This afternoon, we've got a great opportunity to engage one of our country's most disruptive thinkers, Craig Venter.  It's a rare combination. Swimmer, sailor, surfer, scientist. And you sort of put those four things together and you take enough California stuff and you push it inside him and you give him the experience that he had in the Navy and the experience he's had as an academic, the experience he's had at NIH, the experience he's had as an entrepreneur. And you can get a differentiated set of ways in which you think the world might move forward scientifically. So most of you know that Craig was one of the two teams racing to get the genome mapped and won that race, won the National Medal of Science for that effort, has since been advancing whole new ways of conceptualizing synthetic biology. Can we build the organism that we need to create to help us solve our energy issues? A different approach than what Nathan's talking about back there. He's also been involved in with his crews searching for what nature may have given us in the gene pool and he'll probably talk a little bit about that because there's a lot out there, but there certainly isn't the silver bullet that's going to take us to move forward in synthetic ways. And so in Craig what you've got is a disruptor, disruptor scientist. We've heard this morning from different folks about what it takes for breakthroughs, what it takes for fantastic things to happen. Well, it takes finding mechanisms in places for scientists like Craig Venter to be able to move forward and really make things happen. So it's a great pleasure and honor to introduce Craig Venter. Hello again, everybody. For those of you who were here this morning, I'm Steve Kahl and it's my honor to lead our conversation with Craig. We'll talk up here for a little while and then we'll invite you to join the conversation. When that happens, please remember to wait for the microphone, identify yourself, and remember that we're on the record and we're on the air, so speak appropriately. Craig, well that was a uplifting introduction, the sort we'd all like. If you're a disruptor in the way you think about energy, whether it's power generation or transportation fuels, there's been a lot of conversation here today about where disruptive technologies that are scalable, that could really change the way we produce and consume energy in this country, in this world, are going to come from. So where are they going to come from? Thank Michael for the very kind introduction. I sort of feel like the comedian who just got up here now, say something funny, so I'm supposed to say something disruptive, I guess. But biology is one of the areas that's been really overlooked, and it's been overlooked in part because people have tried all kinds of experiments over the last 50, 60 years, for example, with algae, and looking for naturally occurring algae to make oils, to make fuels, etc. And it's pretty obvious. There's nothing that's going to be in the natural world that produces the kind of levels that are needed to have an attack. Explain why that is. So if, so the best sort of state-of-the-art of a naturally occurring algae facility can produce the equivalent of roughly 2,000 gallons per acre per year, which is far better than any agriculture system. Corn, for example, produces 18 gallons of oil per acre per year, so 2,000 is far better than 18. The best plant is palm oil, oil palm, producing roughly 800 gallons of palm oil per year per acre. But the numbers... I can stop you for one second to me for those of us who are not in your field or downstream engineers. Is all of this oil potentially by its nature usable as transportation fueled? So the, well, palm oil is obviously, it's a much better market for food than for fuel. But people have tried to use it for fuel. So, yes, it's all usable in some form or another. The numbers for algae that are theoretically possible are somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 gallons a year per an acre equivalent. But the thinking has been very linear in this area, and you can find the same kind of algae ponds with raceways, a little paddle wheel moving algae around that people were building as long ago as 100 years ago without much difference in the technology. People have tried to use various types of cells to produce different chemicals. The biggest change came when DuPont spent 10 years and over a hundred million dollars modifying E. coli, the bacteria coli, to take sugar to propane dial. So sugar is six carbon propane dials, a three carbon unit. And now the bacteria can make it much faster and cheaper than the best chemist can. But at the scale and the time it took them to do that, what years were those roughly? They just put it into production, I think two and a half years ago in Tennessee with these giant silo fermenters. So without that kind of investment for a single project, we're not going to get very far. So the only way to change things in what's new in biology, well we spent the last several years getting to the announcement we had last spring of the first synthetic cell. So this cell is the first living organism on this planet to have a parent being a computer. And we designed the DNA based largely on a living system. Went from the digital code in the computer to making the DNA software. We made the entire 1.1 million base pair chromosome that we put in a cell and booted it up, replacing the chromosome that was in the cell, creating a whole new cell powered totally by this synthetic chemical that chemically made DNA. So that's the proof of concept for this new field that we're calling synthetic genomics, where the notion is we can take all this information we've been collecting over the last 20 years in the computer, what I call digitizing biology. So when we sequence your genome or anybody's genome, that converts the four letter A, C, G's and T's into the ones and zeros in the computer. And from our expedition that Michael mentioned, over 95% of all the genes known to science have been discovered from the deck of my sailboat. Simply by doing a shotgun sequence into the oceans. And we've done complete circumnavigations and have been checking extensively where we are. We're up to about 80 million genes. There were less than a million known when we started. And I call these 80 million genes soon probably to be 200 million. We don't know where discovery on this planet is going to plateau out are the design components of the future. So the same way the electronics industry had resistors and capacitors and transistors, for almost everything we have in the electronic world, we have orders of magnitude more design components when you think of gene components as such. So let's take that very well articulated context and bring it into the energy economy, which you've done. And so I want to follow you what you're trying to do. Trying to do. So just to make this at the risk of dumbing it down, but I want to make sure everyone understands exactly what the implications of your monologue are for the transportation fuels economy. You're looking for a scalable breakthrough based in insights from synthetic biology that could replace with perhaps algae derived or synthetic algae derived fuels, a significant part of the gasoline consumption in the United States, if not all of it. That's essentially what you're up to. Now, take me back to the beginning of your thought process. You obviously have studied some of the past efforts to find a breakthrough with similar oils derived from plants or food. How did you find your way toward the hypothesis that you're pursuing now with algae? In other words, where did you begin? And then what made you develop confidence about the possibility of the path you're working on? Well, the entire synthetic life program started just by asking very simple basic science questions. So my team in 1995 sequenced the first two genomes in history of relatively small bacteria. You may remember in 1996, some NASA astronauts claim that they found nanobacteria fossils in a Martian meteor. And that started a lot of people. I was one of them thinking about what minimal life was or could be. Turns out these tiny little bubbles were so small, you couldn't even have a single molecule of RNA or DNA in them, and ultimately NASA retracted the claim. But at this time, we started thinking about minimal life. We had the first two genomes in history. Could we actually get down to understanding what is a core biological operating system? That once we had that core operating system, we could add components to it to make virtually anything replacing all potentially of the petrochemical industry and farming. Neither are really a very efficient way of going about things. People argue that all science that you need today is to overcome the science of the past. Well, 100 years ago, we thought it was such a great idea to take oil out of the ground and use it for things like transportation, not foreseeing what's shown in the keeling curve of this constant increase of CO2 in the atmosphere since it was first measured. And that increases at an increasing rate now from not just burning oil as fuel, but everything we make of plastics and chemicals. So also the third organism we discovered came from very deep on a high temperature event in the ocean. And its metabolism is converting carbon dioxide into methane, and that's how it generates its cellular energy. And it does this at 85 degrees centigrade under extreme pressure. So we started to see the extremes of biology and what was possible. We now have organisms that work in such caustic conditions. If you put your finger in it, your finger would dissolve, but these cells reproduce, live very happily in those. We have organisms that can take high doses of radiation, high temperatures. We have cells that grow at zero degrees. So basically the realm of biology is different than what we thought from this human centric view of biology. It has to be at 37 degrees or it's not going to work. So by putting all these things together and being able to now start in the computer and take all these components and design something new, my view is if we do that, we can replace the entire system of manufacturing. All right, so then take that forward to the particular problem of algae as a potential transportation fuel or substitute for oil in that respect and others including manufacturer plastics. If, as you said before, natural algae typically yields 10 to 20,000 gallons an acre, did I hear that correctly? No, they're maximum, around 2,000 gallons an acre. Most of them do a whole lot less. And so in order to compete, what kind of increase by order of magnitude in that productivity would your synthetic algae need to achieve? We need to go from the 2,000 to the 10 to 20,000, so a 5 to 10 fold increase. So that's the goal. But 5 to 10 fold in biology is pretty trivial. We've seen million fold changes in biological reactions from direct alteration of them. So there's about 100 different components we've measured that go into converting CO2 and sunlight into these large change hydrocarbons that could affect things. You might even say, why algae? Well, there's a number of cells, we can just take yeast cells and enter in those, but you have to feed them sugar. And the way to make this really scalable, if you do the math, sugar becomes very expensive at a certain crossover point. Right now, you could use sugar and produce a whole lot of stuff very cheaply, but it won't get us to where we need to go. So sunlight, despite what Nathan pointed out that goes away at night, is actually part of the biological process. And what algae cells do are the same thing we do.  Well, that's what algae cells do. They take the energy they get from the sun and the carbon dioxide and they make fat so they can get through the night or they can get through starvation conditions. And there's about a hundred different genetic components we think we can manipulate. In a natural algae cell. Well, we're in the chain of events that produces that conversion. The ultimate way to do it would be, and we're starting to do, is actually synthesize an entire eukaryotic algae genome so we can systematically make all these changes in an engineering-type fashion versus random biology. The problem with the existing molecular biology, people change one or two genes at a time and you'll never get there with that. I see. I mean we need a fundamental change of how we approach all this and now we have the technology to start to do that. Right. And so when you visualize the end state, if it succeeds, if you are able through running that genome and then starting to manufacture a synthetic algae that has this rate of productivity that would yield 10,000 to 20,000 gallons an acre if it were farmed, when you get, if you got that far, what would the manufacturing system be that would allow you to produce this in a realistic, sustainable acreage available way? So in part we just need sunlight and mostly seawater or brackish water. And the goal is not to produce an end fuel itself. I think this notion of biofuels is not a very well thought out notion. The program we have with ExxonMobil is to actually make a bio crude going from CO2 and just making these large chain fatty acids that can actually go into a refinery and make gasoline and diesel and GA fuel. So it's not an end point of getting fuel, it's just getting large chain hydrocarbons which these cells do very readily, just adding on more carbon from CO2, so we can recycle the CO2 and make it a sustainable program. This notion of doing things in these large algae arrays that people see huge pictures of, it uses in my view way too much water, it opens it outside contamination, it's just not going to get us where we need to go. But you don't need anything like agricultural end. I've argued not in Michael's presence, it's probably a great use of Arizona. Having all the sunlight they have their desert land and depending on how the things are done, I think they need to be done in a closed system. You can recycle the water and we have some great microbial ways of recycling the water. Microbial fuel cells we can take now at our Institute in La Jolla, we can take human waste right from the sewage plant and just by having a microbial fuel cell where the different microbes self-select on the anode and cathode, they generate electricity and they completely clarify the water within about 24 hours. No energy input, we actually get energy out of them. So we can take that, we can just recycle the water and reuse it in a closed system. So it'll be some type of a closed system. We need, obviously, facilities the size of San Francisco to produce the billions of gallons that are needed. I mean, it's not a trivial investment. So it'd be a massive industrial plant, the output of which would be bio-crewed, which would then be shipped to refinery. So you'd build it near a refinery so you could just pump it in. Well, in fact, you get all the CO2 out of the refinery because refineries are pretty heavy sources of CO2 production or a power plant or just places, you know, people keep talking about carbon sequestration like that's an answer. Trying to capture CO2 and bury it is just dumb. It's going to be the main renewable for the future. We can take all that carbon and convert it into anything we want to convert it to. NASA's thinking about this because I'm thinking about going to Mars instead of carrying everything up there. It's a 95% CO2 atmosphere. Make everything from CO2 on the spot. So everything in our body is carbon-based. All the biology is carbon-based. People have just, they're not sort of too willing to go this direction because people have tried these simplistic biology experiments in the past and they haven't worked out. Right. So thinking about this as a disruptive technology, certainly in the liquid sphere, we've described at end state where you've got very large-scale bio-crewed plants next to refineries recycling carbon dioxide, recycling water, and therefore replacing, you know, some huge amount of fossil fuel liquids that we now either produce or import. That's a disruptive outcome.  So where are we on the engineering chain? How far along are we? Well, also keep in mind that, you know, I have this equation. I'm just going to put it, food equals water equals fuel. So it doesn't matter where you're going from food to energy, energy to water to fuel, they're all interrelated. We have to solve all the things simultaneously. And if you look at the production of the corn at 18 gallons per acre per year, I mean, this is a corn-based economy largely. It's probably one of the dumbest things the U.S. does. So if you're going to try and do this from corn, just to replace transportation fuels in the U.S., it would take a facility three times the size of continental U.S. If you're going to try and do it with algae, it would take a facility maybe using a third of the state of Arizona. It's a pretty big difference in what could be done. But the same exact things that can be used to make these hydrocarbons for fuel can replace what we do for food. So look what's happening with the palm oil industry. One of the biggest contributors right now to CO2 in the atmosphere is clearing all this rainforest and clearing land for planting more plantations. So easily algae could get in the next decade to producing 10 times of efficiency what oil palm does. So why not just make palm oil if that's such a great commodity? Let's just make it in a facility one tenth the size of Malaysia and Indonesia. So when you say algae, you really mean synthetic algae that comes out of your innovation. Or other people using this technology. Absolutely. This is not going to come as much as I would like it to. It won't come out of one institute. We need a thousand groups using this. That's the fundamental problem. We're not funding a thousand groups. But your project is one of the most visible and I'm just trying to get a feel for how you think you're going where are you in the discovery of whether to work. You mentioned sequencing the algae so that you could manipulate multiple genes instead of trying to fiddle with natural sequences. Have you actually sequenced the... Most of the 80 million genes that we have in the database are from algae cells in the ocean. So we have tremendous diversity of biology, tremendous diversity in the computational space of genes that affect all these processes. People had simplistic and therefore usually wrong notions about how to increase oil production in algae cells. And the thought was, well, you have to have photo receptors on the surface of the cell. They capture the light. Therefore, if you have more photo receptors, you'll capture more light and therefore make more fuel. It's just the opposite. In fact, anybody who's ever taken a sample in the ocean out in the ocean knows that algae cells sort of move up and down in the water column to develop the exact level they want for filtering out light to get the energy they want. Quite often, it's over 100 feet deep. So we found by just engineering the photo receptors to make less of them, efficiency goes way up. So some of this stuff is counterintuitive of just more is better of everything. You take 100 different parameters like that and you can engineer those by making substitutions in this synthetic cell. 20,000 may not be the limit in terms of gallons per equivalent of acre. It's hard to know what an acre is going to mean if we can go vertical. But it's sort of a useful comparison of what we do with agriculture right now. And so today in October 2011, what do you think is a realistic timeline for discovery of the potential of that kind of re-engineering of synthetic algae to start to get towards 5,000 or 10,000 potential? Well, fundamentally, the only funding we have right now for making a synthetic algae cell is our investor funding at Synthetic Genomics and funding work at the Venture Institute. The huge program we have with ExxonMobil doesn't go so far as starting with a synthetic cell. In fact, it's starting at the other end. We're doing what everybody else did of looking for naturally occurring algae to see if there's any super algae out there that might do this. That's what their investment is about? That's what the first couple of years have been about. And we sort of found what everybody else found is no, there aren't any super algae out there that do this. When are you going to be able to persuade them to back your more sort of synthetic approach? I'm hopeful, but I'm an optimist, so I wouldn't be in science. Well, we'll take some questions in a minute, but I have to ask the question that I'm sure my cranky great uncle would ask if you came to Thanksgiving or we had this conversation, which is, is there any danger realistic or put it this way? Why is there not any danger of manufacturing a form of algae that escapes from your closed system and sucks up all of the fresh water that we have left? But there is actually a, well, it would be if algae produced the equivalent of 20,000 gallons of oil per acre per year, the oceans would be a sea of lipid, not of water. So it would not be a good outcome. And 30 or 40% of the oxygen we breathe comes from algae. So we don't want that to happen. So it is a theoretical danger. So a key part of, and that's one of the best parts about synthetic life is we can engineer in all kinds of self-destruction safety mechanisms. You know, why haven't there been any accidents from the tens of millions of experiments done in labs throughout the world with laboratory E. coli putting genes from every species? It's because that E. coli has got a chemical dependency in the lab. And if it gets spilled down the drain or gets outside, it can't survive. So that's the simplest mechanism, but we can actually build in self-destruction gene cassettes. In fact, President Obama on our announcement last year asked for his new bioethics commission to take this on as their number one issue. And they issued a report last December and part of that report said there needs to be a really developed effort to build in more safety mechanisms to discover these so that that doesn't happen. So that anything that's in a facility can't survive outside of that facility. The other thing we do is we built in this notion of watermarking the DNA. So this first synthetic species that's gone through billions of replications has a URL built in. It's got the names of 46 scientists. Has quotations from the literature as the names of the institutions. Has a whole new code for writing the English language all built into the genome. And so. So we can sue them if it goes wrong. What is the first about? No, but you can certainly track them. And if this becomes part of the ethos of this new field. I mean, just think how could screw up the study of evolution of we just made this synthetic organism that looked like it was halfway between monkeys and man or something. So, you know, we need to carefully control this in a thoughtful fashion. It's perhaps one of the most powerful technologies that humans have ever had. Because you don't need the kind of teams that Nathan would need to build new nuclear reactors. This is a handful of people working in the lab that can actually use these engineering skill sets. We're actually building a robot to make a million chromosomes a day. And we're trying to build a robot that will be self-learning so it can learn biology 10,000 times faster than any scientist can. Because we don't know what most of these 80 million genes do right now. So the limitation is our knowledge of biology. Well, so just a couple more questions before we open it up. I think we're doing all right. To this question of the investment that would be required to see this hypothesis all the way through on the synthetic algae and the potential pathway to a disruptive bio-crude or bio-fuel. If I were an investor and as a non-biologist, I guess from what you've been saying, one of my questions would be, given the novelty of the synthetic cell itself, having first been demonstrated, at least as proof of concept, in a pretty unambitious way in terms of the functionality of the cell as recently as just this year, what is the evidence that a soup to nuts synthetically engineered cell could actually perform the ambitious functions that you're seeking? That's a great question. So trying to look at what exists in this and credible range that we find in the oceans and algae cells. Every one of the components that we feel necessary to get to this 20,000 number exist in nature in one cell or another. They don't exist altogether in one cell. So nothing new has to be invented. We just have to combine them in a way that nature has not done before. Think of the synthesis methods in doing the computer. It's just a new, very rapid way of speeding up evolution by billions of years. And then just lastly, before we turn to the audience, Michael introduced you with reference to your sailing and now we can see what you've been doing on your boat, studying algae as well as, I guess, when the fish don't come in. Is that what you? So then it becomes apparent how your depth of thinking about this has evolved from your engagements with some of these natural genomes. But obviously you've been thinking about biology from a much wider perspective than that associated with algae and liquid fuels. Can we just step out of our conversation about disruptive transportation fuels? If you were to forecast, if you came back at the end of the century and looked around at the way the world was organized. You're probably as good a master of the answer to that question as any of the rest of us. If you can figure that out, we'll all be with you on that too. But at the end of that century, if you think about the much broader array of the energy economy, including power generation and the way people live in their homes and the way industry works and the way computers are powered and so forth. Apart from the insights about biofuels, are there other insights that biology you might think will ultimately provide about the way we organize our lives and our energy? If these things are taken to logical conclusion, we're at the stage of totally taking over evolution in a very dramatic way. And so when you look across the board this, it's hard to envision a part of humanity that would not be substantially impacted. Food and agriculture, they're related to the amount of fuel and energy needed. If we can make that far more efficient, like a thousand times more efficient, which is what we need to do to make the fuel side economical, that would have a huge impact on food. But we will start to design food in a totally different fashion. We'll change how it's produced. And algae may not even be the right thing because we're taking those because they're naturally synthetic, photosynthetic. Why not just design a new cell that you add the photosynthetic properties to if you really want to use sunlight or you make a heterotrophic like some algae are. They can use sugar at night and sunlight during the day. Make a yeast cell that will do all this with 10 times the efficiency of metabolism. But we're trying to scale up protein production for food purposes. And what we see happening now in the leading parts of the food industry, like Nestle and internal mills, are trying to use what we did with the human genome. The discoveries we did with the microbiome, your 200 trillion microbes that live on in you that determine a lot of your life outcomes. Putting this together with these new synthetic capabilities to design foods that work specifically for humans in a far more nutritious, efficient fashion, than what we get by our historical consumption of things like maize. All right. Well, that's an appealing thought. May not taste it. There's the woman there and then the gentleman next door. Please wait for the microphone and please, if you can, identify yourself. Listen, Morgan Taylor-Jones. Craig, algae require five times as much phosphorus as land-based plants do. They're five to 10x more productive. But the question will be, where will you get the phosphorus because the world is starting to run short? Interaction of Lisa is a major producer of algae and working on that herself. So one of the big discoveries in the oceans was there's a totally different phosphate requirement in consumption in the Atlantic versus the Pacific Ocean. And so these cells in the Atlantic Ocean seem to thrive with a whole lot less orders of magnitude, less phosphate. So there's a lot of biology that the kind of conventional terms that people use in this may not actually be true. But some of these things could end up being limitations, depending on how they're done. The raw materials are a key part of the future. The gentleman with the microphone. Let's talk about location, Andrew Patterson, by the way. Let's talk about location, price, and how we get this thing deployed. You mentioned two interesting concepts. One was scale, and the second was capturing CO2. We've got 1,000 coal plants. Maybe 500 of those have enough sunlight to do what you need to do. There's 500 locations. Probably some gas plants fit that category as well. It might be easier to take that CO2 and move the fuel than try to move the CO2. Are those 500 locations where we could build the kind of plants you're talking about? So it really depends on a few things, and this is sort of where all the different sciences come together. So there's a lot of ways to concentrate sunlight in different environments, and there's some pretty exciting ways to do that people haven't used it before because it generated heat. But now with just simple filters, you can get just the visible light coming through that the cells need to leave and bouncing back the UV and infrared. So basically, you can have a closed system in any environment. It becomes what the cost of these facilities are and what's the cost of manufacturing. If it's a really cheap, renewable plastic that we make these big bags in the size of this room, that after you use it, just recycle and make another one that's going to be pretty cheap and it can be highly distributed. Moving CO2 around is not going to be so difficult. It pipes pretty nicely, but there's no reason not to have these in different environments. Algae grow almost anywhere. Photosynthesis obviously works in a range of environments, but there's lots of ways to concentrate the sunlight and distribute it. In theory, you could have these facilities underground. My name is Martin Appel from the Council of Scientific Society Presidents. The nexus of water, land, energy, and many times, forest has become the source of our agricultural systems. How effectively do you think we could replace them over the next couple of decades if we were to shift into the kind of things you're thinking about? Can you conceive of, in fact, replacing a lot of our agricultural systems with real food production this way? And do you have any other product ideas that would be equally high-impact?  So it takes roughly 10 kilograms of grain to produce a kilogram of beef. It takes 15,000 liters of water to get one kilogram of beef. And those cows produce a lot of methane at 30 times the impact of CO2. So why not get rid of the cow? Meat is a complex of a series of proteins. We know what they all are. We can synthetically make them in these same kind of systems and reconstitute. So we're going to have a big problem with defining what a vegetarian is in the future if we don't kill animals to make meat. We grow these same things, a plant producing a chicken big nuggets. But if you open your mind to what this technology actually brings to the table, anything is possible. I mean, there's no reason to start with these existing systems that cause all these problems. Just eliminate them. I think Paul had a question here in front. Paul Roberts. So it sounds like you're still very early in the economics modeling this, but what's your thought about the range of time that you're going to need to get this to the point where it competes with, say, $100 oil, $100 barrel oil? And once you're at that point, how fast can this be scaled up? You talked a little bit about modularity and small scale, but what are your ranges best and worst? Yes. So there's two components. One is the very tiny engineering, the molecular engineering we're doing on these cells that are essentially invisible to the naked eye. And the other scale is the macro-engineering for building giant plants to grow a whole lot of these cells. The best estimates out of the program we had with Exxon, they have with Exxon is if we can get to the levels needed economically would be 10 years before you could buy gasoline made from CO2 through this process, but it's not a 50- or 100-year process. And if there was a lot more investment, it could go a whole lot faster. So scalability should be very easy to duplicate these facilities. Once one works, there's nothing met. The nice thing about biology is we have exponential growth. But if you take $21 million, if we can do anything in 10 years, it should start to happen in 10 years. I mean, facilities have to be able to produce a billion gallons a year to be effective. So, yeah. Yeah. $2.5 million a day. Yeah. So that's 10% for one facility, basically. Yeah. Yeah. Michael. So Craig, we talked a little bit earlier. It might be interesting to have you talk a little bit about why we don't have 1,000 groups working on this kind of problem. What are the barriers to that and what is it about how science and technology investment in the United States is structured that keeps these activities down to so few teams? So it's a great conversation we've been having because this has been a real issue throughout my scientific career. And as Michael said in the introduction, I've been at universities. I've been at the NIH. I've been briefly out of Solera, which was a New York stock exchange company. So I've kind of experienced the range of things. All the breakthroughs that I've made in science or my teams have made, not one of them came from standard government research funding. In fact, the breakthrough that started all this was developing this new method for sequencing genomes in 1995 when we did the first one. Ham Smith and Nobel Laureate and I wrote a grant that submitted to NIH for this new method and it was turned down with sort of extreme prejudice. You know, Francis Collins wrote this letter to say they were absolutely sure it would not work and they weren't going to fund it and it's only because we had a little bit of money in the bank that we funded it ourselves. That funding, if you calculate the return on investment has been worth three quarters of a billion dollars in funding to my not-for-profit institute since that time. All the work that we're doing with the first synthetic cell, what we did with the human genome, all of this has come from private capital because the government wouldn't fund this. But what does happen as soon as we sequence that first genome in 1995 and prove that the method worked, we had so much federal funding to do a lot more genomes that it was ridiculous. But you can't get funding in this country generally for breakthrough things. You can get lots of funding to do me too things and do more once the breakthrough takes place. So I think as we're talking DARPA is one of the few agencies will give you money for high risk. The risk is the antithesis of risk capital. They won't take any risk with it whatsoever. And I argue that we should be as a public frustrated we don't have a hundred to a thousand times as many breakthroughs and discoveries for all the money we spend on science because very little of it goes to new things that could make a difference. All right. So if I were the president and I or the dictator and I reorganized all of our federal funding taxpayer funding and scientific research and put you in charge of it how would you assure me and the taxpayers that your method for supporting breakthroughs would withstand audit in 20 or 30 years or should you or would your message be just forget about it trust us. If the audits audits not for 20 to 30 years I think it's a no brainer to do it. The trouble is our political system wants to audit this you know immediately we talked about the Proxmire Golden Fleece Awards that would ridicule government funding for things that the public didn't understand what the title meant. And so I think that helped contribute to the government employees being afraid to take any risk to fund anything. That's the right time for measurement. If you measure it even 10 years out there's no question it would be a huge benefit. You measure it on what's accomplished. When you take all the money we put into the research budget and you measure the breakthroughs on that you know they're touting very few things that really came from all this funding. So if you just even conservatively made 30 or 40% of it risk capital sort of like DARPA funding is where if you're not taking risk you get fired. I'm certain we would have at least 10 times as many really fundamental breakthroughs in science very quickly. So it's as much cultural it would be your leadership message to the people making the decisions on the front lines about what you expect of them as anything else. Your notion of having a dictator really helps for this kind of process. And on the one last question in this string you mentioned that the capital you are occasionally able to attract to risky breakthrough projects comes from the private market. I would imagine there might be a risk of market failure there in the sense that on the one hand private investors might be willing to shoot the moon because that's what private investors do but on the other hand the kinds of breakthroughs that they may even succeed in funding are often so far from commercialization that they really are performing more of a basic research than a commercial research function. Well that's the challenge and that's a challenge companies like synthetic genomic have of getting to things some things in the relatively short time that actually prove the concept is correct. And I think the time to market with new medical foods the vaccine that you and the rest of us might get next year or the year after for flu will very likely come from our synthetic DNA process. So in fact it's a place where the government is working in great cooperation with my organization and with Novartis so Bartis funding us actually to make this entire process of we now have it down to where they email us a hypothetical flu vaccine sequence of a new pandemic strain and our goal was over several years to get it under seven days for making that new vaccine ready to go into scale up production. Our part with the DNA synthesis now we have down to less than 24 hours and so we have the entire process down to less than seven days and at least one of those days it's just a transportation of we make it make the virus in Rockville, Maryland we have to get the DNA fragments from the local company and then we have to get that synthesized virus up to Boston where Novartis then rescues and gets it ready to go into their new multi-billion dollar facility in North Carolina largely paid for with with government money that this one facility with our new synthetic process if there's a new pandemic strain could make enough for the entire world very quickly. So that's a place there are parts of the government that work very efficiently to funding new ideas it doesn't translate to most of the governmental so flu vaccines will be the fastest thing on the market. Why don't we call it time and we are in fact right on time it's an honor to have you with us it was a pleasure to listen to you and so please give Dr. Venter a round of applause.


it's well helen i i would support 12 b i think it's important for uh the future of our economy not in south berlington but vermont that we developed that infrastructure and i would not want garland is to stop thinking about ways that we can incorporate a new exit and the ways that that south berlington can work with um that possibility to improve our economy well all of them create a new exit right and i would say that given the desire to have more housing particularly in that area i would rather not have an exit there i would much rather see that be a place for residential housing near those employment centers in an area where we already have the transit route starting just inching south on heinsberg road and and i i just i don't see um the the compatibility there um i am concerned about what kind of development i'm torn but i think given the need for housing i am gonna opt for the housing as opposed to to having um that traffic infrastructure i i think we can have both i think we can have it all and 12 b makes it possible i'm not so sure living living close to a highway is not necessarily desirable and and you have exits with the truck brakes and all the rest i i i just i don't see that as possible well i'll wait and so the highway is going to be there no matter what i just see 12 b in the similar light to the economic development letter and i'm sorry you didn't see that charlie but it really spells some out spells out the arguments that i've heard it since i first joined council um i remember when i first started thinking about running i met with people like john nicklidge and he was talking about how 12 b's been on the books for uh decades and i remember him also talking about the importance of it fitting our land use uh zoning for that area the two tech parks right there so that's why i just see that 12 b it does fit since on both sides of it is not currently residential housing it's currently zoned for industrial use and it's also got the airport off to a stretch so i wasn't quite following your comments there megan about uh i'd like to have a change in the zoning i i'm in it for the for the long haul to have that be a mixed-use residential commercial area the tech parks okay you want to rezone the tech parks for residential housing what does that have to do with the interstate interchange then because i think that when you have roads with biking and and and pedestrian and all of these this needed infrastructure for this new residential and and business center i think that an interchange in the middle of that is just it's not sound design well currently we don't have you we don't have an interchange between we don't have a full interchange between exit 12 and exit 14 exit 13 is this kind of like hybrid thing that wasn't fully conceived i think when it was planned um i would love to see exit 13 have at least the full north south compatibility that 14 and 12 have but right now 12 doesn't have anything and people live in 12 exist people that live live in the south in heinsberg and endorse it far uh sorry all their farms oak creek um the rye property and eventually the hill property and and all the businesses in the tech park right they they have to take 116 north to get to kennedy drive to go one direction the other either exit 12 or exit 14 right to get back to the interstate that that concentration of business and housing that it has expanded out from that that intersection of 116 and and 89 is the perfect place to put an interchange and to get that traffic off of kennedy drive get it off of 116 and let it flow where it wants to go and and i know that there will be some sacrifice of some of that land for um for the the interchange roads themselves but but any argument in my mind that says that oh you're you're just going to create more traffic it's like you've already got an interstate right underneath 116 and it goes right over the top of it what's a better place to connect up with the interstate system than where you have that connection right now you're gonna you're gonna have much more you know like gas station convenience store uh you know big box store as opposed to what i don't think you have zoning for big big box stores there right now i i don't think that's what i just i've seen i've seen interchanges throughout my life and that's not where you want to settle down with your family and go for a bike ride i think you already have people settle down in in butler farms oak creek highland terrace all those houses up in there cider mill 2 is going to be a huge feeder for that road and those people are not going to want to have to go to exit 12 or exit 14 to get on the interstate you have people commuting up from heinsberg you know on on 116 it just i mean i i'd love to see exit 13 completed but you can argue for the fact that exit 13 is like almost all the way there if you had to you can go down to chauvin road take a left take a left and get or take a left take a right and get back on the interstate and head back you know in the other other direction it's not optimum but maybe one type of the one type of change that could be made that would facilitate more growth in that area would be 12 b so have you ever gone through has it st george um and and then gotten on the the interstate at exit 12 that's perfectly possible that's where we've gone several times when we're in that area i think it's important for us to hear from the planning commission who unanimously supported exit 13 and we should ask them why especially when we're looking at all these new land development regulations coming forward with the puds and looking at where that housing should go there's clearly a reason why they unanimously recommended exit 13 and i think we should hear from them because i think that there are ways to get to exit 13 so if we exit 12 b i'm the one who who recommended putting the that exit where it is but when i look at our housing needs and i see that we're going to be taking cars off of exit 13 and putting them in 12 b in the middle of a place that i'd love to have families move into that just makes no sense from that perspective and i i just don't understand what what what housing is going to be displaced by exit 12 b megan exactly what housing is displaced well you're going to have you're going to have many more cars you're going to have much more exhaust because you have cars stopping at life where does that where does that displace housing that's what i've got to know i would like land is being taken that's going to eat away at housing i would like to see housing just near meadowland drive tilly drive that's but that's in meadowland that's not where the interchange is about the interesting with 116 what land will be taken away from housing at 116 and in 89 i'm saying as a i'm not a young parent anymore but i have a 10 year old i would not want my daughter going out on 116 knowing that there is a highway interchange there whereas if we can do real infrastructure with pedestrian and biking bike lanes maybe when charlie's plan has a plan for pedestrian and biking access it's better than today because right now there's a tiny little strip because i bike on that road yes but i i could travel to uvm by bike you know what i did it once because of those interchanges that is not a place where if we want to have young families with children that we should have interchanges because you're just not you're not you're not making something that it's going to be family friendly okay i think tom wanted to make the comment i just really appreciate council barrett's comments and i'm very much of the same mind and i was going to say in my strong support of 12 b and i think 13 is also makes sense too but i'm very sold on many of the pluses of 12 b and i would want two additional aspects to be added it as things go forward is one would be an amenity oriented park and ride really to address some of the concerns that i heard councilor emory raise i would love to see any new interchange there take advantage of an opportunity to design a park and ride like what we have in richmond but with the thoughts in mind to really get people out of their cars to really address climate change concerns we have and to foster public transportation i think that's a possibility and the other thing is we have to watch out for that we all want to watch out for the self-growth taxpayer and i'd love to further further explore any transportation tiff transportation infrastructure or you all understand tips i don't need to go into that but ways to have the any growth that does occur in that area similar to how we have the downtown to pay for any local city burden so those are things that i want to be part of a conversation about hopefully going forward but i fully support that interchange as well as 13 i think all the all the commissions including the planning commission makes sense for looking at road for exit 13 but 12 b makes a lot of sense for all the reasons already offered i just find 12 b going into tilly drive or all those medical buildings are just very odd yeah well yeah you won't you won't get housing there that's for sure it will change the development pattern that i see for that area yeah you're not going to get housing where the buildings are until you drive anyway that's all zoned for professional we can change zoning tim we're in the process but that that is a huge uvm medical facility and it's all owned by them right now yeah but wouldn't it be wonderful if you had people who could walk to their you know get their their their their appointments is down the road i mean i can do that for my dental right now i could do it for brian hillside property is going to be filled with people that could take that could technically walk over there if they wanted to uh if they're also undeveloped land there's undeveloped land to the northwest of that property which could have housing someday yeah but the interchange to walk from there to across an interchange you know you're going to have wide this is you've seen you've seen across that thing today megan because there's no crossing there's no crosswalks there's no crossing and lights at least if you have controlled signalization you can have people safely cross a highway when cars are stopped uh who wants to live when you have to cross on highway to get to someplace i'm sorry this is just so anti you know quality of life and and i and i just if if you know if we could have both ways i would go for it but i just i see that there's a real conflict here and it's conflicting with i would say our housing goals uh so so to redirect charlie wants us to give some guidance is that correct on on where now are you asking for a formal motion because i'm prepared to make that motion if you'd like that or if you're just looking for the sense of the of the council charlie uh you know the that's formal as you want to make it is better from you know my standpoint because then it's something we can clearly communicate we have a planning commission member here i wanted to hear from the planning commission too i also want to mention one other just just to keep in mind that this is a planning study um and that this is not a finality in either direction um so i just you know why you to know that like it's going to go through quite a bit of process after this right with the environmental stewardship just yeah and that would include the NEPA process and environmental impacts so um there is a process for this and i just want to just be clear about that that this is not a final position if anybody was having that kind of anxiety so well i do think by the time this gets built even the the business models that i think mad is thinking about may not even be viable who knows you know just to make it all about servicing a couple businesses i think is i don't know that's really hard to predict accurately so we may have this and and i i guess that question you know i i can't remember who it was said there was so much traffic on um kennedy drive kennedy drive is practically empty we built this huge four lane thing that hardly gets used i mean why don't we want that to be a place to get to the airport or or chelburn road or williston road it just seems like city center let's pave over the county trying to it's very pro car 12 v i agree i would argue it's really just pro efficient transportation and movement of good services of people just to give it people faster reduce commute time so thus less environment eight look at your strap chart it's anti-environment it's right there i also think it would foster a resident uh regional density so i think it's that if you can you look outside of just south burlington i think it'll draw the growth not but smart growth intelligent growth that we can design around already well one will want to live there no megan don't keep interrupting please sorry i'm hearing westford is talking about sewer infrastructure i'm not necessarily for against what westford's thinking about but what i'm saying is westford is at the furthest corner of chitin county so as we look at the entire region i see this as the type of smart growth to reduce commute timescape faster access to good services employment centers so i think it's the right type of uh of uh thing to plan for in the future but i would also go back to what charlie said which is this decision is not making 12 b happen this is a long process that uh it's with way romant works in the champlain parkway and this presidential highway nothing is going to happen or be decided tonight it's just yeah there is there are no construction trucks that are happening now i think what charlie's asking for is the sense of the board and and i think i have the sense that uh the board wishes cc rpc to continue to study 12 b as a viable option in south burlington for the future and if the cc rp may say no it's not viable we can't do it and then the money may not be there and that's fine but we don't want you to stop looking at it i don't want you to stop looking at and i would make a motion that says to continue to investigate 12 b as a viable option for our city our economic development committee said you can you should do both i would love both of them um active and active um discussion or can you do that charlie look at both of them as a combo are you looking just for one you know i think we're trying to um doing both is really a compounding thing because we're we're doing one of these with new improvements at x of 14 to add the third interchange improvement kind of doubles or triples the work um because that's uh you know three combinations instead of one um so i'm not saying we couldn't but it would probably cost some more to to take a look at that uh in addition um i'm happy if that's where you end up i'm happy to explore you know how to do that um and it may stretch out the time a little bit too i don't want to uh speak for the consultant team without talking to them first but um so it does make it a little bit more challenging um just from a study aspect um i don't know how to take back charlie but if that's a motion that you're looking for a second madame supportive of it i also i don't see 13 as something to shut the door on either i think both of them the case has been made and i wish money if there was an infinite amount of money i want to do both so i'm of that opinion too we have a motion um but i think we need some and seconded further discussion michael did you want to chime in for the planning commission and then yes um well you've already received the planning commission's views that uh and and i get back to charlie charlie wants you to choose one right that's that's the mission we were given at our that would be easier from our view yes pick one and the planning commission and several other committees uh chose exit 13 to make it a full single diamond uh interchange because it would give you direct access to the airport it would give quick access and and a benefit for city center which is the commercial we hope the commercial center of south berlington um uses a huge amount of land acres and acres of land uh and nobody is to me how they would avoid destroying a major major wetland uh between the southern and northern buildings of uh a lot of that land belongs to sure that it doesn't buildings at least them to uvm i can't be sure but was it clear for extra people in the chain michael you're going in and out we don't see bigger pardon your voice now it sounds good but it was going in and out ah well i don't know why that is but can you hear me clearly now i can yes yes yes you froze up again if i can adjust this thank you froze is there another planning commission member here an energy uh also let me just take a look at the list here i know that andrew chanek was here yeah andrew's here andrew could you talk to us about energy committees the energy committee i think um kind of felt similar sentiment that michael's articulating that kind of exit 13 now doesn't really work great and that um it you know if we had to choose between a new exit and kind of fixing the current exit um we we we thought we'd better to kind of fix the the current exit and kind of share your concerns megan about the quality life around the new exit there for the residents i will say that the the overriding sentiment of the energy committee was to if we're going to spend 10 20 million dollars to to build more pedestrian and mass transit and and bike mobility rather than car mobility but um if if we were kind of forced to use the money for for this project um you know we we kind of unanimously thought 13 was better than the 12 day there's one other thing anything spoken to me he says if you build the exit you don't need to funnel traffic uh into that area am i still breaking up you're back now you're back now but somebody else in your house using you know what the problem is take time if i could jump in here all i all i would say is i would like for me to be able to develop a resolution where we look at policy decisions through climate change lens and i i realize that you all know what that means that means that to my mind 12 b is very much contributing to our climate change issues i see 13 as a solution um and i would really like that's my request that we hold off until next meeting and i'll prepare a resolution and we look at we look at this through a climate change lens but there's a motion on the table and it's been second and so we should have a vote um we can table that motion matt if people agree well i don't agree okay what i'd say i i don't see 12 b as the calamity for environmental for climate change for the the region because i i see it as smart growth with the environmental benefits of regional density to get more concentrated housing in that area away from the corners the far corners and further out into the hinterlands i also see the public transportation amenity oriented park park and ride is really needed for the whole region we need more richman richman park and rides and i also see this is reducing commute time so i don't see this as a as a bad thing for climate change even electric vehicles are going to need shorter time so to to your point council emory i don't see 12 b as as anti climate or not addressing the climate change concern oh let's have that discussion right now it has the lowest environmental stewardship it has uh the lowest livable sustainable and healthy communities uh i think that these lowest system preservation as a lot of things that i think we need to talk about and if you're willing to have that debate i would ask that you table this so we could have that that debate i think those debates are going to happen what as this moves forward because of all of the different requirements that the federal government act 250 and everything else requires so all of those things will be considered about April 29th they have a public meeting so if we meet at our first meeting in may and carry on i don't think we're slowing them down is that correct charlie uh to be honest with you i was hoping to come out of this meeting with a decision that we could communicate it at the public meeting and kind of start to turn the page into what the packages of that are more like what andrew described you know all the climate change efforts and investments that we would make before we would do an interstate um so uh but uh consular emory we will remain flexible um you know the best laid plans um so we'll uh do we'll follow your lead whichever direction you go with i see that jim burton wants to speak michael you're still breaking up maybe you could leave michael and come back yeah i wanted to as uh i'm involved with the economic development committee and uh important to realize that we landed on 12 b is providing the most economic benefit to the town because of high paying jobs and improvement to the business parks access would accelerate more businesses settling in in our business parks so uh we see it as actually a win-win that uh with the increased tax base that will come from all of that uh and taking uh you know large trucks off of the secondary roads uh i think this is a win for the environment and i think uh with the additional proceeds that could come from the taxes that would result from further development in the existing business parks that are already prepared for this i that money could be put to other great things like bike paths and pegs and all the rest of it so uh i see that the area is uh been already prepared for this uh most towns of size have a business park district and generally it's built right off of an interchange in effect national uh companies coming in the area will expect that uh so the absence of 12 b has actually slowed uh you know people uh choosing to settle at the business park that we have so that was the uh the consensus at the economic development committee uh we said if you don't do 12 b then yeah 13 has some economic benefit but not as much as well be will you see residential and those business parks that you have seen uh no they're business parks and there's a place for business parks and in fact south riland has the most business parts of any city in vermont so it is the economic engine of the state in that regard i think it's important to the state's economy and to the county economy uh and uh if the role we play the the benefit is we get the tax that activity as well and use that for other public good so the answer is no is that correct you don't see residential we don't think it's a it's a residential issue we've already got residential zoning we also don't believe that by the fault uh the properties around that exit have to dramatically change that's up to planning zoning and regulation uh it's not a given uh certainly uh it will provide better access and get some some traffic off of our secondary roads particularly the heavy traffic that is going into the business park excellent thank you john no residential so not excellent well um we have a motion um i think you know as charlie said this is not a way to complete i think we can come back to this um if need be just as a community oh michael mitag yes let's see if we can hear you now if you can hear me now how's that sound yes that sounds fine until it doesn't sound fine now okay so i just have a question in closing before you vote on this motion about the weight that will that will be uh the waiting given to the opinion of the council or some members of the council and the opinions of the the various committees of the city that that worked on this um a few weeks ago which which committees and and uh represented a long a large part of our community many many people participated so um it's a question of balancing the needs of of evidence for whom the quality of life is more important possibly than the development of of easy access to the to the business parks um technology park or meta and um also the use i said earlier that 12p will use up a lot of land if you look at it the way it's laid out um the hill the hill farm it'll use up a chunk of that the contribution to um the negative contribution to climate change just from building it will be significant um so no we all preferred exit 13 for the reasons we've we've given in our written comments to each other you know there's a question of balance here what's more important um we don't see that uh that they'll that that it's needed because exit 13 access to route 116 which which gives you access to the Tilly Drive area and um and and Kennedy Drive gives you access to uh many lands as well so we just don't see that it's necessary the other thing is that 13 full interchange of 13 had the lowest cost on the the highest scores in many in many categories so it didn't seem like a no-brainer to us thank you i agree with you it had the much higher court of ranking and i think there's a number of committees that weighed in um and i appreciate that work but um apparently the council as other majority of the council have other ideas so we have a motion on the table um are you ready for that vote just one one more item uh Helen is that as Charlie's pointed out before don't forget that all of these bridges all have to be replaced anyway right so there's going to be a ton of energy spent in tearing things down and building things back up and fashioning the steel and bringing it in and trucking it and then putting it in place so we're not going to get away from having to spend energy to replace even aging infrastructure it has to be done anyway the question is exit 12b versus exit 13 you have something at 13 now it does something it's been serving a a function for many years there is no connection at exit 12 and there is demand for inter for intersection to to be able to conduct traffic you know on and off the interstate that hasn't existed before there is demand for that you have the opportunity to make a decision to pursue that in the future where it doesn't exist today and that will have benefits for commute times and also reducing travel times for people that have to go out of their way into the city to get back on an interstate to go somewhere and also for all the people have destinations for the uvm health services that are going to be right off that exit so I just want to point that out that it's an opportunity to provide connection where it doesn't exist today and it has you have to rebuild it anyway so you might as well spend the extra money and put something in that gives you an advantage absolutely two people wish to speak Helen I'm reading in the chat Chris Trombly and Ariel or Ariel I'm sorry okay why don't we hear from those and then complete this so Chris why don't you start yeah thanks Helen I'll be brief I just want to weigh in the portable housing committee did take a look at this we weighed in that you know we incurred attributing a greater weight to likely economic development benefits of the exit alternatives you know we didn't weigh in on 12 v or 13 but we understand that you know housing affordables the ratio of resident income to housing expenses you know and the opportunity to bring in jobs to the region does have a positive impact on housing affordability so we didn't we didn't pick one but we do ask that the economic development is weighted higher than it currently is so that a team can evaluate the benefit of which which exit would be better thank you thank you Ariel hello no you sound like one of the chipmunks nope no you still sound like the little chipmunk maybe take it in the chat box and Helen oh no there your voice is okay I don't know what you did but you're a human being welcome thank you now the only thing is I think what's missing from this discussion is the grant that's already in place to basically revamp that hill on spear street that goes from the intersection of swift and spear to uvm once and that actually is going to need those two ramps on kennedy drive to be redone in my opinion it's and it's also going to include a pedestrian byway now once that's done it's my belief that that's actually going to liberate a lot of traffic that's currently on shelburn road and going to make it much easier to access between south burlington and uvm so that I just wanted to bring that piece in because when I was sitting in on the affordable housing committee we really didn't include that in our discussion we were really talking about the exits but we weren't talking about the other pieces that were coming in as far as that grant and that's already been approved that work is is definitely going forward so just wanted to add that piece in okay thank you michael I don't know if we can we're gonna be able to hear you can't hear me now well that's how you start out and then we can't but I mean can you make a real brief because it's getting late we have a motion on the table I'll make it brief and comment that exit 13 actually does not work as Tim says it doesn't work at all you can't get on onto 89 Michael I know that I didn't say it weren't completely I said it partially worked but if there's something there let me finish I didn't interrupt you okay for me to get up to the highway anybody who lives around here has to go down to Sheldon Road and back up and that's four miles additional travel just to go 500 meters that doesn't work at all and it would work very well if it was a full interchange in addition we'd recover some land on once on the north or south bound lane of I-189 which would not be required to be a full highway it would become a boulevard I believe apart from all the other things you said lower cost it'll take some load off exit 14 and Kennedy Drive is underutilized and we spent a ton of money on building it so let's utilize it okay thank you so are you ready for the vote yes let's make it roll call so this is to support 12b a ray ganda ray ganda also said the natural resources committee favors the diamond upgrade to exit 13 and does not favor 12b I know as I said earlier I think we have many committees who are not supportive of this but we're not listening to them today so um the motion on the table is to support 12b so Matt hi Tom hi Megan no you can go through St. George to exit 13 it's really easy Tim Tim hi and the chair votes no so the um vote is three to two so that's Charlie thank you Charlie can I make one comment um it's certainly me because I'm I'm hearing you know certainly the split in city council and certainly the split amongst your committees and I just want to in fairness to you and the conversation this is a recommendation done to this to the study advisory committee I think one of my takeaways from this conversation is you're going to make us think long and hard about whether we can look at both of them in the next iteration so we will take a hard look at that and I just wanted to make that comment before we left the conversation so thank you very much I really appreciate all your attention on this in the last couple months thank you you're welcome good night good night okay item 11 this is the consideration impossible approval of the resolution requiring that a third party conservation easement from the so-called wheeler property be conveyed and completed within five months of enactment presented okay we have a motion to approve is presented do we have a second second okay is there any discussion just one question for Kevin yep um so did Andrew have any feedback about the difficulty of applying the conservation easement in conjunction with the the pre-existing act 250 easements he didn't um but he is looking into that Tim um it was an interesting question but he didn't have a he didn't have an opinion on that yet he has been in touch with the land trust they may have um they may have some advice on that as well so the process is moving forward but he he does not have an answer to that question okay so I just I just want to warn everybody that I'm I'm I'll vote for this resolution that's no problem but I'm just worried about uh legal technicalities that could slow the process down that's all yeah yep okay well we've had other legal technicalities that's in the beginning so it's been a real slow process all right are we ready for the boat 10 years another are we ready for the boat okay yes all in favors thumbs up signify by saying hi hi and who are we seeing where is Tom are you are you a yes hi hi my camera's going in and out for some reason I think I'm sorry I'm sorry I usually do things okay so it passed that now we have February and March financials Tom Hubbard yes thanks Helen um so here we are three quarters of the way through the fiscal year uh or now in the last quarter and kind of prepared at this point to share some forecasting with you as we look uh through our revenues and expenditures to date as as well as some projections for the end of the fiscal year so currently as as you've seen from the general fund revenues we're sitting at about 86 percent uh on revenues and 66 percent in our expenditures um so first let's take a look at the revenues because this is where some of the expected shortfalls are anticipated uh there's a number of key revenue items that we're tracking and the major ones include the property tax, the local options tax, interest on our accounts, planning and zoning revenue, fire inspection revenue, ambulance revenue, and wreck and park activities and events these are some of the major revenue sources that we expect to have some shortfalls in and while these items that that I'm sharing with you have kind of negative numbers associated with them I want to come back after identifying the potential downfalls with ways that I expect that we'll be able to balance these out at the end of this fiscal year so let's take a look at the uh the local options tax we should be about 63 percent received to date uh both with our sales in our rooms and meals the sales tax revenue is right there um however the rooms and meals uh continues to lag behind we're currently at 38 percent of revenues received and the rooms and meals we're projecting about a $400,000 shortfall at the end of the fiscal year in the local options tax because of that interest on our accounts uh when the budget was built seems like ages ago at this point for FY 21 but we had figured in a two percent return on the investment and as I've shared with you over the past couple of reports we're getting at about a 0.25 this is going to be a shortfall of about $175,000 for us planning and zoning revenues while we're catching up currently uh we're around 64 percent so not at the 75 percent mark we still project a shortfall of about $90,000 there fire inspection revenue uh much of much of this as with planning and zoning revenue is based on the timing of development and review and we're currently at 57 percent fire inspection revenue collected anticipating about a hundred thousand dollar shortfall there ambulance billing revenue currently at 56 percent not near the 75 percent uh that we should be at about a hundred and fifty thousand dollar shortfall and lastly uh as you know record park activities and events have been canceled many haven't been able to be held we're projecting about a hundred and forty thousand dollar revenue loss uh from recreation parks programs now some of that will be offset and that we don't have to expend some of the money to make those programs happen but all told just those um items alone a million fifty five thousand dollars in shortfall so let's look at um some of the positive factors uh that we can talk about property taxes after the third installment we're doing very well 99 percent plus received to date reimbursement to the corona virus relief fund FEMA money that we received to date 169 thousand dollars city clerk recording fees vital records already collected were 55 thousand dollars over anticipated revenue in city clerk we have reduced expenditures and recreation park activity and events of 95 thousand dollars we have the refunding of the pension loan this year not having to make the principal and interest payments 668 thousand dollars we anticipate a health insurance savings of somewhere over 100 thousand dollars doing really well to date this totals one million 87 thousand dollars thirty two thousand dollars to the good i'm feeling pretty good about that and i just wanted to share that with you and the reason i'm feeling good about it is additionally this does not take into consideration any additional money from the corona relief fund from any additional money from FEMA that we do expect to be receiving or any of the money from the american rescue plan that will be receiving which is substantial this is kevin alluded to earlier over five million dollars we expect that the rescue plan money to be received sometime in the early part of june and really anxious to see some clearer definition about what these funds can be used for it's significant money we're hopeful that it can backfill lost revenue assisted with public safety costs hopefully to even include regional dispatch and other initiatives be utilized for projects and purchases in the cip that were put on hold that were reduced or were eliminated do a lack of funding and provide some funding for staff positions that have been put on hold as well as enable some of the enterprise utility projects for water storm water and sewer to be funded so we'll definitely be coming back to council for further discussion and meetings on this related to projects and funding once we have better information and we'll be working with with charlie at ccrpc and with the vermont league of cities and towns who have both received consulting money to assist communities in this effort so anyway that's just kind of a snapshot of of where we're at and you know still feeling pretty good about bringing the budget online for the end of this fiscal year and being very hopeful about some possibilities for use of the american rescue plan so happy to respond to any questions or comments megan and then matt all of the budget shortfalls that you are talking about they are taking our budget forecast lower and we're having to make up for it or are you saying that these were foreseen shortfalls now that's kind of a status of where we are right now megan and where we expect to be by the end of june with those numbers based on the percentages that we have today and we're falling short of our our budgeted correct revenues yeah the expenses we can control you know like i've said before those are things where we've had the budget freeze in effect and that's worked because it's it's certainly balancing out that shortfall and revenues where i think we are right now is at a point that given the fact that i think we put measures into place that we're we're still going to leave ourselves in the black for this year that i'd like to see us start freeing up some of the money in our capital expenditures to start purchasing some of the fleet to start doing some of the projects that we had anticipated doing in this fiscal year because i think those those projects and purchases can still happen and leave us balanced um we still have over three hundred and forty thousand dollars in paving that i think if we held that back as an insurance uh on any other shortfall that we might have that come july 1st we can always accrue those monies which i think we will be able to into the next fiscal year so that justin can just add that three hundred and forty to all the other projects that he's bidding out for f y 22 and we can be able to accomplish those in the same construction season and you explained to me how we're going to do that with budget shortfalls so the shortfalls that i identified were all offset with with the uh the additional revenue that that i identified so that leaves us with with anticipating that the rest of the budget would get spent as is we've already got 99% plus of our property tax collected so at this point as i shared with kevin and i'm sharing with you i i feel comfortable and confident that we can begin releasing some of the money for the cip expenditures that we had planned in this year with the exception of the paving money which i i think we should hold just as insurance in case additional funds are needed but i don't think they will be um with the fact that that i'm confident we're going to have uh the money from the federal government that's going to be able to help us backfill some of our loss and revenue that's where it's coming from because four hundred thousand dollars in rooms and meals that's a big chunk of change yeah so it right now the 668,000 that we're saving in the refunding of the pension loan megan is going to offset that but when we were able to backfill that 668,000 with money from the american rescue plan that allows other opportunities for us to do some things in the city so that's that's where my level of confidence is coming from at this point and that so i just to clarify tom so but for the american rescue plan a lot of the cip projects you would not you would be putting on hold you wouldn't be you wouldn't be investing in the capital infrastructure is that correct thanks for asking that matt i think we're still okay to move forward where we're anticipating that those expenditures would be made and we'd still come out with a budget in the black so then how do you how do you plan a rescue plan so when you when when we're we're still understanding what the rules are and what we can spend it on but but you would be booking that revenue in in fy 2022 and the expenses as well i assume right even though money might flow in june is that right yeah i think we'll get the i think we'll probably get um half the money uh in early june which is probably two and a half million plus dollars sometime in june that's great thank you other questions tim tom what about the rooms and meals tax and its projections for over the summer into the fall especially next fall yeah i i'm hopeful that things are going to get better tim um i don't expect that there's going to be much of a change to the end of june uh which is why we're projecting the shortfall fortunately in terms of our local options tax the rooms and meals is only 25 percent uh the sales is 75 percent of what we collect um so i'm hopeful that that's going to get better but i i'm also confident that one of the things that that i have understood from the american rescue plan is that would be an eligible backfilled revenue loss that we we could cover with the federal funds in the meantime we're covering it we're covering it in our own way within fiscal year 21 to come out in the black okay well everyone keep their fingers crossed get your vaccination get your vaccination we all have one right tomorrow two i'm all set that's why i went out west right i'm good i'm good to go okay thank you thank you um 13 we need to convene as the liquor control commission to consider chipolte um well who else dave's cosmic subs duke's public house i'm moving the liquor control board second all in favor hi okay so we've got four i think it is one two scrutinize them but i'm gonna move to approve all of the presented liquor control uh applications through the second second okay any discussion all in favor signified by saying hi hi hi um moving on to item four i'm sorry let's move out second second all in favor hi hi other business um i remembered what i wanted to bring up and just i would like um us to think about and maybe it's an item we could just send me tom already identified a vacation conflict for this summer so if you'll think ahead of um if you're gonna be away and it's impossible to join either you know on um you know go to meeting or call in or something please let me know and we can try to schedule around that or at least not have anything controversial or real important for those meetings okay so as soon as you know um let me know for kevin or somebody so we can um organize that tom yeah june 21st i'm gonna be vacationing so i could join but it'd make my wife really frustrated so if you need me i can but i have that other business item about the ferry is now a good time chair yes you may all right so in one of my other roles a senator i greatly respect senator jenny liens is uh very concerned about the sinking of the ferry in the lake and they are taking testimony and they are looking uh it just came up in conversation i remember councillor barrett i want to say three or four months ago asking this council and other business what our thoughts would be about rather than dropping it to the bottom of the ocean imagine if we ship wrecked it or sank it on red rocks beach or pick another place and so i'm not going to push that notion but i want to say that if there's interest of this council i am open to it i i am not saying i i definitely want the ferry to be dry docked on red rocks but if this council would rather have that ferry on the land rather than down at the bottom of the lake uh now is the time to speak up not that we have the money to pay for it i'd want the state to pay for it all again this isn't a warned item if anything i just want to put it out there that there is uh there's interest in the senate in which i'm serving now to not drop that thing to the bottom of the lake and if a municipality with access to the lake express interest in such a device i think it'd be a conversation worth having that's all i want to say what would we do at the time we just let them use our land to get it out or what would we do councillor barrett talked about a plane and uh that i don't know if you want to refresh your memory when i was a yeah when i was a kid at weaton regional park uh in maryland they had brought like an fu-47 jet fighter and pulled the engines out and stuck it in the park and put steps up to the cockpit and then a slide down the other side i actually dug up a picture and sent it to tom earlier today i was amazed i could find the picture on the internet but you can find anything in the internet so the the point was that they repurposed this military aircraft on a playground the kids could crawl through the engines they could sit in the cockpit before somebody yelled at them and they could slide down the other side um you know i mean if they dragged the ticon deroga all the way across the land and made it a museum piece this ferry is pretty special i think uh just aesthetically i just don't know how technically feasible it is to situate it you know adjacent to the shoreline and then prevent it from sinking by you know somehow dry docking it you know like the boathouse sort of whatever and and then making it an extension of a park either through just activities i mean it's it's a shelter you could have you know parties underneath it uh kids could play on it i it's just you know ideas that's all brainstorming that's all why would they say i wanted to get some more information about the size i'm not thinking red rocks is the relatively small park and they don't have a huge beach i'm not sure all the residents want a ferry pulled up on the beach as a burlington has more room for something like that they have a lot of land though yeah a lot of beach underneath the maran plant you know and then they could have two metal structures that are you know but i'm gonna take from this conversation and relate to my good friend jinny lions if i can say that that no counselor bock door said no it's a crazy idea we don't want to hear anything more about so that's the only thing i'm going to convey and then i'll talk to kevin if there's uh any reason to put this on a future kevin and ellen about actually considering any possibility of south burlington considering this adron i don't want it at red rocks i'll say that i don't want it red rocks i we weren't supposed to decide today i thought this is just right right other business that's what i said i mean i mean i don't want to know what it is i'm committed to nothing so i'm at health council armory i will definitely convey there's concerns about red rocks but okay okay that's all i'm gonna say i'll i'll send that you know about any other business to come before us we had something about a conversation helen pardon me you had something you had a conversation about something yeah and i can't remember it was the vacation conflicts was one thing but i can't remember the other thing all right it'll come to me tonight good all right so are we ready to adjourn all in favor hi hi my meeting was so long i should know well i didn't we're gonna we haven't had a long one a while so it's good really yeah don't worry ace okay the first year on council i remember sticking around at one two o'clock in the morning 10 56 this is this is good we're good so glad you think that all right bye


Hey, TLO! What's- Y'all on Twitch, we are not behind! If you didn't even like, comment, or subscribe, turn on your post notifications, and let's continue to grow the family from Chicago to the UK. In this channel right above, man, if we go live and you happen to miss it, this is where you can catch it. We do got the Discord, and we also got the Patreon. Some of you may be wondering what I got on. This is called a skip shirt. It's actually very slimming.  I pay $50 a month to live in a skip in London. Skip shirt was free. Let's get into this, man. I'm interested. My name's Harrison, and I live in a skip. This is the main living area, as it were. This is my hob, where I'll kick. I've got my pots and pans under here. Very small one-pot meals. The folks live a little bit better than me. It's clean in that joint.  For the next year, food storage, fridge.  So what goes in the fridge? Which is kind of cozy for the place with artwork from friends and family, which is nice. The project is obviously my home, but it's also a statement in response to the rising cost of living and the crazy rent prices. You know what? I ain't even knocking that. I'm not even knocking that. If we out here making statements, me too. I refuse to go by high fashion. You know what I'm saying? I rather wear it is. You know, affecting thousands of people all over the country. And so this project... He's doing it for a good cause. Well, Keith, it's all mine. ...was a way in which I could find a... almost like a little loophole that would give me a space to live for less money in a very great location and equally make a statement at the same time. I feel like he's smart for this one. He's a smart guy. You see, this is the entrance, so a little bit awkward getting in and out every day, but once you get the hang of it, it's actually not too bad.  And that is all my storage down the side, so all my clothes, my tools, um, jumpers, and then, yeah, all the beddings up there. He can only do this in London. And I'm surprised he can do this in London. Like, does nobody bother it? Is it gated in? I came back to London a few months ago. I'd been doing some work overseas, and I started the dreaded hunt of looking for a room. As is the case with thousands of people, it was almost impossible to find somewhere that was in my budget that fitted kind of a decent location and my criteria. And even if I found somewhere, you know, there'd be 100 people looking for the exact same room, and without putting a deposit down, within five minutes, it'd be gone. So you ended up spending all of your evenings, all of your spare time, hunting for a room, just to be let down time and time again. And, you know, I've got neighbors here. I wonder how much it cost to me. Oh, it is, okay. It's in a gated community. I see balconies. What kind of posh over there? It looks nice over here, okay? As long as this isn't a good spot, like, I could trust it. Like, I could never. Because I'm this big, you know what I'm saying? I've lived here their whole lives, and their kids are now grown up in this area. They've got jobs here. They're moving out, and they're having to move way out to the, you know, the outskirts of the city. Even though this is where they're based, this is where they're grown up and spent the last 20 years. And the price is just, you know, unaffordable. So the cost was about £4,000 all in. So that's all the materials, most of the furnishings. And then my only outgoing cost, now that it's here, is the nominal rate for the actual skip itself, which is £50 a month. For that to be possible, obviously I've got a lot of help. I mentioned before the site, this is provided by a art charity called Anti-Bavillion, who have access to this plot of land. Even the Porta Lou company has provided that for free, and therefore, hence this project, isn't necessarily scalable, but more of an art project in itself. So you're only paying about £6,000. Okay, okay. And for the rest of the year, you've been outgoing, right? Like a lot of loopholes he just found out for this one. Yes, exactly. So inside the skip, I have a little, this is my water, which I refill from a hose that runs from the neighbor's property. And then as of today, actually, I will have electricity coming in. That will mean I can cook in here, I'll have a heater, I'll have to charge everything, etc. And then showering, I do work or at the gym. Are you single at the moment? Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. But I'm sure after this video, his rate went through the roof. I can get behind having a little hippie girlfriend that would like living in here with me, saying that of the earth and things of that nature. Yes. What do you think any potential partner would make of this? I think... Yes. And now it's a button-up. Yeah. Okay. A little skip vest. You feel me? Let me back up so y'all get the full... so y'all get the full credentials of what I'm trying to do here. Hold on, man. Ever since I can't remember, I've been popping my collar. Hey, where you lit? My bad. Let me get back to a future presentation. It's a good question. I think the reactions I get are 50-50 on whether people want to come and check it out and stay over. I think most people want to come and check it out. Stay over is crazy. Stay over is a different kind of question. I think the shower, the toilet would be a big factor. They're one of the biggest compromises of living in a skip. And then how long are you intending to stay? So I will be living in the skip itself for over a year, maybe longer. And then I'm going to move to other sites. It could be a case that I move this to other locations around London if opportunities arise. That would be heat. Like, moving it around, that's raw. That will make it something that I'm going to do. If it's stationary in one spot, I'd be like, eh. But yeah, I want to do definitely a good chunk of time, see it through. Do you think you'll hack it? Yes, I think so. I've kind of picked the worst time of year and then moved in. It's cold. So I've experienced all the cold in here and I've experienced it without electricity yet as well, which means hopefully as we get closer to spring, it gets a little bit more comfortable. The garden starts to become a little bit more useful. And then my other worry then would be the other extreme of middle of summer, just how hot it might get inside here. So that would be a different kind of challenge. But I think I should be able to. With electricity though, you'll have fans.  Okay, yeah. But the purpose of this project is to push a bit more creative thinking around housing and how it can be done. The way in which social housing has been done and has moved moving forward over the years has become much more of a tick box exercise for developers rather than something that people or organizations or government really, truly believe in and want to put their time in and want to put them. This is for a great cause. I'm sitting here having a laugh about it, but it's still for a good cause, man. At the end of the day, are you not entertained? Money in. And so therefore it's become something which just has to be kind of done on the side and then therefore it's never, you know, fully integrated or done to a high standard or the time and effort isn't really put into it. And so, you know, this is just trying to push people to really think a little bit more about that.