Recording in progress. Little person, Tracy, Councilor Pines. We have a quorum and a lot to get through. So I'm going to go ahead and get started if you're ready, Catherine. I am ready. All right, awesome. So I will call to order the Board of Finance at 5.03 PM on Monday, May 24th. And the first item on the agenda is the agenda. I would welcome a motion to read out. So I'm ready to make a motion regarding the agenda. So moved. Thank you, Councilor Pines. Seconded by Councilor Jang. Discussion of the agenda. There's no discussion. We'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Are there any votes? We have a duly adopted agenda. Is there any member of the public that would like to speak to the Board of Finance in the public forum? I do see someone with their hand raised. Gabrielle, I will enable your microphone. Welcome. Thank you. And thanks very much. I wasn't certain how to join in in this discussion. I'm here as chair of Burlington Electric Commission and I just wanted to note that the team at BED and the commission, this is with regards to the agenda item pertaining to increasing the rates for Burlington Electric. I just wanted to give you guys a little bit of background, which is that we have been discussing this since about 2018. And we've had 12 years of no rate increase, which is both wonderful, but also not reflective of most things in life. And our team at Burlington Electric has just been incredibly strategic with the investments made over the last 12 years, as well as some luck in terms of what's gone on in the market and in terms of renewable energy policy. But as a result, we've been able to hold that steady and then with the pandemic, we've certainly seen quite a shortfall. But again, over, I think we've met, the Burlington Electric Commission has met the last three Wednesday evenings in a row. So a couple of additional special meetings as well as our typical meeting as the team has just continued to sharpen their pencils and identify where they could cut, what they could transfer for a future year in terms of expenditure. And I just, I wanted to weigh in to the Board of Finance that the commission and the department team do not propose this rate increase lightly. We do understand that this is an incredibly challenging time for so many Vermonters and so many Burlingtonians. We did hear at our public meeting last Wednesday from some of our really important key community members, UVM Medical Center, UVM Small Businesses, and we will continue to work with them throughout this whole process. But just wanted to weigh in and say, this is not done lightly. It is done with full acknowledgement of how challenging this may be for some entities and some individuals and I'll leave it to the team to present in the appropriate agenda item. But just on behalf of the commission wanted to really let this Board know how much time and effort and detailed analysis has gone into this process. So thanks very much for the opportunity to speak and I'll just remain on mute and listening and happy to answer any questions if they may come up with the appropriate agenda item. Great, Gabrielle, thank you, our representative Stevens. Thank you for your service Montpelier and thank you for a long service on the commission and coming and sharing that perspective as a chair tonight. It's very helpful. Are there any other members of the public that would like to speak to the Board of Finance about business before us from there? I'm not seeing any more hands, Jordan, we have no emails. So I'm gonna close the public forum now and move to item 3.01, which is the Consent Agenda, which is the adoption of May 10th minutes. Are we ready for a motion regarding the Consent Agenda? Councilor Pine, turn off his mic if I may. Time is short for Councilor Pine to have official actions on the Board of Finance. So would you like to make the motion? I would move to approve the Consent Agenda and take the actions in the case. Great, thank you. Is there a second? Seconded by, we'll give that to President Tracy and go to a vote. Are all those in favor of adopting the Consent Agenda? Please say aye. Aye. Aye. The motion carries unanimously and that brings us, thank you, to 4.01. We are at the deliberative part of the agenda for the section approving and recommendations to the City Council. The first item is the Rail Yard Enterprise Project authorization to execute a cooperative agreement, a significant milestone in already, in the longer than we would like history of this project, but this is a significant step towards seeing this important project built. We have Chief and Spencer and Norm Baldwin here to answer any questions. Chief, why don't you, it's been a while since we have talked at this board about this project. Please give us a short summary of where this stands and why this is such a significant action tonight. Sure, thank you, Mayor. The Rail Yard Enterprise Project really is an exciting project in the southwest corner of downtown seeking to achieve a number of goals. Its purpose and need talks about enhancing multimodal connectivity, increasing the livability of this neighborhood south of downtown, stimulating economic development and improving access to the Rail Yard, to and from the Rail Yard. And so thanks to many councils support along the way, we've done two scoping efforts, one that was completed in 2016, one in 2020 and the council has continually supported this project's advancement. At the last time the council supported it was also to direct us to find a way to have the state and federal partners contribute 90% of the project cost and to get the preliminary engineering underway as soon as possible. Because the community has very strong support for this project. And I'm pleased to say that through good conversations I've made myself with leaders of federal highway and VTRANS, their support for this project has grown and got to the point where they are ready to begin preliminary engineering. This cooperative agreement offers $10 million of state and federal funding for us to move into preliminary engineering that will allow permitting and right of way and all those subsequent phases to really kick off. So we are very excited for this and city engineer, nor Baldwin, anything you wanna add? Yeah, I just share with the members of the board and council members that the cost sharing for this is 81% federal highway, around 9% for state and 10% local match for the city itself. I would note, and it's an important element here is that under any of these cooperative agreements VTRANS is considering development soils non-participating. So there is an unknown cost here yet to be understood as we advance through design. And another piece of the puzzle is that this funding would be available July 1. There is some preliminary work we're doing right now to assuming we get a cooperative agreement that's executed in support of the council that we could put an RFP out for design consultant and possibly come back to council late summer to get this project moving forward quickly. So we're, we are actually in early stages of conversation with VTRANS staff and making this an actual real project. Great, thank you, Chief and Norm. We'll go to Councilor Pine and then President Tracy. Sorry, I didn't mean Councilor Paul, I apologize. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I guess this is my last board of finance meeting when I will get confused with Councilor Pine. I think it must be the four letter and the P at the beginning. I believe that is what it is. I'm gonna assume that. So the first thing I just wanted to say is that, when I read this over on the fact that the grant award is 81.08% federal funding and the state is 8.92%, to me sort of sounds like a negotiation. And just wanted to offer my congratulations to those who managed to do that because those two numbers equal 90%, which is pretty impressive. The other thing I just wanted to ask is that you've got in here that 500,000, 500,000 would be in the first in the FY, let's see, you've included, the local match obligation is 1 million and that is included in the FY22 budget. But it says the proposed FY22 budget includes 50,000. So I assume that it's just the 50,000 and I probably have misread this when it says we'll continue to be budgeted in future fiscal years. So you're assuming that the most that we are going. Yeah, so to simplify it. The 1 million, so the 1 million is in the FY22 budget. No. No. What we're trying to express in the memo and I'm sorry it's not clear is that you have $10 million commitment from VTrans and Federal Highway for a maximum product limiting amount. Over the life of that cooperative agreement, the city could be on an obligation of a million dollars. It's anticipated that early stages of design will not cost us a million dollars. It's gonna be spread over some period of years and that we're only gonna be spending, well, a local match obligation of $50,000, which is 10% of whatever that math is. Okay, I mean, I guess what my confusion is, it just simply says the local match obligation of 1 million of this initial 10 million is being funded, et cetera, et cetera. And is included in the FY22 budget. Yeah, so we're anticipating, we're gonna spend about 500K in the first year and we're gonna have a $50,000 local match obligation. Okay, all right, I guess I'm not sure that that's what that says, but that's fine. I mean, I just, unless I've missed something, I mean, I don't see that and I don't see that in the motion, but I think it probably, perhaps again, maybe I'm the only person who feels that way, but it seems as though that's not phenomenally clear. I just wanted to verify. So anyway, that's all I was gonna ask about. This is wonderful news that we are finally moving forward with this, particularly given the neighborhood and the desire to have more activity in that area and hopefully make it, as I say, the neighborhood that's affected by that. So anyway, thank you. Thanks very much. Thank you, Councilor Powell. President Tracy. So I'm curious as to how this timeline will, for advancing this project, will interface with Parkway construction potentially. There's been significant discussion in increasing community interest around advancing this project along the same timeframe as the, as the Champlain Parkway in order to avoid the, or at least lessen the impacts on the King Street neighborhood. And that's specifically in the context of really needing to recognize the racial justice issues that play here of diverting traffic from a largely white neighborhood and increasing traffic volumes into a neighborhood that has one of the highest concentrations of people of color in our city. And so I think it's really important that we prioritize this and I'm happy to see this moving forward, but I just would like to continue to emphasize, at least for me, the need to see this project move forward on the same timeframe, because I don't want it to be us knowing that this is an issue and saying, oh, we're just gonna let this be an issue and let people suffer these increased things for years before this other project is advanced. So I guess I'm wondering if there's an opportunity here, given that we're starting to really see some progress on this really hard enterprise to have those two projects line up because I think absent that will just be, in many ways, recreating just the long history of bad and frankly racist highway decisions that have been made over time. So I just wanted to raise that issue in the context of this and that's what I'm hoping is possible here. Great, thank you, President Tracy. Mayor, can Mayor respond? Yeah, go ahead and what you can, when you start. Great, yes. Advancing the REP and bringing this forward as quickly as possible has been an effort over the last six to nine months to really drive this forward. It led in part to the mayors and my continued conversation with V-Trans and Federal Highway to get the right funding formula and to allow the preliminary engineering to start. Thanks to our partners, they agreed to start now with preliminary engineering. In addition, we've been looking at all other ways that we can keep the Rail Yard Enterprise Project moving ahead quickly. One of the ways is by trying to figure out on the front end what permitting, federal permitting process will need to go through. And in working with Federal Highway, it appears at this point that we can advance the Rail Yard Enterprise Project with an environmental assessment and not a full-blown environmental impact statement. So that also has a potential to keep this project moving more quickly. The Parkways timeline is such that we're expecting to get the Federal Highway's response to the record of decision sometime later summer or early fall. Project is expected to be put out to bid over the course this winter with a 2022 construction. Construction would last at least two construction seasons, which would put finishing that project probably around 2024. So to your point, President Tracy, the REP, the Rail Yard Enterprise Project, it's gonna be a complex project, but there is a path to getting this under construction within four to six years. And so the two projects are independent of one another, but are gonna be relatively close in their project delivery timeline. At least that is our intent. Okay, all right, well, that's helpful like in terms of the clarification, I just would hope that we can continue to push on any annual efforts to get them to line up completely because I think that's gonna be crucial to really addressing the community concerns that we're hearing here. Yeah, President Tracy, I would add to what Chapin just said. Explicitly, we are still in a period of environmental justice review on the Champlain Parkway. It has put front and center the concerns you are raising that in some ways, our predecessors had grappled with and addressed, I mean, I'm not sure addressed is actually the right word, but had made a decision about many years ago, this environmental justice review from my perspective has caused a reopening of exactly the kind of concern that you're raising and we're making sure that that work is done very thoroughly. And we think this has put this table, this issue back on the table in a way that must be addressed and that's what we're working through. So more and more to come there. I guess in this action we're taking tonight, moving forward with our federal and state partners, the Rallyard Enterprise Project, advancing the thinking, advancing the design, advancing the engineering, hopefully moving through an efficient federal regulatory process. All that I think is all to the good of no matter kind of exactly how the decision about Champlain Parkway comes back to us. I think having this moving forward and moving forward quickly will be helpful in that. Are there any additional questions before we vote, Councillor Jang, go ahead. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I do believe that, Champlain, thank you so much. I think what you provided around answer to President Tracey's question in writing was very well, to me at least, because there are a group of people that when I send it to them, they wanna take it to the next level. Basically, this is no longer a city issue. They wanna now go to the state, and there has been, they started something. So my question is specific about the soil contamination and also the budget for this project. I just wanted to hear from you. Are you speaking from a high confidence that Burlingtonians or the city of Burlington can only take the tap around the 10% of the total cost? Will this be the same issue at the Burlington School District? We go further down the line and we find all the contamination that requires more substantial amount of funding. Do you think from your perspective? Thanks, Councillor Jang. I'll start off and ask the engineer, Baldwin, if he has any additional thoughts, but the 10% local match is for participating costs. That means that things that Federal Highway and V-Trans deemed to be eligible, get the 90% Federal and State share. Managing soils, as City Engineer Baldwin said, are not part of the participating costs. The city has long struggled with the cost of doing projects in Burlington where soil management is a major component. Right now, the roundabout has a half a million dollars of soils that we are finding out how to work with on that project and the parkway will have its own soil liability. The bike path realignment on the waterfront has its soil liability. So this project won't be any different. There will be an additional cost to the city over and above the 10%. What that is will not fully be understood until we have a design calculated quantities and then we'll have an estimate to come back to you. I feel like the given the small project area and the importance of creating this street grid system, as we've heard from counselors and members of the public, that it is a risk that we need to understand and but we need to move ahead with the project. City Engineer, Norm Baldwin, anything to add? No, I'd say that's very thoroughly explained. And the challenge is until we go to design and we start doing testing of the soils and get biometrics and we have an alignment we don't really know precisely what that cost will be. As you know, there are three alternatives being considered in this process. And until we know the alternatives, that won't be narrowed until that point in time. I would also add that we've been direct conversation with DEC about funding other sources of funds to offset some of those costs that could be potentially eligible through either federal or state dollars. Okay, are there any further questions for the team? Seeing none, I think I would welcome a motion on a parade from make a motion. Councillor Jang, Councillor Jang, but yeah. So moved, I make the motion to move this forward. Thank you, Councillor Jang. Second from President Tracy, further discussion. Okay, not seeing any hands, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Are there any opposed? Don't believe there are, the motion carries unanimously. Thank you, and thank you, Chairman Norquham. This brings us, okay, I think you're stick with us. DPW, Team DPW, next item is authorization to amend the project budget and construction contract for sidewalk reconstruction program. And this is, we talked about last week in the capital budget meeting, the need to approve soon sidewalk monies if we were gonna be able to have an extensive season and it seemed like there was likely support in the discussions last week. So we are bringing this back for action, hopefully tonight. So that's the context, Councillor Paul. Thanks, Mayor. It's a long recommended action. So I won't read it unless you'd like me to, but I would make a motion to take the recommended action. Great, thank you. Is there a second? Seconded by President Tracy. Is there any discussion? Councillor Paul, go ahead. Thank you. I would just like to thank the DPW staff that responded to me. There was a concerted effort going on as every member of the Board of Finance received these emails, a concerted effort going on on one city street to make sure that they get their sidewalks done, both sides. And I know that they have been on the list for a considerable length of time. And if were it not for these funds would not be getting the sidewalk. So that amongst the other projects, I think which are all very worthy and I'm happy to support this. Thanks very much. Okay, thank you, Councillor Paul. Are there any other discussion? Yep. Councillor Jang, go ahead. Yep, I'm sorry. I just stepped out because a constituent of mine came to my house about the same issue, sidewalk on Lorry Lane, $50,000 surgery that could happen when went very wrong. And basically I support this and I support any other additional funding as well that the DPW may require to get these type of stuff. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Jang. Any further discussion? Okay, seeing none, we will go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you, Team DPW for batting us and bringing it forward for action. I'll look forward to seeing fresh concrete in three more miles of the city this summer. Sharing President Tracey and I were recently talking about the joy that it gives us to see freshly laid sidewalks. Authorization to execute engineering on-call main agreement with Wright-Piers and another DPW water resources item. Welcome, Martin. Megan, Megan, would you like to tee this up for the brief summary? I mean, I'd be happy to hand it over to Martin. He's the one who's leading this vote, but go for it, Martin. Yeah, sure. So Wright-Piers is the wastewater engineering firm that we've been working with since the bond vote was approved in 2018. We went through a competitive EPA qualification-based selection process at that time and we selected Wright-Piers. So they've been working with us and we've received a few approvals to work with them on EPA state revolving fund projects over the last two years. Since then, we've also worked on smaller projects which are in the memo, which are less for value of less than $50,000, but now we're seeking to continue working with them so that up to a amount of $100,000 because we anticipate over the next couple of years and in the near future, we're going to be doing some more engineering planning work as we prepare for additional projects that are necessary at the wastewater plant. Thank you, Martin, for teeing that up. Floor is open for questions or a motion? Councilor Jang. I'd like to make the mission to recommend to the city council to approve the 2021 Water Resource Weight Restructions and Affordability Program Proposal. I got it right. Oh, to recommend to the city council to authorize the director of Public Works to execute the on-call main contract with Wright-Piers. The maximum of limited amount of $100,000 for engineering services related to wastewater treatment plant improvement program, subject to reviewable, up to a vote by the chief administrative officer and city director of this office. Thank you, Councilor Jang. Seconded by President Tracy. Floor is open for discussion. Okay. Seeing no hands, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. Thank you. I'm in water and we'll see you later on tonight, I think, for the rate discussion. We now go to the 4.0, sorry, I guess here we are for the rate discussion, sorry. Sorry, lost my way there for a moment. So 4.04, approval of the 2021 Water Resources Division Rate Restructuring and Affordability Program Proposal. An associated chapter of 26 and 31 ordinance changes. This is the product of a years of work and I think really good work, creative work and attempt to be responsive to past discussions council. And I'll turn it over to you, Megan, for a short overview. And then we'll hear from Board. Yes, hold on, I'm trying to, can you all hear me, there we go. Yes. I am not quite my usual perky self since I am recovering from a stomach bug that my littlest gave me over the weekend. So I've got my team here, Jess Lavalette and Dave Fox in case I completely lose my train of thought. But President Tracy, you had directed me to give a more substantial presentation but I just wanna be respectful of how much time other items may take. Would you like me to still go through my slides to make sure everybody's fully up to speed or put it into hyperdrive, whatever your pleasure. So, yeah, I think it would be good to probably hear just a quicker presentation because we do have quite a bit on this agenda and I would be concerned about getting over into the other into council agenda, recognizing all the other ones that we have going on. So, and if counselors have additional questions I can certainly ask it is also on the liberty of agenda for the full council as well. So, okay. Let me go as quickly as I can. We are super, super happy to be here with you today to present on our final proposal for our comprehensive rate restructuring and Burlington Water Resources first affordability program that's designed to protect essential access to clean safe water. And can you all see my slide just making sure because I know I've had that mistake in the past. Okay, awesome. So I think we all kind of have come to the same realization. You all as a council and administration have been extremely supportive of our march towards more sustainable funding to both fund the operations as well as the really necessary reinvestment in our capital infrastructure that really much of it has passed its useful life. But we realized that there was a tension with the incremental rate increases and potentially marching towards a place where people might actually have a hard time paying their water bill. And so what's the point of having access to clean water or having the ability to serve clean water to our residential population when they potentially are not able to afford it or start having to make really difficult choices about what they are able to use their money for. And so in 2019, again, two years ago, we did kick off this comprehensive rate evaluation and we had three objectives in mind. One prime in our minds was keeping the affordability of rates, trying to figure out ways in which we could really protect that access to clean water that essential access for our residential users. At the same time, we can't ignore that we need to improve our overall financial health and sustainability along with our revenue stability. If COVID has taught us anything is that we cannot always rely on a steady usage of the water that drives our ability to pay for the plants, pay for the pipes and all the things that we do. And then fundamentally, we wanted to make sure that rates were recouping the cost of service in an equitable manner. Now equitable doesn't necessarily mean equal. We'll talk about that in just a smidge. I wanted just to detail that we have done an extensive amount of public outreach in the first year of the study, public meetings, city council presentations. We did go on a hiatus due to COVID and then in 2021, we decided that we needed to restart the program because again with COVID, if people were barely having a hard time paying their water bills in the past, we were really concerned that this is the time that was now that people needed help in order to access, continue accessing their utility services. 2000, sorry, April, 2021, we did a huge slog of additional outreach to share the results, the latest results of our proposal with public meetings, information, postcards, ads in seven days, as well as direct communications to some of our more heavily impacted customers. We were very happy to obtain a motion of support from the Public Works Commission as well from the TUC, as well as from the TUC in late April. So going back to equity, for the longest time, all of our customers have paid the exact same rate for their volumetric water. But when we look at how different customers impact our system and the level of burden that they put on our system, some customers actually put more of a burden on our system, and so it is justified to potentially charge them more. And so for the first turn of the wheel, even before we get into specifics of affordability, we looked at realigning cost of service with what we're actually charging people. And the first piece of that is to actually charge people, charge customers a fixed charge by meter size. This is very much equivalent to what you might see on your electric or gas bill, the sort of ready to serve charge or an admin fee. It's industry best practice, strongly encouraged by our bond rating agencies. And it starts to realign the amount of fixed revenue we get closer to what our actual fixed expenses are. Our actual fixed expenses are more in the realm of about 20%, with this initiation of implementing the fixed charge, we're starting to recover about 10% of that revenue with a fixed charge. The other piece is a customer class based rates.  With this, even though we're not fully leveraging and not really making say the commercial volumetric rate any higher than the multi-unit residential or the city customer class, we have that ability in the future to apply different affordability-based pricing for essential residential water in future turns of the wheel. The one place where we are kind of charging a different rate would be the irrigation rate. So for folks who have a water-only meter, that is irrigation meters, we charge them water only because we know that their water is not going to the wastewater system, it's actually going on dirt. And so that rate is substantially higher because while it's certainly everybody's right to irrigate their lawns and their gardens and whatnot, we don't necessarily think that clean, safe drinking water, the best use for it is not necessarily to be put on dirt.  There's a handful of meters in the city which are actually used to provide the makeup water for heating and cooling. There's only a handful of customers that have that type of meter. And while we originally included them in the irrigation customer class, we realized quite recently that, you know, that water is a little bit different. It's actually less discretionary because you actually do need it for heating and cooling. One important caveat to the irrigation rate is that we are exempting the irrigation meters for the community gardens. Lastly, something that we haven't charged for in the past, but is definitely a special benefit that some buildings or subdivisions have is private fire protection. So certain buildings actually have a separate fire, separate pipe, larger pipe that goes to charge or to provide the fire flow for their sprinkler system should they have a fire. That pipe and the pumping ability that we have to maintain in order to supply that pipe is above and beyond what we would need to just provide everybody with regular tap water. And so that is a special charge that's going to be assessed. The, when we originally did the calculations, if we were to assess that charge fully, the full cost of that charge to the customers, it would have been quite a substantial rate increase on some of those customers. And so we've proposed to phase that in over five years. Getting to affordability, which is really the thing that I think we're all interested in. We've had a few assistance options to date, interest-free payment plans, stormwater credits for directly assessed properties. But it was really clear that there was more that we needed to do to assist our customers. And so the elements of the affordability options are threefold. First of all, everybody who's in either a single family duplex or triplex property is going to have a sort of first tranche of their water, which is based on, we look at the median usage for a different type of property. So for a single family, it is 400 cubic feet per month. For a duplex, it's 600 and for a triplex, it's 900. For that volume of water and below, they're actually charged at a substantially lower rate to incentivize water conservation. If they go above that amount, the first 400, for instance, with a single family would be charged at the lower rate. And then anything above that would be charged incrementally at a higher rate. The other piece, and this is the biggest piece of our affordability program is the waiver of the six monthly water and wastewater charge for income constrained customers. So this is going to be designed to provide relief to households who meet either income or age eligibility requirements, as well as nonprofit affordable or senior housing developments. The income eligibility, we don't have enough staff on hand to be looking at people's incomes. So our proposal is that we would be determining income eligibility through a customer submission of proof of being eligible for some other income-based programs such as LIHEAP, Lifeline, if they received assistance from Vermont Gas, so on and so forth. The senior discount is going to require an application with the proof of age and happy to talk about it further. I know there've been some questions or concerns that folks don't think that being a senior necessarily equates to being on a fixed income. We think that having the application process is gonna, for the most part, weed out somebody who would get this discount and not really necessarily need it. And the last one is flexible payment terms. In the past, we have had payment plan options, but this is actually going to add a budget billing option, which will allow people to kind of lock in at what a monthly rate is, even though for months to months, their bill might otherwise go up and down. A couple of other cool things that I think I mentioned during our budget presentations were super excited about our first infrastructure assistance program, which is going to be providing up to $250 in rebates for residential customers to cover the cost of filming their private sewer lateral. Someday, somehow, we would love to be able to establish grant programs or loan programs so that folks would be able to replace this piece of infrastructure. The sewer lateral from the home to the main is actually entirely owned by that property owner and not by the city. But we think it makes a lot of sense for folks to hopefully get access to filming this pipe, understanding what its condition is and planning for those long-term costs. On the water side, we're going to be providing $75 rebates for residential customers towards the purchase of a water since plumbing fixture. One of the best things you can do to conserve water and bring down your bill is to actually sort of engineer in through either low flow fixtures or a dual flush toilet that really helps folks reduce their water because you can ask your kids to turn off the faucet or ask them to, you know, if it's yellow, leave it mellow but that doesn't always work. And so making it really easy for people. And then by 2022, we're going to be fully implementing our Blue BTV residential stormwater grant program where folks can get their house assessed. And if the Blue BTV consultants identify that there's some easy things you can do on your property, we would be covering a portion of those costs. Now, one thing that came up in the past was our affordability programs are admittedly not really addressing the needs of renters. In most cases, these fixed fee waivers are only going to be applying to single-family properties and other individually metered residential units. An example of that would be a lot of duplexes might have one meter and in that case, it might be hard to apply the fixed fee waiver, but in the case of duplexes where, for whatever reason when the property was constructed, they have individual meters, we would be able to apply that. So multi-family rentals aren't gonna have access in this phase and why is that? I think some of our concerns and concerns that other cities have shared is that if the city provides a fixed fee waiver to a landlord, we have no way of guaranteeing that that landlord is gonna pass that affordability measure on the tenants. So that doesn't quite sit with us quite right right now. The other piece, as I mentioned, is that multi-family units often share a meter. So if you have a four or five unit building, just doing a fixed fee waiver structure isn't necessarily gonna benefit an individual rental unit and so we need to figure out a way to do that. We are not alone, most water utilities across the country are really struggling to address this renter gap. DC water and New York City water in particular and we're really closely watching DC waters program have only recently launched programs this year. And so our promise to you because we recognize that in a place like Burlington with over 60% of the properties being rental properties is this is something that we really need to tackle. And so we're gonna continue to evaluate these options and bring something back to you by April 2023. So lots of talking, what are the numbers mean? Tonight you're not being asked to approve these rates, should you approve our proposal? This is the rate fee schedule that we would bring back to you. On the upper tier, you're seeing our new proposed fixed charge per month. And now a really great question a counselor had posed to me was why are we seeing the fixed charges actually go down for some of the larger meter sizes and I think it's two reasons and Dave can correct me if I'm wrong, but one of them is that they're also seeing that fixed fire charge come in but the other really important piece is right now the larger meters who currently have a charge each month, they're actually getting them a minimum amount of water. So they're getting an initial chunk of water for free or with that charge and with this proposal, they will no longer be getting that allowance. So they're gonna be treated just the same as the five eighths and three quarter inch customers which are your typical residential meter size. And everybody has to pay this regardless of whether you use zero or 100 or 400 cubic feet a month, you're gonna be paying this charge because it's that readiness to serve fee. On the lower tier is the volumetric rate. And you can see those, the two tiered systems for the single family duplex and triplex systems. As I said again, the tiers aren't such that if you go over the 400 cubic feet that then all of your water is charged at that $6.19 cent rate. It's that the first 400 would be charged at that $2.48 and then anything above the 400 would be charged at that higher rate. And then for the most part, you can see that all of the other classes are getting charged the same with the exception of the heating and cooling makeup water which is a slightly higher charge and then the irrigation charge which is a substantially higher charge. What does this do for the customers? Well, had we not been pursuing this rate restructuring, the typical single family home using about 400 cubic feet a month would be seeing a bill increase of about 5.9%. And with this rate restructuring, you're actually seeing, I don't know if you can see my cursor, that that same customer, even though we are generating more funds, the funds we need to run our system to sort of backfill the fact that we didn't have a rate increase last year are actually going to be seeing, no impact or even a slight decrease. If you're a customer that actually qualifies for our wrap or our fixed fee waiver, they're actually going to be seeing a substantial decrease. And the same goes for the duplex and triplex customers. The one caveat to that that certainly has drawn a lot of people's attention is the low volume customer. Why are they seeing an increase? And the simple answer is that it's because of that fixed fee charge. The proportionality of that charge compared to how much water they use ends up showing them having what looks to be a substantial increase on a dollar value. It is about $51 a year or I think about $4.25 a month. It's just, it is just an outcome of how the rate restructuring works. It's one of the reasons why we decided to implement the senior discount because we wanna make sure that if there's a customer, say a senior customer who perhaps hasn't necessarily gone through the exercise of qualifying for one of the income-based programs, perhaps they're proud and they think that they can just manage it on their own. We want them to have the ability to have a relatively easy way to perhaps get a little bit of a discount on their bill and bring them more into that row too. On the flip side, I mentioned that the commercial customers on average are seeing about a 9% increase and that is one of the reasons why with this turn of the wheel we aren't necessarily adjusting that volumetric rate on these particular customers and also why we're phasing in the fire protection charge over five years. And I think with that there's a number of different ways for people to reduce their bills but they could certainly contact our office if anybody has concerns. We also have made available a form where people can request an account impact summary. So if folks are worried about what's gonna happen to their bill, we're able to prepare an estimate of what that looks like and then talk people through the various things that they could do to reduce that charge. And overall, we were very happy to be able to propose a FY22 budget that's built to ensure proper operation and sustainable stewardship of infrastructure with that targeted funding for the customer assistance programs. As I mentioned before, if we weren't doing this rate restructuring, all residential rate payers were gonna be seeing a definite increase on their bills but with the proposed changes, income qualified rate payers and seniors are gonna actually see a decrease on their overall water resources bills. The majority of single family residential rate payers are gonna see a benefit and various median single family users duplex and triplexes are either gonna see no increase or a decrease. Most importantly, perhaps, by establishing that customer class-based rate structure, it's gonna allow for specific affordability-based pricing of essential residential water usage as we march on into the future. And with that, I think I will stop my show. Great. Thank you, Megan. Really a lot of detail and strategy that you've pulled together here. The floor is open for questions for Megan and the team or a motion when the board is ready. Councilor Pine. Thank you. Megan, the work that you've done is pretty incredible here and I'm really just wanna acknowledge and thank you and your team and the consultants. I'm just really impressed as when we were discussing the $30 million bond a couple of years ago and the fact that rates would have to go up both for that and for future capital improvements that are going to be necessary. We made it, I think we had consensus that the impact on rate payers was something we were very concerned about. And so I just wanna thank you and say that we really appreciate what you've done here. And I just wanna ask you, is there anything that you feel like you couldn't achieve in this restructuring that you wish you could have done? I mean, I think the only, there's always rocks left unturned and I think if you've attended all of our various presentations, generally the iterations between the presentations was because of some comments and we would flip a rock over and take a look at what was underneath and see if we could do something which is why the duplex and the triplex rates changed and so on and so forth. I think it's the renter piece. I think we're really curious to see how DC Waters program goes and whether something like that could work in Burlington. I think it's gonna be interesting to see what the uptake rate is of our currently proposed program and then figuring out what we can do for renters and the relatively the near term. I think our consultant looked at our current affordability and it's not terrible, right? We don't have extremely burdened customers when it comes to our water resources rates, but as you mentioned, as we look at the trajectory of what we have to do to reinvest in our existing infrastructure as well as build new infrastructure to further protect the lake, I think it really could become a concern and I wanna make sure that all of the customer classes that we can protect are protected. And so we're excited to see what the next few years hold and be able to bring something back to you guys that we can work on, on how to help those folks. Great, and thanks so much. I wanna just point out that I think it was 91 or 92% of the voters on that question said, please, please, please charge us more to fix what we're doing to our lake to help to reduce the pollution of our lake. So I hope your division will be looking for other ways to do more because there's still way more to do and you've made that clear to us. Thanks. Welcome, thank you for your support. Thanks, Kessar Pine, Kessar Paul. Thank you. So, yes, Megan, let me join the chorus of people who have complimented you and your colleagues on the incredible amount of work that has gone into this. This was a pre COVID initiative, obviously a little, in an ideal world, it probably would have happened a lot sooner, but you have done, it's unfortunate that the public doesn't always know the things that we know as city counselors about the enormous amount of work that has gone into crafting a rate structure that is respectful and fair. And as you say, equitable doesn't always mean equal. Hopefully it means equitable. The only question that I had or two questions, I guess, is that as I had communicated to you, I had a constituent who was concerned about seniors and the discount that they would receive and just wanted to, I think it is true and sort of I think human nature that people don't apply for a discount unless they really need it. I think it would be good for everyone, anyone who isn't on some sort of an assistance program to at least be able to verify for the record every couple of years that in fact, they're on a fixed income and this is something that they need in order to be able to manage their finances. And I'm wondering if that is something that can be extended to landlords, whether or not there is something that, and I don't know if this is even workable, but something that would say sort of like the way that we did during the early days of COVID in terms of giving people a break on the not having to pay interest and penalties on property taxes. Is there something that can say that, yes, we are doing this, but we do something that says that in fact that this would be passed on to tenants. I don't know if that's something that's even workable, but if it is, it's just a suggestion. I'm happy to make a motion to recommend that the council authorize the general, I'm sorry, I think I've got the wrong one up here. It sounded really good, but I realized that I've got the wrong one here. That recommend that the city council approve and adopt the 2021 water resources, rate restructuring and affordability program proposal conditional upon the adoption of the necessary amendments to be made to the Burlington's code of ordinances to recommend also that the city council votes to suspend the rules and place the attached amendments to the Burlington code of ordinances, chapters 26 and 31 in all stages of passage. Thank you, Councilor Powell. Do we have a second for that motion? Motion is seconded by Councilor Pine. I see Councilor Carpenter has her hand up. And we will go to Councilor Carpenter. Thanks, I'm Kieran Megan. Years ago when I was doing housing development, we, on a number of projects, we actually built in sub-meetering for the apartments and we kind of moved away from it and it's a little complicated, but I'm just wondering if you've looked at that and in particular, as we build new multifamily units, whether essentially requiring sub-meetering is something we should look at. So good question. We, I can't remember, Jess, we certainly don't, people could sub-meeter on their own, but we don't participate in the reading of those meters. So it would be a way to sort of cost allocate out the specific water usage and frankly also to know, A, if you have a particular unit that has a leak going on, right, because if it's kind of buried in the noise of a multi-unit building, you might not know who specifically could have a leaky toilet that could be increasing the water bill for everyone. So I don't, I don't think it's a bad idea, but it's not something we've necessarily gotten involved in per se. Jess, I don't know if you have any other comments on that. I concur with that. We used to provide, we used to sell sub-meeters to customers who wanted them prior to the change in the lead law in Vermont. So now anything we take out, we can't actually do that with, but yes, there are a number of properties who do sub-meter, but it's nothing that we actively participated in other than selling old stock, to my knowledge. Okay, it just may be something worthy of consideration as we go down the path of trying to be fair to rental properties. And I don't have any experience with this, but pushing sub-meetering in that way, you could be sure perhaps that some savings got passed on to tenants. That's an interesting point, Councillor Carter. Thank you. It's something that we can think about in this, in this next stage, it can all sorts of questions, I think that that we'll have to look into, but I appreciate the point that we're going to address. It's definitely easier to put them in when you're building something than after the fact, because we have people come to us and say, oh, I want to split these all up. And it's like, it doesn't really work that way. So definitely something for consideration. Thank you for bringing that up. Okay, we have a motion on the floor. Any more comments? Presentation. Just also wanted to call out, I thought the public process around this was excellent. I really appreciated you going and setting up tables at the MPAs. I also saw you on Church Street one of the days doing that and just getting feedback. I thought that that was really just a unique thing to see. And I just really, from a department for a process that is in some ways pretty wonky. And so to bring it to the public like that was really impressive and just want to compliment the team for your work on that. One of the things I wanted to just get a sense of is what, if any, conservation, you feel like we'll see coming from this. Do you think that this is going to impact behavior in any way? Or do you think that people are going to continue to kind of just use the water that they use? I mean, it's a good question. I think folks who are particularly around that 400, the median mark are probably going to be a little bit more compelled to try to get to that cheaper water because they will notice a bit of a jump when they cross that threshold. I think one thing that our division is looking into and with the possible pilot project up at the hospital that I mentioned during our budget presentation, looking at the possibility of doing AMI or advanced metering which would give people real-time access to what their water usage is, right? Which would enable them within the month to potentially dial back on how much water they're using versus waiting for their bill to come. I think until we get to that point, it is going to be a little bit hard. There are devices out there that you can purchase to sort of put on the outside of your meter and it will report to your smart device, but that's something that we're looking at for the next turn of the wheel. It doesn't really help us from an efficiency standpoint because it doesn't take us that long to read, but from a conservation and from an affordability having control over how much water you're using, knowing when you might have a leak. I think that's kind of probably affordability 3.0. And also we have to figure out how to pay for that type of infrastructure as well. Thank you. I think it's going to help with the irrigation though. Folks who have irrigation meters are definitely going to probably notice that they're going to have to be a lot more careful about when they're putting the water on and maybe not sprinkling quite so much. Okay, I'm not seeing more hands or questions. So I think we're ready to go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. Congratulations to the water team. Thank you for your hard work and we're a long period of time to get here and we will see you back later tonight. Thank you. Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. Okay, 4.05 key bank lease purchase finance agreement. It's a BED item. Welcome team BED. And the floor is open for a motion or questions. Councilor Paul. Thank you. I just have one quick question. And that is, I was looking at the term sheet and there are two options. Option number one, which is a term of 48 months. Option number two, which is 60 months. It's a slight difference in the rates. And either I missed it and please tell me where it is on the memo that you've attached. I don't think it says which option you chose to go with. And so did I miss that or did you not say that in the memo? I'm not sure. Sorry, Councilor Paul. We may not have mentioned that in the memo. I believe it's 48 months that we were looking at the shorter term. My colleague, Emily is on with us and can confirm that. Yes, that's correct. And it's the lower interest rate as well. Okay, so I think that in the interest of, being perhaps a little bit more complete since there were two options that if that could be just put into a final something or other so that people know what the term was. I mean, I personally, I'm all for paying things off quicker than as quickly as you can, given that it's low interest rates, but I think it probably would be good to include that. Good, Councilor Pines. Thank you. I'm a huge fan of the lease purchase approach. It's really, I think one of the best ways for municipal government to finance, especially these types of transactions. I did see that the term sheet expired according to the term sheet I read on the 21st. So I just wanna make sure that's not real. Hopefully they'll extend it. It is, okay. And I have the sense that it's just checking because I think the rate increase and the term sheet don't appear to be related, but yet they really are in a sense because one of the conditions is that we need to maintain our current financial ratios that we have. And if we don't do that, our debt service coverage ratio will slip. And therefore it looks like this financing would probably not be available to us is how I read that. Emily, is that you? Would you speak to that or is that Darren? I was gonna offer, Emily should jump in on that. I was gonna offer that the lease financing is part of a strategy that we have to maintain a above 90 days cash on hand for the FY22 budget, which is one of our critical ratings metrics. But Emily should jump in with more detail. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. The connection between this item and the rate case and our budget is that your approval of this item is assumed or incorporated in our budget proposal as well as the rate case is incorporated and assumed in our budget proposal. And so our ability to sort of construct a budget for FY22 includes this loan and the additional liquidity and cash that it provides in FY22, which in part helped mitigate the rate increase we're seeking by providing additional cash in FY22. Great. And then the rate is pretty remarkable how low the rate is. And I'm just wondering if staff time, if the transaction cost, if you're paying some attorney to put this deal together or is it fairly straightforward for you to do this? We have not yet reviewed the detailed lease purchase agreement. We have a boilerplate from key government finance that we are reviewing, but that is not gonna be the final, they're still finishing credit review on BED this week. And then we expect a final set of agreements. So, and we would consult with the city attorney's office to review those as needed before executing. But all said, it's a relatively modest administrative burden for, as you said, such a good interest rate for our customers. Great. Thanks for this and really appreciate your work. Okay. Are we ready for a motion? Don't think we still need one. Councilor Powell, is that a hand? Sorry. Sure. Sure, I'll make a motion to recommend that the council authorize the general manager of the Burlington Electric Department to enter into a tax exemplary purchase financing agreement with key government finance incorporated for an amount not to exceed $800,000 for information technology investments subject to the final review of agreement terms by the city attorney. And also noting that this is a 48 month lease purchase agreement. Second. Thank you, Councilor Powell. Thank you, Councilor Pine for seconding it. Any further discussion on this? Seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. All right. Motion carries unanimously. And that brings us to the other VED item, 4.06. This is the VED FY22 rate changes. Thank you, Darren for and your team for I know many months of hard work on this. In other words, a considerable discussion about it. Last week, I know you've done a lot of follow up with counselors in the day since. Floor is open. Well, if the board would like to summarize again, I feel like we sort of started this conversation last week. So happy to have Darren kick it off at the summary or dive right into any detailed questions regarding Councilor Pine. I was going to move that we recommend the city council authorize the general manager of Burlington Electric Department or his designated file tariff amendments with the Vermont Public Utility Commission to increase Burlington Electric Department rates by 7.5% beginning in fiscal year 2022 as proposed. Great, thank you, Councilor Pine. Is there a second? Thank you, Councilor Pau for seconding the item. Floor is open for questions or discussion. Councilor Pine. I would like, Darren, if you could talk to us a little bit and for the benefit of the public and other counselors who may not have this information, what would be the downside of either not doing this rate increase, but perhaps more importantly, if we were to phase it over perhaps a one-third, one-third, one-third over this next fiscal year, what that would do to BED? Thank you, Councilor Pine and appreciate the opportunity to speak to that. We in coming up with this proposal vetted a number of different options. We certainly, our first preferred option would be not to be here at all with a rate change, understanding it's a challenging moment for the community coming out of the pandemic. It was clear to us based on the impacts on BED that we had to propose a rate increase in order to maintain healthy finances. The 7.5% is as low as we were able to bring it, assuming an August phase in of the surcharge as we've proposed, as low as we were able to bring it while maintaining reasonably healthy financial metrics for the organization. I mentioned the 90 days cash on hand, that's the target, the minimum target for maintaining our A rating. This budget with the rate case would deliver a 97 days cash on hand, still lower than our three-year average of about 113, but above the A rating metric and it gives us a little bit of cushion in case things don't go quite as well during the year given that we will see continued COVID impacts on our sales to customers. The bigger concern is the adjusted debt coverage ratio, which for us is a metric that Moody's uses to look at the health of our operating revenues relative to our operating expenses and includes things like the city pilot payment that we make and other adjustments that may not be considered in the traditional debt to income ratio that's used. We're currently projecting a 1.06 for FY22. We really wanna be between a 125 and a 15 long-term to maintain the A rating. So we're still a little lower than we'd like to be but we've understood that there's a balance to be had between the impacts on our customers from going with a higher increase and the need to maintain these healthy metrics. We looked at even if we were to delay the rate proposal just by a couple of months even if we were to phase it in October instead of August we would see that ratio drop below 1.0 which to me would be a very much a red flag for us and not something that we wanna propose. And the other point I would make is our budget assumes that we'll be able to bring forward a proposal to the council and ultimately to the voters for a revenue bond later this year that would help support more moderate rate impacts going forward, help mitigate upward rate pressure through that revenue bond. And so having a strong credit rating as we go into that process is something we're very conscious of wanting to maintain. And private utility would have retained earnings that they could dip into and there's other sources. So you don't be doesn't maintain a significant fund balance of unassigned fund balance, do you? No, we really don't. We have a cash on hand kind of we have accounts and we have a credit line that's been approved continuously by the council, a $5 million line of credit that counts towards our days cash on hand that's sort of our cushion. We try to never draw on it. We try to reserve it in the event of an emergency or just to help with our credit rating but we really don't have much cushion beyond that. Well, I was definitely hesitant at first because of the size given that inflation is, well, this year it's actually, it's up quite a bit from last year but the rate increase is significantly higher than the rate of inflation but I think you've all done your diligence, you've done your homework and I think you've convinced at least this counselor that the rate payers are actually there's some, there's some safety, some guardrails or some safety mechanisms here with the creation of a low income rate and aggressive efficiency incentives and efficiency investments. People can actually lower their usage and maybe be cash flow neutral or perhaps better. So thanks a lot for what you've done here. Thank you, appreciate it. Good, I'm Councillor Jen. And then presentation. Thank you, Darren, for being in front of the council again to have this discussion and I personally value the conversation we had this morning. Thank you so much. And I think, you know, we had a great conversation and I recognize also that you have done substantial amount of work including the commission, right? And you guys have been having great discussion but I don't feel as if the community or the city council itself was really included in this discussion. This from my perspective seemed very sudden and it seems new. And I think we discussed, you've been mentioning for quite some time, BED hasn't received any increase over 12 years now, right? But I don't think that necessarily means you included us in this conversation or you included our constituents into this discussion. And also another element of all of this, you have one chance contrary to many other city department which means that you reach all customers directly in their mailbox through the bills. And I think you had an opportunity to engage them in this conversation. And also you mentioned it here in this conversation that yes, basically what I'm saying is I'm not saying no to the rate increase but I'm saying when. I think this is critical and I think many people have many other concerns in front of them, right? And I think we mentioned all of that. So I don't feel that I'm very comfortable in saying yes today, right now or this fiscal year about rate increase right now. And but I just recognize your work and the work of everyone is asking you for next time, we can do much better because time has changed and we have to be at the forefront including the people that we serve every single day. Just wanted to add that into the mix but thank you for all you have done. Thank you, Councilor Grail. Are there any further discussions? Further comments? Sorry, President Tracy. Thanks, Mayor. I was just, so to Councilor James' point I'm just wondering what the process has been to this point if you could just clarify that and then what it'll be going forward just so that folks are clear on what steps have happened now and then what other steps because I'm just wanting to understand that because we have heard that feedback from like some of the larger institutions. And so just wanting to get your take on that and what you're gonna be doing coming out of this as well. Thank you, Council President Tracy and thank you, Councilor Jang for the questions as well. Yeah, let me speak to the process. We've been signaling certainly previous Board of Finance budget presentations from prior fiscal years and as our Chair Gabrielle Stebbins mentioned at our Electric Commission, which are public meetings although I recognize that are not always well attended. We've been talking about the need after a period of 12 years now and even after a decade previously of adjusting rates at some point in the future. We have tried to keep customers who budget well in advance customers like University of Vermont, University of Vermont Medical Center updated that we were uncertain about our FY22 rates. In fact, we did that last August with UVM and in January with UVM Medical Center we get regular inquiries from them about are you planning to have any kind of a rate change going forward? We indicated we were not certain about FY22. Our budget process, this is my fifth budget with Burlington Electric. We start our budget process in December and January with division by division approach everybody bringing forward the projects that they need for their area. By the first or second week of March, it gets to me and I'm able to review it with our executive team and we begin the process of adjustment. In a typical year, we have a roughly 60 million some odd dollar budget. In a typical year, we may be looking at particularly over these last few having to find a way to cut or defer a million or perhaps two million in order to make the budget balance out correctly. This year we were staring at a $10 million gap from where we were to get to 90 days cash on hand. So it was an extraordinary challenge brought on by the pandemic in large part and we were uncertain at that point what resources might be available to us from state of rearage assistance. There was discussion at that point around the ARPA funds coming to the city. We weren't certain what of those BED might qualify for. So we started our work at that point of cutting, deferring or making alternative assumptions around the $10 million gap that we were facing. During that period of time, we said very much to the commission and to customers like UVM and UVM medical, we believe we may need a rate increase. We started that work, we were able to get about seven million of either cuts, deferrals or alternative revenue assumptions such as the revenue bond that we're proposing. The remaining three million that we couldn't otherwise address is what is made up for with the rate case. And our process is actually a multi-step and very unique process nationally for going through a rate case. There's only I think five states in the country that require a municipal utility to go through a local and a state regulation process. Vermont is one of them. So for us to propose this and bring it to fruition, we started with a public meeting of our electric commission which we had as Chair Stebbins mentioned, we actually had three of them over the course of three weeks. Members of the public could come and speak to this. We had UVM and UVM Medical Center and the Burlington Business Association joined us for one of those meetings to comment. The commission votes to recommend to the Board of Finance and City Council. So we came to present on our budget to the Board of Finance last Thursday. Again, a public meeting, we had public participation, I know from some of those same customers. And then we come tonight to seek approval to advance this to the Public Utility Commission. If you grant us that ability, that starts a whole new public process at the Public Utility Commission that will last months and months and will include a public forum, public hearing essentially on the rate case from the Public Utility Commission and members of the public are able to participate in that and weigh in at that point. But we're anticipating probably through the end of the year a fully litigated rate case with the Department of Public Service advocating on behalf of ratepayers for any steps that they can take to examine what we're proposing and make sure that it's just and reasonable under Vermont law. And ultimately it's up to the Public Utility Commission to decide to approve the rate or to change it or alter it in some way. But so we really have, we're really just at the beginning in some ways of a very much a month-long process that will include additional opportunity for public comment beyond the commission meetings, the council and Board of Finance meetings that we've already had. All right, thank you, Darren. Are you satisfied, President Tracy? Okay, Councilor Powell. Thanks very much. So I'm also very sympathetic and an understanding of Councilor Jang's comment. I think that the more advanced notice that we can give people, particularly in a difficult time for not only for the institutions, but for everyone, the better. And I think it seems as though, Darren, that to some degree we might have been really, over the last maybe one or two years, sort of been living on borrowed time. 10 million dollars of a funding gap is a lot. And yes, I think it's great that you were able to manage to close that gap by a significant amount, seven million dollars. But I do sort of question on what some of those deferrals were. We all know what happens when in, and we've seen this in government when we start deferring things on and not that I'm dying to go and see a rate increase, but it seems as though perhaps this rate increase might probably should have come sooner and for less so that we didn't find ourselves in a situation where we have a 10 million dollar gap. And so the only thing that I would say, I mean, I will support this because I think that the downside of not supporting it is much, much more significant than, I mean, it's just not a place that we can go to for a variety of reasons. And certainly the economic metrics would not be, would not be at all favorable to anyone, our rate payers included. The only thing that I would ask going forward is that I think there has been some discussion with the institutions, particularly about having a semi-annual meetings. I think that those should be semi-annual and meetings that are, that perhaps even the commission or the council receives updates on and that going into FY23, should there be a need for another rate increase that we hear about that in much more definitive terms, not just simply we're uncertain, but a little bit more definitively than that. That's the impression that I got from the institutions that I, the people that I spoke with at UVMMC and UVM was that, yes, they were aware that these were uncertain times, but I don't think that anyone really focuses on those things until it's much more concrete. And the sooner we can do that, I think the better for everyone, including BED. So as I say, I made the, I seconded the motion. I'm happy to support it. I don't know if I'm happy, but I mean, I'm certainly willing to support it. I just think that the more we can learn from this experience, the better. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Powell. In the interest of time, I'm hoping we are ready to go to a vote. There are no more pressing questions. Looks like we can do that. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Are there any post? Okay, so we do need to do a roll call. I think under current rules. So I'll just call the roll. President Tracy. Yes. Councilor Powell. Yes. Councilor Jang. No. Councilor Pine. Yes. And I am a yes. So that passes by a recommended council by a vote of four to one. Thank you, Garen and the team for all your efforts around this. Thank you. Sorry, I just lost my agenda for a moment. One second. The next item is 4.07. This is, hopefully this is something that we can deal with quickly. This is a, we're coming back to the shiflility park, shared use path approval to change. The only thing changing here is who is able to sign on behalf of the city because to avoid any appearance of any conflict because director Cindy White lives right next to this entrance, although she has recused herself from everything about the planning up until now. So that is what this change is. Are we ready for a motion on this item? Councilor Jang. So moved. Thank you. Is there a second? Second by President Tracy discussion. We will go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. And are opposed. The motion carries unanimously. Great. We have now just three more items before the police department presentation, which is, I know we have Chief Mirad ready to start with that as soon as possible. The next item is 4.08, the creation of the early learning initiative manager position. So thank you, Brian Lowe for joining us and the floor is open. Thank you Danielle. Councilor Pine. I am going to move to move to approve and recommend the city council authorized the creation of a regular full-time exempt non-union grade 19 position early learning initiative manager reporting to the director of economic recovery. Thank you, Councilor Pine. Is there a second? Second by Councilor Jang. Thank you. Discussion.  Quick discussion. And I think thank you again for doing this. Now, one element I think we have been discussing for this for quite some time now and was just wondering if the city is contemplating the idea of creating childcare programs itself and not like slots with the partner organizations. And where are you with that? And who's the next person that we need to talk to about this as we move forward? Hey, thank you very much, Councilor Jang. Yes, so far the program has increased by 38% the number of childcare spaces available, high quality childcare spaces available for zero to three-year-olds in Burlington plus an additional 15 spots for three to five-year-olds. So about 91 new spots total. Another thing that you have raised in the past has been is there a way the city could look at reviewing other ways we could provide childcare for employees, whether that's creating running a center or contracting out or something else. And so that is something that if this position were created is something that we would review as a city. What are other ways we could look at supporting city employees? I can't commit to what exactly that will look like but it's definitely something that we can review this coming year if we have this new position. I would just add to that I think this would be a good time for that review with the potential certainly if the Biden infrastructure plan passes and it's current in its initial proposal which would have substantial dollars for expansion of high quality childcare. I think that would really create a moment where perhaps everything's sort of on the table and maybe some dramatic change to this program would be well-timed. So more to come on that. Thank you. President Tracey, did you have a question or go ahead? Yeah, so I guess I was curious because within this if there was a discussion of not having this as a position but really providing more direct subsidy towards creating those positions and if there was a debate around that and if you feel like you're gonna be able to by creating this position leverage more resources as opposed to just giving this money to providers. And part of my question is also just in recognition of the significant challenges that we faced in terms of creating additional spaces. In engaging with providers myself, one of the things that I think was really challenging there is that there's just the economics of operating in childcare are really particularly challenging. And so I guess in particular the wages that our early childhood educators make make it particularly difficult also for early childhood educators. So I guess with those dynamics at play I'm just wondering how this position is gonna address some of those dynamics and interface those and if there's a way like if there's that if you've weighed out sort of the subsidy versus putting in there I guess that's multiple questions at once but just wanted to- Tracey, go ahead, Brian. No, thanks very much, Council President Tracey. Great questions. And yes, there's as the mayor alluded to this is I think the right time to build this position and create this position. We've long thought that we would need a position at some point and there's a number of factors inspiring to make it the right time to do this. The first is that we've got a working model we've tested it. We've seen capacity expand 38% in that hardest to reach range that zero to three age range for high quality care. And we've also seen 57 families placed into scholarship programs over the last two years and been able to expand that even during the pandemic. So there's good evidence that we can build on this program. At the same time, a kind of critical partner that we've had in Let's Grow Kids who's really been an outstanding partner is as planned pulling back. And they provided some of the kind of people power to help us connect with different families and enroll them in spots. Because as you say, Council President Tracey, it's not just the money, it's finding the spot, right? Like those are the two services that are being connected here. And that is very time consuming work that needs to occur. It needs to be really down at a granular level with the families. Where do they need to go? What kind of spot works for them? Where do the parents work? And can we make it a spot nearby where their work is, et cetera? So that the partner that's been helping us do that is as planned pulling back and the city's taking over some of those functions. Then in a way that we couldn't have predicted, all these new federal supports are kind of coming into focus. And exactly what happens at the federal level I can't predict. So I wanna be careful about that. But it looks like there may be significant new childcare programs that really hit on key components of this program. For example, there may be at the federal level new regulation that means that families only pay up to 7% of their income for childcare in certain brackets. And that could really help revolutionize what our program is trying to do or galvanize really what our program is trying to do. Those same federal bills also speak to some of what you're talking about Council President Tracy around or federal bills around the costs for or the salaries paid to childcare providers which are just way too low and are a product of a really broken market and ecosystem. So, and then you also have the city trying to do whatever it can to incentivize a strong economic recovery. And there's a real nexus between childcare and economic opportunity coming out of the pandemic. So I think it is absolutely the right time to build a position like this and have sustained focus on this in the city to capture those federal resources, make those connections for families and help support Carl Nistrowi and the team leading the economic recovery. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very well. Okay. Oh, sorry, I should just call it for the council. We do explicitly say in the memo that we'll reevaluate the reporting structure a year from now once we're a year into the recovery. Okay. Councilor Jang. It will be very quick. And I was just wondering why especially going to why not CEDO to be managing this position but the recovery? Hey, it's a great question. And that's what I was looting to with the we think the nexus between the economic recovery and the provision of childcare in Burlington is really strong. And we think especially in this year when there's all these new federal programs coming down that Cara is the director of the economic recovery is the right person to oversee this position. And part of the positions time would also be supporting Cara on the broader economic recovery issues. In a year's time, it may make sense to reevaluate that and change the reporting structure as you allude to councilor Jang. But right here right now, I think I'm in car. I don't want to speak over you here. I'm sorry. Just it felt like this was something that was a strong nexus for us and a great opportunity. Thank you. Okay. Seeing no more hands, we're going to go to vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? I don't believe there are any opposed. The motion carries unanimously. Thank you, Brian. That brings us now to 4.09. The approving, the pledging of the credit of the city in anticipation of the receipt of revenue from airport department. Revenue anticipation note, see which is here. And anything, we've approved many revenue anticipation notes for enterprise funds in the past, including the airport. Is this anything unusual about this item? No, there is nothing in the item. Okay. Councilor Powell. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'll make a motion to recommend the city council to approve the attached resolution. Thank you. Is there a second? Seconded by Councilor Pine. Discussion? All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Thank you, Rich. And finally, before going to the police budget, we have the early learning initiative contract amendment with the child care resources and other IT item. Okay, Brian's still there. If there are questions on this, are we ready for a motion on this? Councilor Pine. Move to approve the child care resources contract amendment described above as recommended and authorized the chief innovation officer to execute any and all documents necessary to fulfill the contract subject to final review by the city attorney's office. Thank you, Councilor Pine. Is there a second? Thank you, Councilor Paul. Discussion? All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. Thank you. All right, this brings us now to item 6.01. And we've gotten through the deliberative portion, no more approvals or recommendations will be needed from the board tonight. We do now have the final of the departmental budget presentations. This is the one that certainly there's the most going on with because of the transformation that we were going through and the changes from last year. And I'll take Chief Murad is see him with us. Chief, if you could turn on your camera, there we go. And I thank you, Lisa, for joining us as well. I know the chief has a PowerPoint to share and why don't we hand it over to you now, Chief. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. And thank you city council members for having me with you tonight and allowing me to present this budget to you. If I may, I'd like to share my screen. I think I've just enabled that if you can check Chief Murad. We can see it. Thank you. Thank you. So this is our fiscal year 2022 budget presentation. And it is, I hope a picture of an agency that is dealing with our diminution with regard to the resolution that was passed last year, addressing those headcount issues and deficits and also building from that in ways that as comports with the public safety continuity plan that this body approved earlier this year, allow us to find new ways to address public safety in the Queen city. This is our mission statement. I know that this is available online, this presentation and that the council was sent it earlier. So I hope that you've had time to look through it. I certainly don't want to read every slide. I don't think that's necessary, but I do want to point out that the reason the police exists and the parts of the police that are not necessarily sworn as well, the reason the function of the police exists is to keep people safe by preventing and responding to crime and disorder with and for our neighbors. And that really is the key component that it is with and for our neighbors. This is our current org chart. This depicts what we have, not what we are allotted. So there are a couple of spots in there that are vacant that are not counted in the totals with regard to non-sworn full-time employees. And the 82 are what we have on the books as of April 1st. This is the organizational chart as of April 1st. And if I assess our effective officer headcount and I've talked about that previously with regard to officers who are on military deployment, officers who are on long-term injury, we dropped from 82 to about 77. The staffing, I'm sorry, excuse me. The staffing explanation is this, we have 82 sworn officers on staff as of April 1st. And that's down from our total headcount in the past. About 15 down from our historical average and down 10 from the number at which we were when we began this process last year. We made plans last year to winnow the department on purpose owing to revenue issues and concerns about where COVID would take us. And then of course we were further affected by the decisions made through the racial justice resolution with regard to headcount. But as I look at our 82 again, this describes the fact that some of those 82 are on long-term military leave or administrative duty owing to long-term injuries. Some are already on terminal leave using accrued time and the effective number is approximately 77. That decrease from a normal historical average of about 96 to 97 to 82 means that we've lost a number of things. We've lost our swing shift, which is a shift that normally covers the gap or not the gap, there is no gap, but it covers additionally between what is our day shift and what is our evening shift. And that swing shift works therefore in the late afternoon and into the early night and provides augmented services, particularly in our downtown core, it was used to great effect on North Street for foot patrols, that is no longer available to us. Our street crime unit is not available to us any longer. That is a unit that generally took on cases that exceeded the investigatory capacity of patrol in that patrol has to be able to continue to service calls for service that come in as those incidents keep rolling in, patrol has to respond to those, but some incidents require a little bit more time to look into, that would include pattern crimes, that would include specific kinds of crime conditions in a specific location. And those may not rise to the level of being investigated by our detective services bureau, but they do exceed what patrol can do owing to the needs that patrol has. And so the crime team served as a way to deal with those kinds of situations, we don't have that crime team. Furthermore, we had a number of specialized officers who were in specialized roles, our community affairs officer integral in taking part in the city's concerted efforts with a lot of different entities to tackle graffiti. And that community affairs officer has been reassigned to patrol. Our emergency response officer or ERO has been reassigned to patrol. That was an officer who was dedicated to using the ERV that was built in order for us to really hone the ICAT process, which is a national standard for de-escalation and addressing barricaded persons that this agency helped create. That officer has been reassigned patrol. Our school resource officers are reassigned to patrol. One is on military leave and one is a sergeant, actually. We have calculated attrition in the coming fiscal year at seven officers. This is a picture of the FY22 budget and it is the work of a lot, this is the result, excuse me, the result of a lot of hard work. I cannot thank CAO Shad enough for the work that she has done. Bob Rustin, huge amounts of work and most importantly here at the BPD, Lisa Verano, tremendous amounts of work at putting these things together and really digging into the numbers that we have. As you see, our budget is decreasing. And I think that that is in keeping with the desires of the city council as expressed during this budget process last year. It's dropped quite a bit, particularly with regard to salary and benefits. One thing I'm very happy about, and I'll explain a little bit about that later, is the fact that our training has returned. Our training budget was diminished last year, not because of anything from the city council, but because we tackled that as a savings location during our internal assessments owing to anticipated revenue decreases because of COVID-19. And I'm really happy to get that back. It's incredibly important to making certain that the men and women inside feel fulfilled, that they have avenues of career path and career growth, that they are learning the most recent kinds of best practices and then sharing that with the community that we serve. Because ultimately the work that we do for the community is what matters. We are also talking about bringing forward community service officers, CSOs, they are unarmed, non-sworn officers. They are part of the public safety continuity plan that we outlined in very late January and again in February. We are talking about hiring a public records request specialist or a redaction specialist. This is a component of being able to follow up with, excuse me, and actually being able to fulfill desires of our Burlington Police Commission. The Independent Burlington Police Commission has formulated a new release proposal for body-worn camera footage. The only way that we will be able to meet that request and fulfill those obligations from the Burlington Police Commission is to have a dedicated person who is capable of doing that redaction work.  We have to watch it once to get the sense of it and we have to watch it again to determine if there are audio redactions that need to be made in comportment with Vermont state law about privacy and ongoing investigations protections and then we have to watch it again to determine whether or not there's visual redactions that need to be made. So that adds up a lot of time. This is a picture of our fiscal year 22 budget versus the fiscal year 20 budget. We're obviously taking the 21 budget out because again, it was affected by drastic cuts that the entire city made in an effort to maintain a budget. The mayor directed us to make certain that we were able to keep ourselves afloat without harming Burlington residents. That was his primary goal and primary directive but we did have to find deep cuts and we made deep cuts even before the issues with headcount were derived from the resolution. And so we're very happy to be able to return a little bit to a normal annual budget that really allows this agency to function on all the cylinders that it's got. But there are a lot of savings involved. There are a lot of savings involved because of that decrease from a 105 authorized of sworn officers to the 82 at which we find ourselves right now as of April 1st. And some of those savings are anticipated to be used with regard to park rangers, with regard to expanded mental health services and a reserve for those kinds of expansions and a reserve for implementing that BPD assessment that is ongoing right now being conducted by CNA, a company that's looking at our full operational and functional manners of policing that was described in the racial justice resolution last June. We are working diligently to get CSOs on board. That is a component of the public safety continuity plan that I presented to the council in conjunction with the mayor, worked on that plan, have been thinking about that plan for well over a year and we're able to present it in the very beginning of this calendar year in a way that thankfully convinced the council that it was something that we needed to do and was worthwhile. I think this is an exploration that's very exciting for this city because it represents a shift of public safety responsibilities to an unarmed, non-sworn, essentially non-police function that nevertheless retains the ability to share information with police, to have rapid response with police when necessary, but not when it's not necessary. And it's an expansion of the kind of public safety paradigm that I think our community really wants. Now, the Talitha consultancy that is ongoing is going to help us determine what it is that our community wants. The CNA assessment is going to help us determine what our community wants, but it's been clear at times and their members of our community, a very vocal portion of our community was very clear about what they want. I think the CSO plan is a way of reaching that. I'm very excited about this as a potential for us to be able to take what are currently police jobs and turn them into jobs that are responded to by these unsworn, unarmed officers. Getting them on board, however, is going to take some time. We want the right people in these seats and making certain that we vet the right people, that we attract the right candidates, that we assess them properly and then train them once we have hired them so that they're able to do more work than our current CSOs do is really important. Our current CSOs are incredibly valuable members of our team. They perform a lot of work as it shows here. They each do approximately 620 incidents a year. And so they perform about 1,200 jobs, 1,200 incidents a year out of a total universe of about 2,600 incidents to which they could respond. Merely bringing aboard new CSOs is going to dig deeper into that total universe, but expanding the role that they play and the kinds of incidents to which they respond with new training is going to allow us to go even further than that and actually get closer, I believe, to 15 to 20, maybe more percent of our total incident volume. That's something that we really anticipate happening in the hiring process, in the early stages of FY22. We're in the process right now. We have interested parties, but administering tests, et cetera. The best bet is that we're going to be able to do that in early FY22. And then we'll have an onboarding and training process that hopefully gets them deployed in FY22. The resolution from the city council allowed us six of these positions and then to be followed by in the first half of the fiscal year to be followed by four in the second half of the fiscal year. Here's some of that training that I was talking about. I'm really excited about some of this training. We are returning to previous levels of funding and we're going to be able to do some things that we had on the ready back in the spring of 2020 before the pandemic hit.  So nobody could travel. Nobody could go to training units or modules in other states, et cetera. But those are the kinds of places where officers are able to mingle, share best practices, really establish the cutting edge of the profession and what's out there with regard to de-escalation tools like ICAP and deceleration tools and communication and negotiation tools like our crisis negotiation training. So getting all of those for our officers is going to be very important. Particularly as our headcount falls, we need tools to make certain that the officers we have are A, sharp and remain some of the best officers in the state at what they do and B, things that incentivize them to stay here in this department as we go through some uncertainties about where the future is heading. But I think it's a real path forward and this kind of training actually gets officers on board for those kinds of movements. We recently finished, excuse me, we were in the course of finishing a six unit iterative implicit bias and anti-racism training with a woman named trusty loving of the Institute for Racial Equity. That's something that we worked on and assessed with the former director of police transformation, brought her aboard and have done that training. We're in the final stage of that six unit session. Much more effective than doing a one and done where somebody comes in for a day and teaches, this has been something that's grown. We've allowed units to do it together so that an entire shift takes that shift off and actually goes through the training together. The detective unit went through the training together. It's been a really effective and useful two-way conversation between the officers and the trainer. These are just some pictures of incident volume trends. I think that this year we're really focusing on the budgetary numbers and so I'll try to move through these quickly, but in past years, this presentation has been an opportunity to share with the council where we are with regard to the parts of our city business that we deal with. We deal with incoming incidents, crime, but also disorder. And so our trends are what we see here on this slide. Over the past several years, we have purposefully engaged in more hands-off policing. We have seen our overall incidents drop, but if you look at that image in the upper right-hand corner as I look at it, you'll see that there's a purple line under the blue line. That purple line represents where our incident volume would be if I removed only traffic stops. Traffic stops are primarily driven by officer discretion. It is an officer seeing a condition and addressing it. It is something that's not a call for service from the public. And if we remove those alone and take a look at the vast decrease that's happened in traffic stops over the past several years, we have a much flatter trend about incident volume until we get to that 2020 year where it falls just like everything else rather precipitously. 2020 is gonna be an anomaly in stats across every sector and across every state and city in the US. But I think that it's instructive that we are still hearing from the public at a not that diminished rate. Chief, it's important we were about halfway through the 30 minutes and I wanna make sure this time for councillor questions. So if you can try to wrap up. Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. So this makes the same point that when we measure external versus internal, that is incidents that are driven by internal discretion of officers versus external, we don't see the same kinds of decreases that we've seen in the other categories. It's indicative of the fact that the public is still calling for services. Here are some pictures of our serious violent incidents, the most important kinds of calls to which we respond and the directions that those have taken over the past several years. Here's a discussion of incidents with partners which I think plays a lot into our discussion of both the CSOs as a new position, the CSL that we've been allotted and are working to hire and the possibility of having other CSLs in other city departments or of working with partners to create models that talk about co-response for certain kinds of incidents. Finally, we've got a number of projects that we're looking at right now. There was a project that I created called Vision 2020. I created it back in 2019 and administered it beginning in that autumn. We were prepared in early 2020 to implement the recommendations that had come from this employee led CAT scan of the Burlington Police Department. But the budget crisis interrupted, we're hopeful to begin to explore some of those recommendations and see what we can get now. Project Reset is something that Interim Chief Jennifer Morrison created. It was about getting a new system for evidence collection and also certain training initiatives. Again, those are things that we're really eager to revisit now that we have funding returned. Benchmark, a system that we've brought in, that we're still working with and getting our data into, but it's going to consolidate and collate data in brilliant new ways. The city council approved it, we're really eager to that because it's going to meet some of the things that come up in the bottom project, which is the CNA assessment. Some of the things they're asking for with regard to data are things that we're not being able to provide as well as we would like only to a combination of resources and the way we track them. We're hopeful the benchmark system is going to address that, but we're really hopeful also to be able to work with CNA in order to get their understanding of where we are as an agency and then hear from the community through the other Talitha consultancy as well. And I will open it up now for questions and discussions. Thank you. Thank you, Chief. And I'll stop the screen share or shall I? Well, before you do that, can you go back quickly to the page with the savings, which I think may be a slide of significant interest. I just want to quickly add before letting in any, I see President Tracy has his hand up and we'll go from there. I want to just, the expanded mental health services reserve want to be clear what this is. This is a potential in, the council is supportive of this direction. This would be funding municipal funding for what would be a dramatically expanded public response, emergency response to acute mental health episodes by adults and children. The hope would be that this is something that has come out of discussions we've been having with council for some time and it's also come out of conversations I've been having with community leaders who have been pushing for, if you will, cahoots like reform or addition, cahoots like program here in Burlington. It is, I just want to, as councilors look at that number, it is my hope that that is not the entire investment. I am optimistic that if we go in this direction that we will be able to secure substantial funding from the state and potentially other community partners as well to make it potentially on the order of magnitude of something approaching a million dollars a year is the kind of model that we've been looking at and exploring. So with that, President Tracy, the floor is over. Thanks, Mayor. Thank you. Looking at the itemized budget, there were a couple of items that I just wasn't clear on what they were because they're kind of more general descriptors attached to them. Line item 6211, specialized equipment, $46,000. Line item 6208, special supplies, $40,000. And then 6292, other charges for $24,000. Just curious as to what each of those items are representing. Chief, I can speak to that if you'd like. Thank you. Okay. So that is all our equipment for like bodycams and firearms. It is for vests. It includes, I mean, throughout those three accounts. So all of those major equipment, another issue to officers. Okay. Chief, can you clarify, because I did not think you were purchasing firearms this year. No, but for training, we have to have training, seminations and the equipment that they do the training with the supplies, part of the, when they do training exercises, Chief can speak to that. He just went through it. Yeah. A lot of that is ammunition cost. Ammunition has, the cost of ammunition has skyrocketed and there have been extreme shortages of it. You're correct, Mr. Mayor. We're not purchasing firearms. We, I'll be more specific about that. When an officer retires after 20 years, the department works out an arrangement whereby that officer essentially can purchase his or her own firearm and then we replace that firearm. We did that with a couple in this fiscal year, in the coming fiscal year, I do not intend on replacing the firearms that are sold to retiring officers because we don't have the headcount of armed individuals who need all of those firearms. And we have a certain surplus of them right now that allows us not to do that but that has been the practice in the past and was the practice this spring. So no, we're not making additional firearms purchases but we have purchases of taser devices, of the cartridges that go into the training. We have purchases as the CSOs are going to wear body armor and ballistic vests. And so those are gonna be purchases that we have and there's other equipment as well. Oleo resin capiscum spray or pepper spray is also something that CSOs do carry, mostly for animals, they do a lot of work with animals. And so all those equipment costs do continue to turn through even as we don't have new police officers coming in until hopefully the later part of the fiscal year. Okay, would it be possible to just get a breakdown of those items just so that we're clear on exactly what we're voting on here with regards to your budget? Sure, I can send that out to you. Thank you so much. Can I get that to you later? Or are you waiting for it right now? I'm not waiting for it right now. Sorry, I apologize. I was muted, I was talking, sorry at least. I was just saying please send it around to the full council when you distribute it. Like that's what we do with all budget requests. I was also trying to say we're gonna go for another seven minutes here until 7.15 before we go to the BHS presentation. Are there further council questions? And maybe Chief, yeah, you can take down the screen share at this point. Absolutely. And tomorrow would be fine, please. Thank you. Councilor Paul. Councilor Paul, you're on mute. Sorry, my apologies. Thanks so much. There's no need to go to the slide, but I wrote down on one of the slides that you talked about the use of force tactics that the state requires four hours and that BPD does 10 hours. So I guess I'm trying to understand if you can explain how doing 10 hours of use of force tactics is a, how you view that and why you do 10 hours when only four is required. Sure. Frankly, because we want to go further with use of force because use of force training is about not using force. And one of the things that we're exploring right now is a terrific new program that surrounds jujitsu and the use of jujitsu as opposed to striking techniques. We want our officers to be competent and confident when they have to use force. We don't want them to use it when they don't have to and our policy makes it clear that it is something that is a last resort when we are dealing with situations. We want deceleration, we want de-escalation first, but there are times where the use of force is unavoidable. And when that happens, we want the officers to be good at it. We want the officers to be competent at it and confident at it. The new jujitsu program that we've been working on is one that really talks about grappling, about contain holds, about ways to take a subject into custody that don't involve strikes, use a lot less physical kinds of violence and are more about containing that individual. I think that's a good use of the time and it's also something that keeps the officers sharp and has them work together in teams so that we're not just talking about use of force with regard to working on a heavy bag. We're talking about the ways in which people approach a situation and the ways in which they can use different kinds of de-escalatory techniques to avoid that use of force. Okay, I think that, and maybe I'm the only person who feels this way but I think that saying use of force tactics doesn't tend to evoke the thought of less use of force. That just wasn't how I read that. And then the only other thing I would just mention is that in your presentation, you put the Burlington International Airport underneath other, you put it, I can't remember exactly on your chart but you put that in a way that does not evoke the fact that it is a separate division as per a city council resolution. So I would prefer that when you, I would ask that you when you, when you are doing that, that you put that out as its own division, which is what it is. Thanks very much. Councilor Jiang. Thank you, Mayor. I mean, I think I will start with that comment right now. I don't think that I have voted or anyone here at the council voted to say the police officers at the airport are in a different department. I think there was a resolution to explore but to date, they are still members of our police department based on my understanding. And the other option is about, I wanted to also ask exactly the fee for service. Does it represent, you know, the fee for service to the airport? I see two components of it on the needy greedy of the budget. I'm sorry, councilor, could you repeat that question, sir? So the fee for service, if you go to the number, I believe it's around, yeah, fee for service, number 25, item number 4600-105. Lise, would you be able to touch on that? You're muted, Lise. Special duty is outside contract jobs. So I'm not sure that's, is that really your question? I mean, it's not specific to the airport or anyone else. It's the whole sworn personnel working outside jobs for that account. Right. So I wanted to understand where is a fee for, basically I believe that the airport will need to reimburse the Burlington Police Department for the services provided there at the airport. So that's not separated in the budget document you're looking at. Okay. Okay, not yet anyway. However, the way the calculation is done for what the airport contributes to the city is based on fully trained, equipped officers being deployed there, which is the eight, the seven, seven and a half. And that's how that number is calculated, but it's not represented specifically in any line item. All right, and that is broken out in the org chart as a separate line. It comes down, they do ultimate, the sergeant at the airport ultimately reports to the same chain of command as the, as others in the department to an area lieutenant, and then up to the deputy chief of operations, but it is separated from our patrol units. Thank you for clarifying this. And this is the last question for both the mayor and Patrick Chad. Now, what is the representation of the total budget of the police department with the overall general fund budget of the city of Burlington? Is it now 17% of the budget or less than now? I am happy to get that information for you tomorrow, Councillor Cheng. I actually haven't finalized those percentages because as a result of this process of gathering information, we knew we would be tweaking some of these budgets, but I'll send that around to the whole council. Thank you. Yeah, I think, can you also speak to how you're going to, which I know you've been working on meet the council resolution, which require discrete accounting for the airport division? Of course. That is actually not difficult because it is my understanding that used to be done and it just requires adding a new code into new world. And then we have the officers as they work at the airport, charge their time. So I describe it as lawyers, like we think of lawyers just the charging their 15 minutes of time. Thankfully they won't have to do that, but as we have different officers working at the airport or working not at the airport, the time that they work at the airport, they'll have a special code. Everything else will be charged to BPD. And so we will be able to run reports and accurately charge that. Which is there anything you would like to add? Yeah, I was going to make a note that in the presentation that was done by the Burlington International Airport, they actually are showing this as a credit that they get back for that service that provided. So it's $1,270,000 is the cost for the police that are providing service at the airport. So I just wanted to make that note. So it is called out in the airport budget and we can do a better job identifying that within the police budget. Hope that's helpful. So it shows up as revenue. It shows up as revenue in the police budget for the exact same amount and as the expense shows up in the airport budget for that $1,002,000. Okay. I had committed President Tracy who would be turning over the gavel to him for the council meeting three minutes ago. So I will just say before doing that, I think we, if there are more questions about the police budget, we can handle that in a couple of ways. First of all, please feel free to send them in writing or reach out to Chief Mirad with additional questions, written questions. Make it clear, bring questions, have the benefit of then written responses. We'll get to the full council. If the interest in more information from the police is so great that we need to bring them back sometime between now and June 10th when we were shooting to finalize the budget and submit it, we can do that. And you can either let me, Jordan or President Tracy know their interest in further discussion like that. Okay. Or if you hear our chat and we'll be coordinated. With that, if there's no objection, I'm going to adjourn the Board of Finance at 7.19 p.m. and hand the gavel over to President Tracy and welcome our guests from the Berlin School District. Certainly. And if I could please be given hosting responsibilities. I know that I believe Councillor Mason is on as an attendee. So we do need to make, okay. Great. All right. Perfect. I'll call to order the city council meeting for Monday, May 24th at 7.19. Before we go to a motion on the agenda, we'll do the pledge. So before we get to our colleagues from the school district and school board, I, we do need a motion on the agenda. So Councillor Stromberg may please have a motion on the agenda. Sure thing. I move to adopt the agenda as follows. Note presentation slides for agenda item 2.01, communication superintendent Flanagan and BSD chair wool regarding update on Burlington High School per Russ Elick. Add to the consent agenda item 5.28, communication Richard H. Kate, vice president for finance and administration UVM regarding proposed 7.5% electric rate increase with the motion to waive the reading except the communication and place it on file. Add councillors Hightower, Hanson and Paul as co-sponsors to agenda item 6.04, resolution expanding youth representation on city boards, councillors Pine and Tracy per council Tracy, note revised version of this agenda item per city attorney's office. Add councillor Stromberg as a co-sponsor to this agenda item per councillor Stromberg, add to the agenda item 6.11, presentation Eileen Blackwood city attorney regarding redistricting per city attorney Blackwood, removed from the consent agenda item 5.27, resolution approving the pledging of the credit of the city in anticipation of the receipt of revenue from the airport department board of finance and place it on the deliberative agenda item, I'm sorry, as item 6.12 per councillor Freeman, removed from agenda item 6.10, communication Catherine Shad, CAO, regarding administration response to council resolution regarding police services at the airport. Okay, we have a motion on the agenda. Is there a second? Second. Seconded by councillor Hightower. Any discussion? Councilor Shannon. Thank you, President Tracy. If there is an objection, I was hoping that we could start our public forum at times certain 750 to allow the school board time to make their presentations since we're starting that late. Sure, yeah, we have a relatively light public forum this evening, I mean, the light in terms of numbers. So I'm fine to push that back. And if we end up having councillor questions, I would hope that we could get to those on the other end if we still have further questions because I do want people to be able to have a full discussion recognizing that board of finance did go over. So you'll just recognize that I don't need to make a motion. That's fine, yeah. Okay, thank you. Yep. Any further discussion on the agenda? Okay, hearing none, all those in favor adopting your agenda, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion carries. Thank you all. I will now look to our colleagues again at the school board and school district. Thank you for being here and for providing us with an update as to just what's happening with BHS and the reimagining process. There's been some significant decision points that you all have made in recent weeks. And I think it's important that we continue a sense of collaboration between the district and the board and the council and the administration. So really just appreciate you being here and being willing to share that with us and engage with us and appreciate your patience and just sticking with us given that we did go over on board of finance. So thank you so much again for being here. Thank you, President Tracy. We really appreciate the opportunity and thank you to the whole city council, all of the city council, all of you for having us here and Mayor Weinberger also, we've been working closely together throughout the course of the year and we've made some, needed to make some quick decisions and we'll need to do some quick work to make sure that we have a high school that really meets the needs of our community. And so we're looking forward to the opportunity to give you an update. I have six or seven. Well, you've seen the slides. I have a few slides that we'll go through and then we'll open it up for questions and answers after that. So I will share my screen. Let's see if I can make this happen. So everybody's seeing that. Okay. And I'm gonna do, I'm not gonna, I'll do this view just to, so that I can still see you all. So this update is, again, to give you all an update on where we are with Burlington High School and Burlington Technical Center. And so I wanted to start with where what landed us in this position. And so, so first of all, we were in a re-envisioning project that was essentially a major renovation of the current or the existing high school site on Institute Road. And as a part of the re-envisioning project, we had to do testing of hazardous materials. And so when we started testing the building, we found that there were, in the caulking around the windows, there were PCBs in that caulking. And that led to a series of tests, environmental tests to assess the extent of the PCBs at the site. That ultimately led to, in August 2020, air testing that found really high levels of PCBs in building F. So we tested the whole building and we got the results back from building F first. And that was the first day of school this school year. Students actually didn't spend the day in the building because they were doing an orientation. And that was mostly on the soccer field, some in, some out of the building or on the turf. But we got really high levels in some rooms in the F building between, I have 3,000 nanograms per cubic meters here. It was between, there were some rooms that were 1,000, some rooms that were 6,000. And that was the amount of nanograms per cubic meter of PCBs in the air. So at that moment, we had to make a decision to close the building and wait for the testing to come back from buildings A through E. That testing came back, the built the testing from buildings A through E. And what that showed was that there were higher levels of PCBs in the air than were acceptable based on the Vermont Department of Health screening values. They were still in A through E, pretty much across the board, below the EPA screening values, but above the Vermont screening values. So I actually thought that there was a possibility that we would be able to, you know, figure it out with the EPA and the Department of Health and get back in to that building. But it turns out that we pulled together with our consultants, the EPA, the Vermont Department of Health, and everybody said that it was, they did not think it was safe. No one on the call felt it was safe for us to return to the building until we did further testing, both the EPA and the Vermont Department of Health recommended that to us. And so the next step was to really understand the extent of continue to understand the extent of the PCB contamination at the high school. And as we continued to test different materials in the building, we found that PCBs were pervasive in the building. They are everywhere. We found them in the caulking next to the window. They have seeped into the walls. So they're in the walls of the building adjacent to the caulking. They're in the soil. So they've dripped down into the soil right next to the building, just right around the perimeter. Important to note not underneath the ground and there's no plumes or nothing under the ground and no spread beyond the area right around the high school. So that site is still, could still be a site for a high school. And they were, and then most recently, right before we made this decision, we found that they were also in the glue mastic, the glue underneath the floor tiles and that the PCBs in the glue had actually seeped into the concrete flooring. So they're everywhere. They're in the floor, they're in the ceiling, they're in the walls, they're in the air, they're in the soil. And it was just clear that we were not gonna be able to deliver a safe building and ultimately even at this point be able to deliver the original building that we envisioned when the taxpayers voted to approve our bond for $70 million to do this re-envisioning. And so we estimate for remediation that it would have been $12 million. That's a rough estimate, but that's the estimate for remediation. But the issue is that that, as kind of related to what I just said, that may not bring us under the Vermont standard. So we will always need to do mitigation there. But we also are not, no one feels confident that we will get the numbers under the Vermont Department of Health's screening values of 15 nanograms per cubic meter. And so ongoing monitoring is costly. We may not get under those numbers. BTC was also not a part of the re-envisioning project as it was in the state it was, the project was. And we were gonna have to figure out our next step for BTC and have them stay in F-building. But F-building, well, we did that. F-building no longer is viable. And so we also need to find a space for BTC, which has about 288 students from our, half from our regional schools in the region and half from Burlington High School. So that led us to the decision. And I apologize that I forgot to mention who I'm here with. So I'm here with our chair, our school board chair, Claire Wall, you all know Claire, thanks. And we're all here to answer questions. I'm just gonna lead on the presentation. And then we also have our executive director of finance and operations, Nathan Lavery, who you also know. So that's the sort of how we got here. And this kind of speaks to that. So in the end, it ends up, the renovation project would result in an $88 million project, which is a $70 million bond plus the $12 million in remediation plus two million year over year while the project is going on, that will not meet the, doesn't get BTC back in the building and doesn't meet the full scope of the original plan and could end up with, we could end up building a building we couldn't use. So we decide, so the school board voted to, I recommend to the school board that we end the project after chair Will and I and the facilities and finance committee and executive director Lavery have been working closely on this. And we, the school board ultimately voted to end the project recently after the last finding around the concrete. And the, we originally thought that we would need to make a hard decision in August, but we felt like we had enough information and that making this decision in May allows us, could save us a year in the end. And we felt like we had enough information to make a decision. And so we need to try to save as much time as possible in the project. So we're moving aggressively and we are first, this is this work around phase one has already begun. And that is a high level site search and evaluation. We are working with White and Burke to identify options that can hold both BHS and BTC. They're telling, we're probably gonna get to a handful of five to 10 sites. I don't have an exact number in the next six to eight weeks that then we can move into phase two on those sites. And that'll allow, that phase two is where we do our due diligence assessment, conceptual design and narrow the recommendations to two to three for consideration. We would do environmental testing as a part of this. And we also, and I'll speak to this later, we also are gonna use, we're gonna engage and get feedback from the community and also use feedback from prior engagements from the re-envisioning project to inform this project as well because we really are gonna need to move pretty quickly in order to get a high school for our students after our lease ends at downtown BHS in three and a half years. So that's, this is phase one and two, then phase three and we still need to build a timeline for this. So we know the timeline for phase one, we, I was able to divert and shift the resources that were going toward the re-envisioning project to working full speed ahead on this project. And so we're able to continue to really put our energy toward this project. Phase three would be the acquisition, design and permitting of the priority site. And then we would move into bidding, construction and building occupancy. And as I said briefly, a second ago, our goal is to not have students move, have to find a place between downtown BHS and a new high school. And so our goal is really to complete these phases as soon as possible. We have a three and a half year lease, we will be able to extend that lease but we don't wanna extend it very far. And I'm reluctant to give a timeline but really I've been telling my team and the folks we're working with, we really need to get a high school into a new high school in four years. And that is a really aggressive timeline and probably faster than most people are telling me that we can get this done. And so we'll just really need to work hard to get to a place where we're in a high school in that general timeline. And we'll give more detail on timeline as this project evolves. We really wanted to get to you early and we appreciate the invite from President Tracy to be able to get to you early, make sure it's clear, make sure we have, answer any questions early on and we start to really engage with you and with our community as quickly as possible. In terms of funding, we're gonna explore a number of funding options. And so we'll look for regional support for the technical center. I think there is opportunity for regional support there. We'll look for state and federal school construction aid, state and federal cleanup aid and philanthropy. We did have some success with this with downtown VHS where we worked with the governor who put 3.5, 3.5 million in his budget adjustment and then our local, our legislators supported pushing that through and getting that to support downtown VHS. So this is, we are serious about seeking funding for this project. And then we also know that in addition to external funding, we will need to go to bond. We'll need to ask citizens to support a bond. And we are thinking about, in terms of timeline, again, we will get more detail on a timeline in the next few weeks as we start this phase one. But we think that we may need to go to bond in November and it sounds like that could be a possibility. So more to come on that. So in terms of sort of high level questions, we don't know the cost of these two school programs and what that will be, but we will know a lot more and we're happy to come back after we learn more, after we start the site assessment process and start moving into that site assessment. We did spend about, we spent about 3.5 million of bond money at this point and half a million of local budget. We're predicting we'll probably spend about 4 million of bond money overall. We borrowed 20 million this year and we have 46 million of bonding authority left of that $70 million bond. And so we're weighing at this point using this authority or starting over with a new ask. And that's a question that we'll have to wrestle with and we'll be open to feedback as well. And then we're looking all over the city. So as I mentioned earlier, Institute Road, where the old Burlington High School sits is still a viable piece of land for us to build a high school