components of this work and to connect them with business support for business and workforce development. We've talked about the CAPMA support. We were able, in discussions with the Burlington Housing Authority, to get them to commit six off-street spaces to provide to the Community Health Center of Burlington for some of their off-street parking needs. We have offered conceptual design assistance to CHCB for their off-street parking evaluation. They have worked with others and have not needed our help to date. And we have started our FY24 budgeting to include that free city loop transit service in the city's budget for FY24. And as was discussed tonight, I have spent many hours working with countless property owners along the corridor many are here tonight exploring the concept of shared parking. We've talked about the six spaces that BHA is willing to provide to other property owners and businesses along the corridor to date have not been ready to sign up as you saw in your packet. We offered a program whereby the city would manage parking off-street and off-peak for property owners in return for sharing 80% of the revenue that was collected to the property owner or business. That detail is in your packet and happy to talk more about that. There are still some ongoing conversations with some property owners but to date we do not have signed agreements. Next. So tonight's recommendations really the proposed parking regulation changes allow for the council directed plan that they put forth in March of 2022. We have worked to do that in a way that would minimize impact by increasing the active management of spaces along North Manuski and nine spaces on the side streets immediately adjacent to North Manuski Avenue. Separate from your action tonight, we will continue to work on the shared parking arrangements. We will continue to work with CAPMA and the other large employers on the corridor to find solutions moving forward. And I think with that, the next slide really just summarizes that if there is action tonight that the plan is to notice these ordinance changes. There's a 21 day notice period that needs to be into effect. And then the Vermont agency of transportation who is doing the paving on this class one town highway will then embed these design changes in the plans for paving this summer. They will not be effective until after paving has taken place, after paving in straight. So in closing, I think it's important to note commission that we have been here before implementation on Colchester Avenue, implementation on North Avenue, other various Burlington projects. It is difficult for folks to adapt at first. But they do adjust to new systems and expectations and this project will require some ongoing monitoring. We know that we were not just going to take our hands off the wheel and walk away. And I would also say may require some adjustments, which we can also do. We're not moving the curb line. This is striping and that's easy to change should we need to this project meets the plans the city has adopted. We hope the commission will support this. Thank you. All right. Thank you. With that, I will bring it back to the commission for discussion. Start. Mr. Barr, you started here. Here. I do the short straw. Yeah. There's a lot of information that has gone back and forth. And I've read through the packet a couple of times. We had a kind of a precursor to this last commission meeting. And I followed this, but I like to do action on the ground. And a lot of times I'll bike through there. I'm during the nicer days. I will admit I'm not a bad weather biker. I'm only a fair weather biker. So I tend to drive down there. I go to full homes. I go to old spokes homes. I go to a lot of different places. And I've decided to try and drive, but not park on South Winooski Avenue and see what I could find adjacent. And just like coming to Burlington, a lot of people say that, oh, there's never any parking in Burlington. I could always find a space, maybe a block away, but I can usually find a space. The seven times that I went to the North Winooski Avenue area from Union to Riverside, I have always found a parking space. And I haven't done it all at night when there's less people or all during the day when there might be less people. So with that in mind, I tried to put my person where the challenge is going to be the greatest. So with that, I would say that I think that I've lived in Burlington almost all my life. I'm not dead yet. And I think that with good wayfinding, once we come up with those agreements, and I assume that we will come up with agreements for those parking areas adjacent, I think good wayfinding will help the situation. So. All right. Thank you. Mr. Fox, your answer. A lot of information, obviously, went into this and a lot of work by the department. I was curious, you know, someone who spoke at public comment and Phil, you kind of just alluded to this too. I guess I'm wondering what will DPW do to kind of monitor the impacts should this pass, you know, parking counts, that sort of thing. So you alluded to it. So not taking your hands off the wheel. So, yeah. We'll be out there. I mean, as construction is taking place, conversations will take place. I mean, folks have my car. I have my phone number. I'm very active. You know, we will visit. I go to Fahung. And they have no problem telling me how they feel about these things. So it will be direct communication with folks that live and work there. Will Klovell who's with business development. He has, he's also involved in this project. So he's in, he will be directly involved as well. Okay. Thanks for that. Yeah. I will say such hard work done by this department and other city departments to go out and can't like canvas this neighborhood I met someone from not CEDO, but the business, the new business arm of the department was like, we were talking about this project and she's like, Oh, I was actually one of the people who went out to canvas. So just deeply appreciative of that outreach work because it's not easy. And I think that's all I have. Thank you. A few times, quite a few people in advance of this meeting. And with the intent of trying to, you know, figure out where we, where we need to go. I'm very sensitive to the comments about people who are trying to find a way to have people come to the business with a car. But I found in the course of my attempts to locate a couple of places for the Dolan's auto boats to just put their vehicles. I discovered what I think is part of the problem is that we, we have a lot of surface parking lots. We don't have a shortage of parking space, but we do have a shortage of equity and it's actually the most actual ability. And in the process of trying to communicate with the large parking lot owners, which I know Director Spencer has been, I discovered what, I discovered a lack of interest in working with, with us to find solutions. And to me that was, I was surprised and concerned. And again, I really was just making an effort. I, I go to Dolan's to have my car fixed. And I've been doing that for 30 years. I live in Illinois then. And I was just trying to find a way for them to stash a couple of cars during the day, their own car, so that they could have room for their, to find a way to deal with this particular challenge for them. I think that's what we're, we're all trying to do. But I pretty much saw we came, we came to a dead end willingness to participate. And it was, it's a big concern to me. So the other thing too is I, I have been concerned about what, what, you know, again, the problem with the community health center really needs parking for their staff and then people to, to come to their, to have appointments. I'm a, I'm a patron of the dental center there. So I, I walk there. But when I have gotten a sense from again all the conversations and emails that I've been having that there's not a very positive attitude about working on, on, on options that might be a little bit more challenging than just leaving things where they are. And I've been on this commission for nearly 10 years and we've been doing lots of things to help the community health center continue to have parking for staff on the street. So it's not like this has been a continuing challenge for the community health center because it's not new. So recognizing that and I, I have to say that I went back to look at the, the Gnusky Avenue parking management plan because I thought we needed, we really need to start dealing with actual data and statistics. What do we have for spots on street? What do we have for spots off street and the parking lots? And, and I actually pulled out a couple of pages from the parking management study and the plan.  There's plenty of, you know, there's a lot of parking here that, that were, that were, that, that's available. And I, I had provided that information as an, as an attachment for people that want to read it. It's an extract of the 96 change parking management report, which we've all been, a couple of people have heard that. But there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of parking between Riverside Avenue and I'm just going to cite a couple of pieces of the data that are on, they're in page 40, 36 to 39 of that report if you're looking at the page numbers on the bottom of the report. PDF, different numbers. But there's, there's, there's on, between Riverside Avenue and Archibald, there's 174 spaces of off street parking. Doesn't mean that I can go park in one of those spots. There's 174 spaces off street. There's on street, on the west side, which were not taken away, 37 spaces. You're going to be looking at 22 on the east side. They've listed in here if you want to look at the data about a number of jobs, a number of off street parking, the residences that have off street parking, the numbers are there. 46 residential units and they're, they have 33 off street parking services. So that's, that's it. If you look at the parking information on, between Archibald and Union, there's on street, there's, there's, there's off street, there's 249 parking spaces. Off street, there's 249 parking spaces. These are in lots that are controlled that are parking, which people are titled to not allow anybody else to park. They don't have parking space left. There's on street parking on the west side of 26 parking spaces. And there's 18 on the east side, which are the ones that we're talking about that are, that are the transition to a, a, a by far. There's 72 residential units listed or between Union and Archibald and with 90 off street parking spaces for those 72 residential units. So the other thing too that I noticed in the parking management plan was to mention that, relating to the concern about community health center having a place to park. They noted and that, that in fact there is a very large parking deck. There is the number nine Green Mountain transit bus that goes back and forth from Winooski every half hour. This is a, and it was, it was mentioned that because there is 30 minute, every 30 minute service between the parking deck in Winooski and the community health center, if reasonable parking accommodation could be provided at the Winooski parking garage, that's an option. Right now we understand from the parking management plan that the community health center has a hundred employees maybe working in any one day and a portion of them can park in the 76 parking spots. Half of them can park in the parking spots in there. They've got 76 parking spots, again the data is in the repair. So half of their staff has to park on the street or they could be encouraged to park in Winooski and it takes less than five minutes to get from the Winooski garage to the, drops right there in front of the community health center. So it's an option that has been in the paperwork since a year ago, that I haven't heard a whole lot about as far as, you know, willingness to consider something like that. So those are, those are things that have concerned me and have influenced my decision about this. And there was a couple of other things that were sort of things in communications that were quite frankly, somewhat apparently sort of scary for representing information that might be a little bit, you know, challenging. For example, lately we've heard about this large amount of money that the city, the community health center would have to spend to build themselves a parking lot. Well, maybe, but, you know, it sort of came across as an email to me that it was a scary, scary people that, oh well, if we take the parking lot, the community health center is going to have to spend half of a hundred dollars to build the parking lot. And there was another comment about unfortunately the moving of the accessible unit, from one side to the east side to the west side, and the people would have to drive their wheelchair up to the top landing cross over. The legal aid office releases their property from the community, or the Chinden housing trust. There's a chance of parking lot, a large parking lot to be stopped. So they have the ability to provide an aircraft parking in their own parking lot. So I was a little bit concerned, and it's sort of unfortunately a useful information provided, but it undermined my ability to look at some of the other information that was provided in that particular location. So for that reason I just want to say I think that I appreciate the young people who come out and express their concern about where we're going with climate change. And I know that that is very much a worry for young people. And I believe that this is a kind of transition that is going to be painful for people that are you know, say like me that you know, I do bicycle but I've been terrified to bicycle on north of those streets. But I walk everywhere and most everybody will tell you that. And I'm really a supporter of walking and biking safely. So I will definitely be supporting this change and I have confidence that the Department of Public Works will continue to try to improve the way that that it works. And I personally will continue to be willing to help with any effort individually as people need to adjust for change. As I have done that attempted to do with the parking, the specialized parking needs for the Dolan Auto Service, which happened to be that I do know them. That's where I'm at. Thank you. Mr. Damiani. So the question tonight before the commission is whether or not to adopt those language changes that would allow for the removal of parking on the east side of North Newsy Ave. The underlying question we're deciding on with this action is how to fairly divide public space for the public. This is public space that is critical to the North Newsy neighborhood of residents, visitors, property owners, renders, employers, and employees across a wide range of industries and essential services. The culmination of tonight can stem from multiple places, but as alluded to in the presentation by staff, the plan, it started with the plan BTV walkway document, which sums up the vision of improving walking and biking for the city. Its two main goals are to create safer streets for everyone and to make walking and biking a viable and more enjoyable way to get around town. These building blocks of various plans and implementations of plans will do a lot of public comments along the way and across a wide variety of perspectives including this current issue that we'll talk about tonight. Compromising incentives are critical to decision making on public issues of postpartum production. Retrofitting bike lanes into city's built environment is a difficult challenge that we've seen over the year. It's especially true in the removal of existing onto parking involved. Affirmative vote by the commission is production and onto parking supply, but where policy can really make an impact is by reducing the demand of on-street parking in the area. As mentioned, the city council approved the use of $15,000 from the fund to support transportation demand management. One of those projects is to work with CHCB on gathering more data on its employees and visitors to that center. My understanding of the survey work hasn't begun yet. I'd really like to emphasize the importance of specific actionable TDM strategies that focus on helping address the demand for parking in the neighborhood. Should this pass tonight, I would urge the commission to push the city to increase funding to continue the work with local partners on effective TDM strategies and other wraparound transportation projects that directly impact and can complement the proposed bike lanes as well. And finally, as mentioned by Commissioner Fox and my engineer we need to discuss should it be voted in the affirmative how we will measure the effects of bike lanes and really discuss that in great detail on that further commission PDs. Thank you. Thank you. Vice Chair, O'Neill-Valanco. I want to organize as Commissioner Damiani. I read we probably all do read through every comment that comes across our inbox. I took a map of North Winooski Avenue to look and cross-referenced with the property database. I do have a full-time job and family but I really want to see what are the number of bedrooms. I looked at bedrooms in the multi-unit dwellings to get a sense of approximately how many residents are living there and then looked at the surface images to see the parking and there is off-street parking. Might it be insufficient for some yes to some folks who live in the front of the building park on the street because it's more convenient to see the parking area. I went in that thought experiment really with an open mind to see what are the issues with this parking data and then looked at the on and off-street parking that Commissioner Overby referenced about the on-street, the off-street, the resident. So there are spots in the city or as this department look at this shared parking. Do we need more of a carrot for some of these private lot owners? Do we need to offer it up as a pilot for some so that no one feels that they're locked into anything? Again, this opportunity to try and test things out for residents as well as some of the property owners. Just as a thought. Just trying to figure out what that reluctance is and how do we crack that. And then to comment certainly, I walk, I bike, I take the bus, I drive and spend a fair amount of time on North Winooski Avenue at businesses. I'm looking forward to that new restaurant now that Butchard Babes has closed. But this idea that it is vibrant and it is accessible by many modes. We want our residents and visitors to feel safe. So some of the comments about safety in the area is it, do we need to also improve lighting? What else is incumbent upon public works beyond this idea of this bike lane? And thinking of streets as there for moving people in goods. Not necessarily vehicles. How do we make it safer for all? How do we make it safer for our most vulnerable of users? And how do we also address the needs of those who have to have a car along with those who choose not to or can't afford to have a car? So some questions are if we think about this kind of reallocating of public right of way and the conversation about reducing parking for businesses. How in your engagement plan were the businesses targeted? Were you really able to get to all the businesses especially some of the minority owned shops like the Asian market and the African market? I think the only business that I didn't touch base with directly was the recording studio back on the door called a bunch of times. Soundproof maybe. Possibly. We hit everybody. And beyond the limits of the project as well. Further down. It's fair to say it's a significant concern. And you have my word that if this passes tonight we will continue to try to develop shared parking options. It's not lost on me your comment Commissioner O'Neill-Vonco about are there other terms that we can offer that may address concerns that the property owners may have open to that conversation. We're all yours. I think we all care very deeply whether we're for this or against this or for bikes or against bikes or for everyone who is in this conversation cares deeply and is very passionate about it and I appreciate that kind of engagement here. If approved these proposed parking regulations and the changes I do appreciate to echo comments of my fellow commissioners not letting our hands off the wheel or hands off the handlebars perhaps and making sure that there is regular communication with business and residents about the new parking regulations as well as if again approved when the ordinance changes then what's the policy for parking enforcement because this is going to really be a big shift for some of the residents so that it isn't that they're warnings if someone gets a ticket before just an outright ticket how do we bring if again this moves forward how do we make sure we're bringing community members and visitors along with us on this journey instead of wow first time you get this ticket you're ticketed and towed so kind of thinking of this these sort of wrap around pieces as we move forward is that something that policy would or I don't know if it's an ordinance or a policy that can accommodate a warning versus yes on the on trying to welcome visitors tonight in front of you is the whoops program which will enable us to expand the whoops eligibility so that the first ticket anybody receives in Burlington can be waived and we really are excited about that we can look at a warning period absolutely we can also change the terms thanks to assistant director of the project wherever you are who just texted me that we're willing to pilot this for free the shared parking arrangement this is not a money maker for the city it is our effort to try to maximize the utility of parking that already exists okay and then just one final thing on the community health center and trying to identify the parking and TDM transportation sorry transportation demand management systems or structures for them to take advantage of you mentioned in your slide deck that you've done some outreach what are the next steps for the health center to engage with either Katma or the city on looking at some of the opportunities that commissioner over being mentioned about the Winooski parking deck or other parking within the city yes thank you I checked in with Katma today to get the update and as was noted by someone this evening the study employees of the community health center has not started yet they're projecting it to start in about a month and they are looking forward to getting that done so there are no results from that study yet but you know commissioner Damiani suggesting you know additional TDM support of adjacent businesses as part of our FY24 budget we can look at see what opportunities there are to embark on that okay so the Katma and community health center process is ongoing they received a grant for $3,000 as part of the $15,000 to do that survey at no cost to the community health center as I understand it and that is what's being planned for at this time I think that's it thank you commissioner Mutano hey thank you everybody and especially everyone that came out to speak tonight I just want to share everyone that you know we are taking this really seriously and it's been a long time coming to this point there is a lot of factors going on right so I live in the Old North and I live just a couple of blocks away from North Manuski Avenue and I see that it's a real community like I know a lot of people when I'm walking down that street and there is constant change going on and I just am excited going forward to know that there is this level of involvement and people are really paying attention I'm quite involved in Mutual Aid in Burlington and really what that centers is paying attention and understanding one another's needs and on one level we have individuals mentioned a lot of the social services that are better located on that stretch of North Manuski Avenue and they're designed to meet people's basic needs so they could be part of this community and contribute in all the ways that they can and that's one part of it and we rely on these organizations really to ensure that we're all taken care of but that's just one part of it there's kind of these one on one neighbor to neighbor connections that we need to consider as well and it's really hard to make those kinds of connections when everyone is always on the go traveling by car and as you heard some people talk about tonight not everyone has that luxury to go and just drive drive to get from place to place but I feel if we're really building streets really building neighborhoods that enable people to enjoy the streets move around in ways where they can encounter other people that could improve people's lives and that stretch of North Manuski is going to be changed up by this plan and immediately in not too major of a way it's going from literally like one lane of parking currently to now just another paved bike strip it's only the most incremental of changes when you think about it so that's really just one step and it's addressing a problem that has been here for a really long while like we are building cities that are designed for people it's considering other things so in short I do support these changes but I also hear what folks on the other side are saying but we need to move forward like we need to move towards building a city that works for everyone and is really a place where we could be listening to our neighbors hearing each other in ways that frankly we just aren't now I do believe that this only takes us part of the way and I support the idea to continue conversations here as public works commission and really building towards making that neighborhood making that corridor an equitable way to move around like if you're driving or parking as we've learned you have a lot of options and when off-street parking is monopolized in the ways that it are or the ways that it is it becomes difficult to really even understand really how where all that parking exists but I'm confident if people keep on paying attention they'll really stay aware of these conversations that we can find a way for this to work for everyone it isn't fair that we right on the scale of the entire city are making driving that the only way to move around in most conditions like the reason that such a big population such a big chunk of the city are reliant on vehicles is that it's the only and effective way to move around but in a lot of cases it shouldn't be it requires just like this level of investment and understanding that there is a push that needs to happen and it needs to be a constant one so I'm so sorry about the lights by the way but I guess what I'm saying is people need to stay stay on this I think Solby mentioned the Winooski parking surplus and the possibility of using the number nine bus to move in between the community health center right at the top of North Winooski and Riverside there and places where there is additional parking and I do think that's a really effective plan like it mean like this future that we're working towards really means improving access by all different modes but when the bus service only runs every 30 minutes all of a sudden this potentially this potential alternative becomes basically untenable for people just if that's what you're doing every day in your morning to work and the schedule doesn't line up exactly right or you need to buffer this time in because the bus doesn't always run on time that's inconveniencing people and when we really talk about equity it's addressing all of these things it's understanding that this is a complex issue and it isn't just on us as commissioners it's an entire community that should be working together and advocating and understanding where these issues are really coming from so in short the very limited scope of this commission's authority is implementing these ordinance changes when it comes to parking and I'm going to be supporting them but I understand that both as a commissioner and as a community member right there in the Old North Bank that this is a real constant commitment to paying attention to what these changes are and really listening not just here kind of a stern board member but just as a community member and neighbor and I'm sure if more people are doing that and taking that position that we can do all these things address people's concerns and come up with solutions and really work with business owners different communities of interest, affinity groups really understanding the complex array of points of view that people are bringing and coming to solutions that work for the best of everyone but people's lack of trust in the city's processes and feeling I'm listening to is certainly getting in the way of that a little bit and I want to do what I can so that's all I got but thank you everyone that contributed and everyone who worked on those planning studies and served on the parking management kind of working group for their parts as well since actually collecting that information and kind of getting that baseline because it's going to be really important as we go forward. So clarifying question of staff well can you speak a bit to the phasing here we got a heavy lift and a substantial one in front of us tonight I know this is scaled down from what we were looking at say this time last year can you talk about the trajectory that's today sort of we're still looking at things for North Manuski south of Decatur and Union at this point we are just looking between Union and Riverside this has been an all-consuming process as you've gathered from tonight we talked about going back to the Council's Transportation Energy and Utilities Committee and the Council to understand kind of the general thought about the next phases we have implemented a number of recommendations along the corridor the downtown section was reconfigured from four lanes to three lanes I think successfully we changed one block of South Manuski to one-way traffic between King and Maple that seemed to work well so there are other recommendations that we can pick off there was recommendation for many roundabout pilots at a couple intersections here we have not had the bandwidth or staffing up to now with a number of vacancies until recently to pick those up but I think the larger lift of the next phase here of looking from Union down to Pearl for Elaine readjustment is not in the near future in large part because we're going to repave the street and stripe it largely as it exists today recognizing that there needs to be more process given the heightened interest and concern along the corridor thank you for that plenty to consider at the moment I guess a couple thoughts certainly we need to get people to their destinations and the ways in which they get there are negotiable we've heard comments on either side of that statement I understand for example community health center has a garage with I believe 676 spaces my sense of the demand there with 100 staff members on site anytime a number of patients coming and going throughout the day if they had a garage with 150 or 200 spaces they could likely fill it they had a garage with 300 spaces but maybe they could use that as well that's not where we're at I feel like that if there was a garage that large it would be so much easier to come by vehicle and maybe even more of a challenge and more of a stressful environment for people to get there not by vehicle and I think that sort of works induce demand work in the other direction as well and I tell you I live in a one vehicle household and I tell you the times that that vehicle is elsewhere being used it's a lot easier for me to make a choice to not drive somewhere there's a car share I remember I get a car share occasionally but when there are constraints like that it certainly can lead to thinking differently about options I'm excited about and I think it's certainly a worthy effort to pursue the transportation demand management grant program last fall would have loved to see the outcome of the survey community house center nowish but certainly look forward to the outcome of that moving forward and I think there are certainly options of how people get where they're going there's certainly a number hundreds maybe in the thousands of people that work around the city that park and satellite lots and catch shuttles get there that's a thing I'm pleased to see the support for the city and the bus continuing bare free moving forward obviously even better than bare free bus is a bus that can run at higher frequency there's options there other candidate tools that come to mind here are of course like there's as I understand it Residential parking in this vicinity a tool that's been used elsewhere in the city is sort of how guarantee that when people are coming home in the evenings that There's a better chance of them finding a place to park their vehicle closer and safer their house. I know that that's I think kind of a hugely helpful thing for people who live in some other neighborhoods. It might be something to consider here, especially if there were zoned options for that so that I know that even if my address is on one street I have the ability to look for a place to park in the neighboring streets. The other thing that I think hasn't been mentioned much here is that all of this these parking resources that we talk about are in this area town free from what I understand and if capacity is exceeded by demand for something an option that could be considered to be charging for it would be one sort of tool to help make sure that resource is used and used well. And I think, you know, regardless of what tools are applied here I certainly trust that, you know, regardless of the outcome of this vote that the city will continue to engage continue to evaluate and respond and make adjustments along the way. History of doing that and being responsive to the needs and responsive to change direction if need be along the way. And, you know, when other thought on that I think we've been with some of the changes technology wise in our city managed garage parking garages downtown. We've been able to be smarter about monitoring the use of those resources and watching for misuse of those resources and tweaking policy in ways to make things in way that are more beneficial for better optimizing the use of those resources. Yeah, I think those are sort of a few things to consider moving forward. I may be out of line here but I haven't heard anything about anything in regards to safety for people who are going to have part for their way and to their homes. So, or anybody votes on anything I would like you to consider a plan for that please noted and it has been mentioned by a commissioner earlier. I think we're hearing those, those concerns and I just, you know, we'll acknowledge again that residential parking or some other tool to help get people closer to their residents. In the evening could be something to look at but by all means yeah, the city needs to look at through safety improvements helping people be more comfortable moving around these neighborhoods, all day all night. Trust the city will continue to stay engaged on that as well. I guess with that I'll conclude my remarks at this point. We do have a warrants public comment on this item. I will ask, of course, we have the hours getting late we've heard a number of comments to date. Anyone who is not spoken yet and would like to speak at this time a public comment. Welcome your comments here. Given the hour and the sense of comments to date. Ask that you have spoken to. And give the space to. I stayed because I thought I had an opportunity to come. That's on the agenda. Okay, thanks on this item. But still on the agenda says public comment. So, So, Well, if you say that it's on the agenda. Yeah, we have a good board. Otherwise, I would not need. Sure. So, I'll take a turn. Please briefly. Hello everyone. Christina Erickson. I'm award three resident and I also work for local motion. Um, recently I got to participate in event. Actually, a few commissioners were there in several city staff members that the Burlington high school city and like program. Hosted and it was. An opportunity to hear about, um, transportation and mobility issues on behalf of fourth graders and senior citizens and really thinking about. Designing transportation systems and work livable and workable communities that support everyone from age eight to 80. And it was a really striking conversation in a lot of ways. And I think one of the things that we hear is about safety and really building infrastructure that promotes and supports safety and mobility in many, many modes. So, I think to increase the accessibility of multimodal transportation. We have to really shift, make these shifts, make the hard shifts when we need, when we can and are able to add more infrastructure. So, I, I voice my support for this project. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else in the room which speak on this. Thank you. Thank you. Let me just represent again, Michael Monty and champion housing trust CEO and let me just say a few things we, we own a lot of the property. But at least two organizations throughout the northern news game in your corridor. And I want to what I want to say to you is that I think what you're doing here is a little bit of a hope and a prayer because those property owners. People who we work with, like the co-ops, housing co-ops that own lots have no interest in giving up any of their parking spaces because they fear what they have right now is not enough. Outright Vermont does not have enough spaces. The children's space does not have enough spaces. Food shelf is expanding its work right now. It does not have enough spaces in the street. Auto owners don't have enough spaces for themselves. Hemp center does not have any spaces, really. I mean, it has two or three, but it doesn't really have any. The old spokes home has plenty of spaces, but it's not giving them up. Which is, for me, just a bit of irony that, that the bike shop, which wants to support this, and I appreciate wanting to have a bike lane, won't be able to sort of share its spaces. I don't think you can get a lot of shared spaces in the future. I don't see it happening. Legal aid will come back in full force, be in their buildings, and they're going to use those spaces. And since you're eliminating some handicapped spaces on the street, and it's because they're seeing more disabled people at their site, they're going to be using those spaces for people who are disabled. Food shelf is expanding. It's reached to do more stuff with homeless folks. And the people who go to the food shelf, maybe some of them are going by bikes, but they're getting there with vans and cars, and that's a struggle.  Out of the 146 people we employ, out of the 70 or so who work downtown, three or four really take advantage of that program. You're not going to get a lot of juice out of the community health centers in Burlington. You're not going to get a lot of demand, alternative transportation demand out of those workers. That's coming from a lot of different places. And often enough, they have to use their cars. The nurses need to use their cars. The people who go there and go in other places have to use their cars. That's what they do every day. That's why my property managers hack the park at our site. And you're going to have, you have not only the people who work on that site, but the people who go to that site, okay, from other locations. And I'm not talking about just going to a restaurant phone while parking around the corner. I'm talking about the people, the people who are going to outright fear walking on the street because they're gay, about needing to be close someplace safe. Those are the things I'm talking about. I'm not saying bike lanes are important, but I think you're missing something here. Because I'm white in middle class. I live up the street. I have a beautiful home. And I can tell you that that's not what the people who are going there are experiencing. And they're experiencing a different level of issues and concerns. The homeless people who are going to the food shelf are struggling. They're not taking their cars, but the service workers who are there now are. The five or six people who have to be there now to serve them are. They have no place to park. No place to park. And so when you eliminate this parking, that's what you're doing. Hoping to prayer for the future. It's really a hope and a prayer. Oh God, I wish you could do it. If you could take one of those, you know. Eminent domain, all the parking spaces and create some lots. I've been involved in those kinds of discussions in the past. But you're not going to do that and do that successfully. And then you're not going to be able to extend this thing all the way to Pearl Street either. I don't think so. I just think you're going to struggle with this. I know you had to pave something. So pave it. Don't stripe it. Listen to Mellow Grant who was a member. Mellow Grant who was a city council who knocking on doors. Listen to the advisory committee who said, no, unless you get this done. Listen to the businesses who have spoken up who said, wait a minute, what's going on here? This is not good for us. Listen to the service agencies who sent you a letter saying, hey, be careful about this. This is really impacting us in a big way. That's what that's petitioned from the neighborhood initially to say no to this. I don't know why you just sort of wander over, just walk all over this. I'm stunned by this right now. I've been involved with the city of Burlington doing things past what I think to be something that's unjust. But here you are trampling over individuals who are low income, people of color, businesses in a sector of the city that is just on the edge of being okay. It's not richly. It's not rich. This is not gentrified. It's just being okay.  Those businesses are going to go out of control. You're going to go survey their businesses. And I'm going to say, how's it going? We're going to go, not enough people who can't find cars. It's a pain.  We're going to leave. We can't be here. I'm going to find somebody else to go. I'm working at the community health center in Burlington now about building new facilities in Winooski. And part of the assessment, I haven't spoken to about this. Part of the assessment is maybe we should put the dental clinic here because we have more parking. And that's how people get there. All right. Just pay attention to this, please. I did economic development for a couple of decades here. Pay attention to the impact it has on the economics of the city and the services of the city and the people who are going to be impacted. Sorry I had to say it again. I felt like I wasn't heard because I think you're wanting to do something. Do something. I think you want to do good here. But it's, you've got no plan to do it at this point. I mean, really, you don't. Liz career, Ward three. Yeah, I mean, I just want to continue saying that what I hear is a lot of making policy based on personal experience. And I think it's insulting to say that if we built a 300 car garage there, it would be filled. I think that there's a lack of understanding of the lives of the people that have written to you trying to explain it. And I don't thank you. I think you don't believe them. I really do because I think there's this, there's this attitude of the, if we design cities in a way that inconveniences people, they will change. It's a behavior. This is the city design is a behavior changing tool. And when it's used this way, it's weaponized against those who have the least defenses. When you circle the neighborhood to go to Fohang, you are displacing the residents who live there, who get home and are competing for space. When I talked with the low income tenant across from junk ticks, she said, I have it in disability. And when I can't park here, I have to circle the neighborhood. And now I'm competing with all these other people. And in the winter, I have to take an Uber to get home because I have to go find a parking space. She said, if I can't park right here, then I'm screwed. So these are the lives of the people who you all want to build community with and make them feel good about all this. And the battleground has become this stretch of the North Winooski Avenue where the rest of North Winooski Avenue isn't going to work. North Winooski Avenue has the densest multifamily housing in the city. If you take from Pearl to Riverside, it is the densest multifamily housing blocks in the city. There are cars upon cars upon cars from tenants working people up and down that block. And when we did the petition, what I think Chapin respectfully didn't have time to cover is that the original plan was to remove all the parking from Pearl to Riverside. And when we went out and talked to neighbors, that's where there was a firestorm and it became evident how unreasonable that is. And so where is this plan going? It is not a viable proposition to take the parking away on the east side from Pearl to Riverside. That has been essentially put to bed. So now we have this broken bike system that is not honoring the original plan anyway.  But the people whose voices have been marginalized are saying, please stop marginalizing us. We're asking you to stop the train. And there's just this kind of 1950s mentality of like, oh, we'll just build it. We'll just do this transportation thing and people have to live with it. It's just the culture of transportation planning and you've inherited that. And I think it's a shame that you can't kind of get away from that into kind of the human level of the people who live and work here. And especially the Community Health Center, which is Medicaid funded. They don't have capital and they have this problem. They followed the rules all these years. They were developed by the city. The city has invested in all of these social services. We've heard from every single director of every single social service organization except Legal Aid because they have their own parking lot that this isn't going to work for this is a hub. This is a social service hub and it was developed that way intentionally with multiple affordable housing and social services. This was a very intentional community and economic development design. And the transportation plan is not aligned with the community and economic development design that we have. So you've kind of misaligned the social justice purpose of this neighborhood with the transportation plan because you did not include the voices of the people who live and work there when you did your plan. And it and it's coming back and we'll be at the city council. That's all we can do. I think you guys are going to do what you always do and we'll be at the city council and we'll just have to go from there. I think you could use North Wellard. You could use other streets. There's plenty of room to save carbon emissions reduce them on other streets. There's plenty of other streets to have bike lanes. There are not plenty of other streets to have an intentional social service hub that has low income micro entrepreneurship investments. There is not another street to do that. This is it. This is the this is the endangered community economic development zone at this point because of this plan. Anyone else in the room wish to speak on this item. Anyone Mr. Goulden could we do a check on the phone. Yeah, Chair Hogan in order of those who haven't spoken yet. We have Jeff McKee in the queue. Jeff, if you can hear us, you are in the queue to talk. Pass and go to the next. Yeah, I will move on to the next person. I see Jeff is unmuted if you are indeed ready to talk. All right. Jeremy you're Jeremy Fleming you're in the queue. Next to talk. Thank you very much. I would like to say I'm in full support of this change on North Winooski. And I think there's been a bit of an overreaction. I mean we're really only taking 40 spots and more than half of people drive alone in their car. You're only taking away space from 40 to 50 people. Let's say, and you're adding another form of transportation for a lot of people for children for college students for people who don't have cars. And I hear that businesses are worried about what's going to happen with the reduction of parking, but this is proven to work this has worked in cities all across of the world. And I don't see any reason why it can't work in Burlington. And we have a really special opportunity here to be a leader in New England, and really all of the US to be one of the most likeable and walkable cities. And I really don't think we should squander that opportunity. So thank you. Thank you. Carlos you're next in queue. Hi, can you hear me. Okay, yeah, so I'm Carlos, I live in North Winnowsky Avenue, closer to radio in I should say, I think like a lot of the comments are being very misleading right now. I've been working as a social worker for Burlington Housing Authority for the last year. And in my experience what I found is that a lot of lower income people and by book people including me. We, and they don't drive. I mean that's just the way it is. I mean, it's a very diverse I have to have to say you know like some of them drive, which is also part of the problem they probably shouldn't drive. A lot of them have the UIs they I have done budgets with my clients and a lot of the budgets are like transportation for the ones that drive go around 30% of their income to 50% of their income that doesn't make any sense. They shouldn't drive. And why and they drive because that's the only available option for them and that's just not fair like we should have the availability of options to us and I think that we are partying from the cause instead of the consequence you know, it's like asking why no one goes to a drive through in the middle of the highway by bike. And yeah it's obvious like no one's going to do that because there's no other way to get there. Now, talking about businesses, if you want to ask me where I will put my business between church street that has no parking spaces at all, or you more that has plenty of parking space all the time, which one you think I'm going to choose. And I think any any business owner will choose church street, because that's the most valuable land in whole in the whole state I think. I'm sorry I didn't prepare much of the stuff but also when we're talking about disabled folks, not, not all of them drive I think that's another very misleading argument that they are using. That's not how it works. And yeah, I think that's all I have for now. Thanks. We are back to a Whitman you were next in the queue. Mr Whitman is so there. Yes, I apologize. Sorry, can you hear me now. Yes. First reaction Carlos your clients probably have a high transportation cost because they can't afford to live any closer to where they need their services. I'm not sure if he's ever considered that but it didn't sound like it. Speaker before that, excuse me the two speakers before that I completely 100% agreed with and I would hope to connect with sometime in the future. Is it okay if I asked Mr Peterson a direct question. Okay. I was curious if there's any monetary federal state funding benefit that Burlington would receive if the if this proposal was implemented. If so, I don't think any of us have heard about that yet. I'm also curious what a shared parking arrangement is. Does that mean sharing the small amount of remaining spaces. How does that work. Some clarity on that would be great. I'm wondering what the quality, excuse me, reality of a lack of interest in finding adjacent lot solutions. I'm wondering if that was considered in the hundreds of $1000 taxpayer funded study was considered in that entire process before now. This seems awfully late to the game to to quote someone else my word you have my word we will continue to explore parking options. This is this just seems like a like a real sham to me.  That is not incremental in anyone's interpretation of the word. This approach. Mr Peterson. It's difficult to adapt at first I'm referring to my notes and quotes from different people difficult to adapt to it first. Mr Peterson do you live here. Like that comment it seems incredibly patronizing shoes on the other foot, wherever you do live someone came around and said I want to make a bike lane past your house on the UK so you can't park outside there anymore. How would you feel about that. Another quote, I assume we will find some agreements with adjacent parking lots like none of this legwork was done up until this point. We're at the last step here now and know we you have my word will continue to explore options. We assume we'll be able to find agreements with adjacent lots which, even in light of the $15,000 grant hasn't happened yet. This is, I mean, how does anyone know off the top there had a much the original study costs the taxpayers Burlington. I would just ask for answers to most of the pressing questions including that last one how much the original study cost the taxpayers and if there is some monetary federal or state funding benefit that Burlington receive if the proposal is implemented. Yes, you're up in queue. Hello. Thank you for your patience tonight. I would just like to speak in favor of this proposal. I think if we've been thinking about it for a long time and the time has come now. I think that we're failing to use our imaginations. The whole point of this is to get more people, not everybody but more people out of their cars and into other modes of transportation to free the parking. So hopefully, we won't need the spaces of parking, because more people won't be looking for it. I'd also like to just speak a little bit to the safety issue. I appreciate the gentleman that talked about being mugged. And I think one of the benefits of this is the more people that are out in public out of cars, the safer an area becomes. It's just, it's just more lively. There is more activity and people feel and are safer in general. Thank you. There is no one left in the queue online. All right. Thank you for that. All right. With that. Close the public comment and bring it back to the commission here. I guess first before we do that. Check with staff and there was a couple clarifying questions there one on the. The cost of studies to date. And one on whether there's a monetary better benefit from the. The defense or otherwise this proceeds. There is no direct benefit to the city for state and federal funding if this project goes ahead. We certainly always are seeking state or federal dollars for projects we are looking to implement. But the implementation of this project does not get us extra money. How much does the study cost? These studies were not cheap. I don't have the numbers right in front of me, but the Winniesky have. The local match obligation. Yeah, is around $56,000. The total cost of the study was north of $200,000. $280,000. Yes. Sure. All right, thank you for that. Thank you. All right. Back to the commission after rather robust discussion here. Welcome emotion. Anyone has one. I move to adopt the recommended ordinance changes. As outlined in our packet and. Thank you. We have a motion from commissioner Montana. I'll second the motion to approve staff language. Second from vice chair on the obama go. He's ready to discussion around that motion. Yeah. I just had two questions. With the CHCB study. Will it provide data on the number of staff. For patients that they come and go and whether they use a private vehicle. Walk. Bus. Have as I was in communication with somebody who made it seem to me like the survey had nothing to do with that. How do patients decide to get here? So I want to know if you are you part of the conversation of the specification of the statistics that since now we know that they haven't started. I thought this would have been done. You know, a year ago. I want the data on how many staff. There are there how many patients. And each of those. Parties. The methods of getting to and from. You know that study will be doing that. The email that we received today from the from Katma said they are beginning. The planning with CHCB to conduct a patient. Travel survey for the old North end site. I have not seen the survey. I can't speak to the detail of it. So I don't know exactly what data they are going to collect. Is there a way that we can encourage that that information to be part of the study because that doesn't sound like it will address some questions that I think we should have data. I don't have any problem with directly communicating with somebody. Yeah, we can certainly suggest to them that it has been granted to them the funds. It is their study. So if they are choosing to work with Katma and. At this point, I don't think we can direct them. The city could suggest. And then question on that will the sidewalks be changed at all in the paving process. I don't know what condition the sidewalks are, but you know, just. There are nothing on that sec stretch is going to have sidewalk enhancements or curb enhancements just the paving. Yeah. We do coordinate ramp repair in advance of paving to ensure accessibility and catch basin repair. If there's uneven drainage that often can be at the corner, which is a potential liability for people with accessibility challenges. So those would be two of the investments that would be coordinated. The member of the community, I've had to go out and rain those out myself when it was flooding in front of my apartment. Because I couldn't get public works there. And the sidewalks are not good repair on either North Union or North. And I have walked them many times in the past couple of weeks, just. There was when we had the thought there was three inch deep puddles and five or six places in a two block radius. You know, addressing grant repair is fine. But it doesn't matter if you can't get there onto the ranks because the sidewalks are in such poor repair. Sure. Thank you. Yeah. I'll just add for everyone's benefit. Certainly if there are issues with patients flooded or whatever. Call me is called customer service and. Thanks. So you click fix it. Yeah. Or if you're able to. Scoop a little in the meantime, we would appreciate that. To the topic at hand. Is there any other, we have a motion that's been seconded. Is there any other discussion around the motion? All right, go to a vote and please start on the phone. Commissioner Mutano. Hi. Commissioner Fox. Hi. Commissioner bar. Hi. Vice chair on the obama go. Hi. Commissioner over. Hi. I for myself, the motion passes. Thank you so much to everyone for your engagement on this and passionate input on either side. Appreciate it. You understand it. If you can lift here. Thank you all. Thank you. Moving forward to item. Six on our young agenda here. Annual downtown garage occupancy report. Yep. Given the hour, I'm sure Jeff and his team, we've got an exciting new member to introduce. We'll make this quick and expeditious. Right. Am I sharing? It says I'm sharing. Oh, there we go. Right. So. I'm Jeff pageant. I'm the director for parking and traffic. And for I race through this slide deck. The race production of Jackie as perity. She's the new parking services manager. Yes. Very excited. She's jumped right into the fires. She's the new parking service manager. She's the new parking service manager. She's the new parking service manager. I remind everybody she's running all the parking service agents. She's selling permits in the garages. It's part of she's what Leonard Dusharm used to do. If you followed what he was doing. So she's got quite a bit on her plate and she helped contribute to this report tonight. So sorry. Thank you for that. So. Remind everybody. We are here doing this report. It's an occupancy report for the downtown garage. It basically said we don't have to come to you every time we. Sell a parking permit. That was the way it was structured before we had to took two months for somebody to get a permit. So you delegated that authority to us. And we agreed that every year we come back and tell you the garage is not yet full or it's full and we're managing or whatever is happening. Well, right after we did that COVID hit. So things that scrambled. So now it's a little bit different story. So occupancy still remains low. We're still at 40 to 50%. I put last year's graph up there just to remind you. We were at 30 to 40 last year. So we're better, but we're still hurting. The green line is the average. I took the average day of the average of all the days of that month. So that's like the average for the month. And then the red line is the peak day. So that's the peak number that we measured in that day. That blue dotted line is 85%. Which is sort of rule of thumb goal that we're headed towards. So. Better. Not there. We still have plenty of capacity. So anybody who wants to park downtown, please come to downtown garage. A lot of room. And it's two hours free. Interesting thing about revenues though. This is sort of, this is a sign, you know, we're approving a little bit on occupancy, but this is, this is transient and hotel sales. Notice 2001 there was a big climb. We climbed right out of the hole. And now this year we've sort of, we've evened out a bit. I think I've taken that as a sign. We're headed towards something, some new normal. We're, our revenues are still down, but we're headed. We're not as spiky as we were last year. So I took that as a good sign. Free employee programs still going strong. We have 30 companies participating with 60, 650 participating permits. We've rearranged with our new parking aims, parking software. We've actually created a system where now people's permits expire. So I don't remember from last year we had like 70 companies that were involved. And we've pruned out half of them because they weren't actually using, you know, they weren't actually participating. We still have 650 employees though. So that those 30 employees, those 30 companies ostensibly are having better utility. That's how I'm reading it. So just in conclusion, our occupancy remains low. Our public use seems to be recovering. We're looking at, you know, we'd like to get better resolution. We'd like to get time of day, parking occupancy. Right now we're doing it with parking services agents. They're going in there. We're doing enforcement with parking service agents. So twice a day they're counting manually the occupancy of the garage, which is time consuming and not as accurate as if we had LPR. We're still working with legal to license plate recognition. I'm sorry, license plate recognition, optical character recognition of license plates. That will allow us to basically say plate, plate one, two, three came in, plate one, two, three went out, doesn't record anything. It just says we recognize this person came in. We recognize this person went out and we get real time. I can't see. We have some hurdles there yet to come overcome. We are still improving our permit sales and accounting process. We've migrated from a Google sheet waiting list. We're migrating into a waiting list that's baked into Ames. Not there yet. We're three months into Ames. So we're still learning these things. And we are just starting to get to exploiting how to use Ames to get real metrics on parking sales. If you read through the fines for food analytics deck that came out of Ames. We did a lot of work with Ames to package reports. So we're still working. We're growing there.  I don't know how many permits we need to sell still to say what the oversell threshold is because we're not full yet. So that's where we are. The last thing that I just wanted to make sure that we acknowledge every year was 100 Bank Street with a special agreement with them relative to their. It's a special development agreement. And I just wanted to acknowledge that, you know, they have allocations for five years after that they have a it's not an allocation anymore. It's a fixed purchase. They're getting in the year. They're going to say we need 100 permits or we need 150. It's going to be a fixed fee up till then. We have this allocation of 200 that we're working against. They only have 59 permits right now.  It's not open to all that stuff. So, but this is here so that every year we remember to make sure that we engage with this agreement and we communicate that to you. That's it. I blew through there real quick. Excellent. Good information. Thank you. Yeah. Sure. I just have one quick question with the transition to the digital permitting software. And sort of in light of the conversation we had this evening, are we able to. I guess take DMV information of sort of generally where people live and are using the parking garages. Sort of. We can't use DMV data that's protected with CGIS. That's the criminal justice information system. That's why we have locks on our doors. That's why we're allowed to get license plate information and actually connect the aims to plates. We can, however, get that information from Park Mobile because that's disclosed. They disclose their name. They disclose their license plate number. So we can, we actually, that's how if you saw it in that. Holiday promotion, the program, I was able to say where people came from. I got that from Park Mobile. I didn't do it through the DMV. So. It's a little complicated. I know you're going in. So somebody doesn't enter their, their license plate when they enter. If you're on Park Mobile, you do. Yeah. If you have a permit, you don't. We actually, what we do is we, we don't have a permit. We just do, they don't have a credential. And we issued ticket. Thank you. Thank you. I just have a question about the way finding issues that we've had. Yeah. If you have a permit, you don't. We actually, what we do is we type the plate into our handheld. And then if it says they have a permit, we keep going. If it says, hey, they haven't paid. We don't know if they don't have a permit or they haven't paid the meter or, you know, paid by, but we don't know how they didn't pay. We just do, they don't have a credential. And we issued ticket. Thank you. Okay. Let me think about the way finding issues that we've had stations about. Are there any proposals to improve the way finding. Down and back. Anything created. Right. Lights that, you know, the flow along the path. Anything in between the garages is we're actually, where's the meeting this week? There's lots of conversation about way finding real as related to the main street project. Wayfinding in the streets is actually, that's a project managed by Tech Services Group. They might do talk to them. But in my world, what I could control, like we just did a major cleanup of the path between the garages and Bank Street. We went in and actually cleaned up, tens of thousands of dollars worth of landscape to make that a more welcoming space.  If you see graffiti in the garage, just send me an email. There shouldn't be any. So we're trying to create that environment. We're trying to create the destination. We want the destination to be benign. We want people to come in and not be terribly happy and not be upset.  So no graffiti, you know, nice and bright. So that's what I could control. What's the recommended direction down that sidewalk? I mean, which way are you expecting people to find their way in and out of that downtown? The Church Street either up Cherry or up the path, to Bank Street that's almost the same amount of time. I've actually walked from the top deck of the lakes of downtown North to Church Street. It's under seven minutes, five for me. I've seen people coming out the College Street parking entrance. I'm just wondering if that's something that you have any sense of people choosing to do that because they're like, well, I know I got in this way. Maybe I can get out of this. We see a lot of interesting things. So to be clear, we do have a signage, comprehensive signage plan for the marketplace garage and downtown garage. It's a unified signage plan. It's $1 million. And so what we're focusing on now is the lighting, the graffiti, the safety, you know, those really in our face tactile challenges. So we know we need better signage. I really think that's going to help the occupancy. It's been that, obviously, relabeling in the downtown parking garage sounds great. So that sounds like, oh, pretty logical. I could get to the downtown. I appreciate whatever you can do. And I think it's going to help us. And now that you have an in-person working on it, maybe you have something to bring forward. I would suggest we come up with some creative, you know, get some sort of way of getting the creative community to come up with some ideas of how to help people negotiate that. Because I think other downtowns have had these challenges. I hope you figure it out. Thank you. Let's go to the phone, Commissioner Mutano. No comments, really. Thank you for the report. But I'd like to maybe just second the kind of way-finding aspect as being an important part. And especially as kind of that area gets a little more built up, that we kind of do pursue that. But yeah, thank you. Thank you. Commissioner Fox. Yeah, just some quick clarifying questions, because this is new to me. I guess I'm wondering, is this occupancy report just for permitted spaces, or is it permitted spaces? And for the garage. OK, the entire garage. OK, that wasn't clear. Thank you. And then, yeah, just hoping you can explain really briefly what the employee, the free employee program is. Yeah, so this is really interesting. So just a little bit of backstory. There used to be two hours free in the marketplace garage and downtown garage. And a couple years ago, we took the two hours free. It was discontinued at the marketplace garage for a variety of demand reasons. But in that process, we also created a free employee parking program for downtown garage. The idea was that we want the marketplace garage to be for the marketplace customers and give downtown workers, the barista, the front house folks, the people that are really giving the vibrancy to the church street, give them some place to park for free. So basically, we said, we're going to make some more money on the marketplace garage. We're going to spend it on giving free parking to downtown police. And then it's been very well received. I hear lots of positive comments from downtown merchants. And it's only for businesses that are actually in the designated downtown district. Wonderful. That's all I had. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Barr. Thanks. I just have some questions around the LPR and the Ames. And I think it's great that we've moved in those directions. Is LPR just for the garages at this point, or have you mounted cameras on the parking enforcement? We do not have approval to do LPR yet. You don't have approval to it? OK. It is high on our agenda and radar and whatever analogy you have. But we have not surmounted that. So far, it's worked well for UVM and UVM MC. It will radically change our operations. Yeah, because that's important. And in your push to have it approved, I would continue to push the tech companies that make the LPR to put it in a handheld mode. Because just having it on a vehicle, we did find some challenges at UVM with the corners and trying to find it. The idea is to streamline and to make it easier. But a great report. We see it as an equity issue because it means that we can actually get to more parts of the city and not just hit the hotspots, so to speak. Definitely. Residential, all those kind of things. Yeah, it's a good tool. It protects. Welcome your ongoing questions about this. We navigate the whole process. Sure, Ms. Holler. Thanks. Vice-chair on your welcome. I'll spare you what I almost did in the downtown garage when I knew where I wanted to get to. But I went through every door. And I went on the elevator. And I was like, yeah. The elevator worked. The elevator worked. And I had to go to something like the orientation I had at BHS with my surly teenager.  So the wayfinding thing, underscore, underscore.  Yeah, let me sign to say Peggy. And of course, I was yelling at her. I'm like, this is why I ride my bike, because I know where I'm going. Anyway, yeah, the wayfinding, I think, would be helpful. Especially with that sense of, like, I knew where I wanted to go. And I literally almost jumped over. But I, yeah. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, you know. A question about the free employee parking. You just mentioned there's for designated downtown. And I was at a business on lower main and battery, mirror, mirror, right? And someone there said that the employees don't know whe