So we're going to get started, everyone. Welcome to our NPA, wards 4 and 7. I think I'm supposed to be looking over here. Welcome, everyone. I wanted to go over the ground rules for tonight. Listen to others speaking, respect the agenda and process. Share your opinion politely and treat people respectfully. We're trying a little bit different format, so bear with us. We also had a cancellation from Burlington Electric, so we may be out of here early tonight. But before we go into community announcements and comments, we have a couple of housekeeping items for our steering committee. We'd like to nominate two new people. First is Bridget Matheson from Ward 4, and I nominate Bridget. And if everyone could support her. And her nomination, especially Carole, you're Ward 5. Second. Second. And we have Lee that Matt's going to nominate because he's Ward 7. Yes, on behalf of Ward 7, I would like to nominate Lee Morgan. Any other Ward 7 folks? Do we have any more time? Would you second that? Sure. Thank you. Does anyone have any community announcements or comments for the room? We're going to start off with our legislators, and Carole is going first if there aren't any announcements. Okay. Carole is going to go first. And we're starting asking our elected officials to give a little background on the work that they do, committees they're on, assignments and priorities that they're working on. So with that in mind, if you could give a little background on that, then we'll ask the room if they have any questions. We wanted to try to get what's on everyone's mind before you give your formal presentation. For all elected officials. So we're trying a little bit of a different agenda, so we definitely get folks in the room. There aren't too many tonight, but when there are more, we want to get the folks in the room's questions definitely answered before we run out of time. So that was a tweak that we've been working on a couple months now. With that, Carole, would you like to start with, you aren't in session, but when you are in session, what committees are you working on? Okay. Thanks, Jeff. So I'm so grateful to be able to serve in the legislature and represent you all. In District 6 Chittenden, now it's ATLs, is to keep our forests unfragmented, and we are a little bit losing that battle, but we're working on that, and to keep wildlife corridors open or to reopen them, because as, first of all, people need to be able to recreate in the woods. Second, in the forests, that's different from woods. And second, with climate change, the animals will be migrating from the south up through Vermont, and they need to be able to get up through and to keep going north. We don't want animals to get stuck anywhere, because they will bring different diseases and so forth with them. They need to be able to keep moving through. And we expect human migration too, and so how we develop is very important, and in fact, a priority of mine was to make sure we had enough money for water and sewer in our small towns and villages to be upgraded so that people who want to build their developers, whatever, would build in those town and city centers. So that's land use planning end of it. I'm also on the Lake Champlain Citizens Advisory Committee. I'm still on that now. We meet with Quebec and New York, and we work on the health of the lake. The most important things that we are dealing with are toxins and invasive species. Once an invasive species is here, you have to deal with it forever. So we are trying to keep them out of Lake Champlain. In fact, the locks down there from the Hudson River, we are working to close those locks. Almost no one uses them anymore, and some very bad things are trying to come into our lake from there. Let's see. I am now on the Houseways and Means Committee. Houseways and Means deals with how to raise revenue for the state, and it deals a lot with education finance, which is super important for the whole state and super important for Burlington. A huge priority of mine was six years ago I introduced a bill that said we should update the formula and change the weights so that at the same tax rate, we are able to bring in far more money for our students, our schools, and our taxpayers. Finally, we were able to pass that. And we will see, that will start in 2024. It's been a long, long, hard, hard road. Hardest thing, I think, one of the hardest things I've ever done. And didn't do it alone. Martin Gulak was big on that. Let's see. I was able on the Houseways and Means, I was accepted to the Harvard Kennedy School for Public Policy, and this past summer, I spent two weeks learning about tax administration and tax policy with people from around the world. And what one of the takeaways is, we're trying to figure out how do you tax in order to help people who are poor and in order to have a fair tax system where everybody's in and everyone's paying, you know, people aren't afraid to file for taxes and anyway. That was fabulous. And I will bring what I've learned there to the State House, especially with some of the things the taxpayer advocate, Vermont has one, has been asking for for taxpayers to make things fair for them. I have been assigned to the sports betting study committee, and I'm hoping that from that the movement is to make sports betting allowable in Vermont, and we will be able to protect people who are betting anyway, and some of them have lost quite a bit of money because they've been betting without the protection of the state and also to bring in revenue to the state. And my hope is that although some of that revenue will be siphoned to the Department of Mental Health for addiction gambling, I am working on trying to get money for financial literacy, K through death basically. And I'm also very interested in the Green Mountain Secure Retirement Account that Treasurer Beth Pierce has been working on.  You don't want to have to deal with every other thing. So one thing the State of Vermont can do to make things easier if you're in business is to say, oh well, we have this Green Mountain Secure Retirement Account, everybody who works for you can sign up for it, you can sign up for it, and then you can focus on what you do best, which is to plum buildings. I'm also on the Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules. You have to tell me about, I'm trying to talk till Emma gets here because I know she's a little late. Oh, okay. You don't have to stretch. Alright, is my time up yet then? Yeah. Okay. Well, I could talk about my priorities later, but I'm on the Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules. When we pass a law, there have to be sometimes regulations written to put that law into effect. The Governor and his administration, or her administration, has to start writing those regulations. They go through a public process and they come to our committee. We're made up of half Senators, half Representatives, and we have to look at them and make sure they went through the correct process, and if we see a problem, we have to point that out, and that's what that committee does. It's a very important committee, actually. It's very good. I just want to say that what I learned from that and from, like, when it's just, the United States of America and our democracy is so incredibly wonderful. There are all these checks and balances in place, and the Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules is one of those checks and balances, and it just is heartening to see a democracy work, and it is something that is the most important thing, and it's a dream for other nations and other people to look to, and I love my country and I love what I'm learning, and I love serving. I do. All right. Thank you, Carol. Thanks. What about Bob? Bob, would you like to present what you are working on and the committees you're on as well and your priorities? Sure. I hesitate to walk into this love fest, but here we go. Bob Hooper and Carol and I split into the 18. I am on house government operations, and I've touched upon a couple of times what that does. It's pretty wide ranging. We have our finger in just about everything that has to do with government except for committees that are designated specifically for certain areas, fish and wildlife, as Carol mentioned, can dealt with that particular part of the corrections as its own committee. But we still reach out and touch these things sometimes. We last year spent a whole lot of time redistricting part of that, the way we jostled things around a little bit, got early to the next receipt in the legislature, and we followed through with action on Senate 2 on that side. We worked out just about everything that had to do with everybody getting a mail ballot. Generally speaking, I administer what comes down the pipe from the Office of Professional Regulation, which is a division of the Secretary of State's office, and they deal with regulating everybody from funeral parwars to beauty parwars, barbers to, we have any more basket weavers, but anybody that has professional license comes through that office and when they have a change, though, what they want to do is something. It comes through our committee last year. We engaged in a discussion and then eventually approved Vermont Endurement Compact that allows nurses to go from state to state and no longer have to get certification from the local nursing board. They basically have an agreement with the combat that everybody's training, everybody's certification will mean the same thing, so people can come back and forth between states much easier. That was contentious because I actually think that some of these things work for, some of these things work against us. This is one of the things that I'm going to be very interested in seeing, whether we net more available healthcare providers or lose. As just about what everybody knows, we are the people that screen and validate the votes that you take on your state charters.  One of them is the franchise voting thing, which squeaked its way through with some happy odds from us talking to the city attorney and some other people about expectations and then just like everywhere else in the country, everybody quit through the city attorney's office. I don't really know where that stuff stands anymore, but those are indications of what we do. Non-citizens voting has been a pretty big issue on local elections that come through city charters. Basically, the idea with city charters is that under our form of state government, the legislature holds all the power and when somebody makes a change to a city charter, we take action. We grant that particular legal entity, the city or the town, the ability to function with a free card in that particular area. There's been a push from the Brawlington cities and towns for a couple of years to basically say, well, if Winooski can do it, then South Burley can do it, then that's actually prohibited. So everybody has to do the same thing that we do, advertise it, vote on it, submit it, get it reviewed, take testimony, and then it does or it does not pass as the change that we recommend. One of my priorities and one of the things that we have talked about before is the way government works. I mean, technically, we should have our finger in every division of government. Privatization is an issue that we talk about a lot. I want to bring up into a more bright spotlight the function of the Department of Mental Health. At this point in time, they take a lot of money, they spend a lot of money, but they're not accountable for much in the way of results. So a lot of the trouble we're having with homeless and other issues in Burlington, I think, is because of mental health, not actually having the ability or maybe the desire. We have not taken testimony to deal with the issues. And that goes down into children. And also, last thing I'll say about what we deal with, I hope this year we deal with what is going to replace Woodside because at this point, some really violent teens are looking for a place to be that is secure and so far the state of Vermont doesn't have one. So they go out of state. We're going to be pushing in areas of economic development. I think we need to do more for water quality that's going to take us into an area of fur or chemicals. And I have a fondness for veterans issues and it's more than just kind of giving away money to people who serve. It's making sure people are recognized for what they've done. And I'm always eager to take questions. I think we'll take questions after Emma goes, Bob. Thank you for that update. And Emma, we're going to ask you to go over committees you're on, assignments, jurisdiction, and interests. Okay. Well, hello everyone. I'm a state representative, Emma Mulvaney-Stanik. I represent CHIN in 17, which is from Battery Park up to Ethan Allen and Letty Park, roughly. And I am, at least last biennium, I was on the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee. And this wasn't said before, by the way. You can go to any of the 14 House Committee pages on the Vermont legislative website and there's a little cute little summary on top. And it's helpful because, for example, House and Economic, the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee touches a few things you wouldn't know in terms of the title. So we do do commerce in the sense of business and banking issues and insurance regulation. We also handle issues related to workforce development. Unemployment falls under our jurisdiction as well as workers' compensation. And then one that wasn't listed for some reason, but we do oversee is consumer protection issues. And I mention that because we took some testimony last biennium and I am anticipating we'll do a large omnibus bill, which is a multi-miscellaneous configuration bill on consumer protection. I'll come back to that in just a second. We get one committee in the House, so that is my primary committee, although I serve in, or I am a member of several issue-based caucuses. So what does that look like just briefly? So we, for example, on insurance regulation, we had an interesting bill that went through our committee that first started healthcare on genetic testing. So this might be something folks are starting to experience with their primary care physician around another data point in your health of understanding your genetic history and your lineage and things you might want to know about. And so that changes life insurance. And so life insurance corporations were really interested in understanding how we were going to allow that or not. Vermont would have been one of the first states besides Florida, believe it or not, to allow Vermont just to be protected that that would not be held against you in your premium rating or rating by the life insurance. That bill did not proceed. I use as an example that we don't do the health insurance side of it, but we do the regulation side of it, the consumer side of that. We, last biennium, did two very large economic development bills. People often call House Commerce or have heard it described as a mini-money committee, not like ways and means and appropriations, but we do move a lot of money and appropriate it related to economic development and smart ways we can be supporting our economy, all the types of businesses that exist in Vermont, but also in terms of workforce. So we did a large workforce bill last session, which touched on a lot of different topics, which I've spoken about here at the MPA, different sectors of our economy, ranging everything from what we're doing with our healthcare workers, a little bit on nursing. Bob spoke to a little bit on the nurse compact, among many other aspects, trying to move money towards scholarships and helping people with training and whatnot to fill our very large workforce needs in Vermont. I also mentioned we oversee unemployment, so we've spent a lot of time with the Department of Labor in our committee of late, because so many Vermonters used the unemployment system during the pandemic and discovered that it is a very antiquated system. The IT system, which supports people getting their claims, is decrepit to be perfectly frank. It does not support the high volume, let alone even a normal volume. And so it is very clunky. And so trying to even make simple changes proved to be pretty much impossible. So we invested a lot of the federal money into modernizing, like many states actually, the IT system so that it works better for Vermonters, not only claimants, but employers as well. And we had a task force as well, try to look into the system itself and really understand how do we balance the needs of workers accessing that system as well as employers and think about, again, comparably, what are other states doing and thinking around in terms of unemployment, how much people qualify for claims, employers that are exempt, et cetera, from that process? Let's see. And just briefly going back to consumer protection, because I think this might be of interest to folks, there is a couple states that have done some pretty comprehensive work around consumer protection, acknowledging the fact that when you pick up your smartphone or you interface with Facebook or whatever, there's so many data points now that get collected from us, whether we know it or not. And it's a big idea of really understanding the need of consent and data privacy and protection and just knowing what is being shared or held or collected from you. So California and Illinois, I believe, I think there was another state, probably Washington, had done some pretty comprehensive laws recently. And so we're starting to explore that a little bit around biometric data that's collected, how long companies can store your personal data. Even after long you've closed accounts with them, perhaps, they could still hold your data. Rights of consumers and issues around tracking. So some of this is a little bit beyond my knowledge, but you know, you have a smartphone, you can be, you know, whatever the terms are, can follow where you're going. And this applies in many areas, and we can get into all the details of other things swirling around us nationally. But these are all very important and timely issues of thinking about how data gets collected and making sure Vermont can also be a leader around informing consumers and protecting consumers and making sure that corporations are not holding data that they do not need to hold and sharing it without your consent. Special interest areas, if I just have a minute to touch on a couple of those. So because unemployment is an issue in our committee, I continue to focus in on that. It's a complex system. Last session I introduced an idea of an unemployment advocate that would be like an omnibus person that would help Vermonters navigate the system, because again, while we had a huge volume of folks using the system, there are still many folks who regularly use the system, and it's complicated. With an antiquated system, it's easy to make a mistake, and then suddenly you're in adjudication, and without an attorney, it's very hard to figure this all out. So that would be a role that I think is still relevant to help Vermonters navigate a pretty economically stressful time and have much like we have a healthcare omnibus person or healthcare advocate, we have a tax advocate, we have similar roles in other parts of state government. I think it makes sense to support Vermonters. Oh, thank you. Workers' Rights. I talk often about workers' rights. My career has been a lot of worker rights issues. I have a couple bills I am hoping to reintroduce around closing the gender wage gap, wage transparency, and reliable work schedules supporting workers. And I'll finally end on gun policy. I'm looking to explore safe storage rules here in the state, waiting periods for gun purchase, and then an aspect of school shooting drills in schools. I have a second grader, and she started during COVID, and this is the first year she's experienced a drill, and it was horrifying to hear her account as a second grader. It was absolutely horrifying, and I think we need to look at our policies and whether or not we are doing age-appropriate things for our children, knowing what the realities we're living in, but there are other ways I think we can do trauma-informed ways of looking at how we prepare our communities while we work on the larger upstream issues of why we live in such a violent culture. So I'll stick my landing there, and I'm happy to answer questions. I hope that wasn't too fast. I've had a lot of coffee today, so thank you. Okay. I have two microphones. So this is the microphone for the room, and that is the microphone for Zoom, and that. I'm Odeon. My fellow Americans. I don't know to whom to address this question, actually, but on oversight committees in the House, which committee has responsibility for something that my husband and I just learned about, the Vermont Insurance Commission? And are these citizens on these commissions who are paid, and is there oversight and is there a transparency because we're not seeing the transparency? Thank you, John. Well, unfortunately, we'll be doing insurance, but I'm actually not sure. This would be my second term after I'm reelected, so I'm going to write that down, and I can get you an answer, because I have not heard of that yet. So what was it called again, the Vermont Insurance Commission? Insurance Commission, okay. And my guess is that the Speaker of the House, the President Pro Tem of the Senate, and the Governor all appoint people to that commission, and then they serve as other commissions do. But regarding transparency, all their meetings should be right on Zoom, right on YouTube, and you can go to the Vermont Legislative Website to find where they are happening, and so forth. If you could give me your name and email, I'd be happy to talk to you. I'll be close to this one for actually picking you up. Councillor Jang on as an attendee. I do not know. We're similar for you guys. We wanted to start out so that when we're at our meetings, we're asking better questions, knowing what you're working on.  I want you working on it. City Council. Okay. Thank you. This is good. This is a good format. Each Councillor is assigned to at least three committees, sometimes more, and there's sometimes Task Force. The three committees that I am assigned to are Charter Change, Community Development and Neighborhood Revotization, finally known as CDNR, and the Human Resources Committee. I chair the Human Resources Committee, which is one that doesn't get as much play publicly because we deal really with internal issues within city government and HR policies. This last year, we've really been focused on the union contract negotiations. Those are generally three-year contracts, and this was the year that almost all of them came up, so that's been really a huge priority. We've negotiated very satisfactorily all of them, but the firefighters, and we're hoping the firefighter contract will be settled soon. I can try to answer questions about that, but we, as a committee member, really are at a higher level, and then the council itself at the end of the day approves those contracts. We also spend a chunk of time on union grievances as a committee. If they go through the internal process, people have a right to grieve to the HR committee at a certain level, so that occupies some of our time. Our biggest task this year is a fairly major rewrite of the Human Resources Policy Manual for the city. A lot of that work has been done. Some of you may not realize the city was without an HR director for almost a year and a half. Our neighbor, Karen Durfey, now is our HR director, and she's fabulous, and has been a former steering committee member. A lot on her plate. The manual is a little bit stalled because of COVID, and then the change in leadership with the REIB director, and we really want it to pass through that office, so that'll be a big job of the fall. On the Charter Change Committee, Bob mentioned how our state local government works. As he said, we are what's called a Dylan's Law State. It's very difficult for municipalities in entirety to change things. We have to get permission from state government. So the Charter Change Committee routinely is reviewing things that we want to change within our charter and then bring up to the legislature. Generally, those Charter Changes need a vote of the citizens. We've got three topic areas we're working on right now. One is the legal non-citizen voting change. We're pretty far down the path of that. The language, I think, settled. We've been spending the summer and now in outreach programs. I unfortunately had to miss your September meeting. I know that my colleague, Ben Travers, was here to explain that. And so we're excited about that, and I think there's a lot of enthusiasm. And I want to point out that this is something that we've talked about really since, I don't know, predates me 2017 or 2018, so it's not a new idea. We've got way late, again, with COVID. And I think it's important to remind ourselves that in addition to our wonderful New American residents, we've for decades had citizens from Canada and other places I work with many older people who would love to be able to participate in our local government, but can't because they're still Canadian citizens. So the council has to pass that, and I expect that will happen in the next few months. Along with that, we also are going to propose a charter amendment that would give us a little more flexibility in the location of polling places. Right now, it says that physically has to be in the ward, and that's cumbersome, and it will be more cumbersome, potentially, if we have some changes with redistricting. And we want to look at just flexibility and efficiencies. When I hope we build our beautiful new high school, that might be a wonderful place for a combined four and seven polling place. So we just want to give ourselves some flexibility to do that. And I think we'll see that soon. The other charter change that came, I won't say suddenly, but you all remember a year and a half ago, we voted to allow instant runoff voting or rank choice voting for city councilors that passed. It went through the legislature. Representative Hoover talked about it. It came back with the legislature with some amendment that gave the city some flexibility in the methodology that it could choose. The majority of the council did not choose to explore other methodologies, but to use the same methodology that we used a decade ago. And that is in the process of being implemented. The special election we're going to have on December 6th will be the first time it will be used. And then again, a town meeting. It was my personal understanding and a number of councilors as well, that we would wait until the town meeting in 23 before we looked at exploring it beyond into other city offices. However, this summer, former councilor Dick Hansen introduced a resolution that passed that asked that rank choice voting also include the office of the mayor. And that was sent to the charter change committee and it's in the charter change committee now. At our last meeting, there was a discussion about, in addition to the mayor, actually including all elected officials. So that would include school commissioners, ward clerks, inspectors of the election. So our next meeting at charter change will be to review that as an opportunity. I personally would like to wait until after the March 23 election before we change it to give people an opportunity to become more familiar with it. And I think there's a parallel track happening with some discussions of the state and I have some concerns about our getting out of sync with the state. The third committee I'm on is the CDNR committee. We deal with a lot of community development issues, although we've spent probably the majority of our time on housing issues, which is frankly overwhelming us. We have worked a lot of stuff. This last year, the primary focus has been on initiatives to serve the houseless. And we're picking away at some of that. We've added a special assistant to organize and coordinate houseless issues within state government, although she's only been there for less than six months. We have the Elmwood emergency shelter coming online. We've provided some funding to the coordinated entry, which is the major casework program for people who are houseless. And that's a real stumbling point in the system because we don't have enough capacity in that system to meet with all the folks that could benefit from that. So that's a real problem. In sort of a parallel track with that, we're resurrecting discussions that have been around how do we manage and deal with policies for people who are camping in the city. Right now, there's somewhere between 70 and 80 at a minimum that we know of chronically homeless folks sleeping out in the city. We will open Elmwood in hopefully within a month. That will have 30 beds, but that's through the math. It's not going to help our problem. So what do we do with people who literally have nowhere else to go? What's the best policy? And obviously the tension with that is the degree to which some of those folks are in public parks being used by all variety of the public, including children. There's a tension, there's a conflict. How do we manage that? And that will be probably within the next few months a big focus of the CD and our committee. So I can go on, but I give Mark, I don't know how much time I'm supposed to have. Have you till 7.55 and it'd be great to have questions at 7.50. Good to pass. I'm Mark Barlow. I'm the North District City Councilor, which encompasses both Wards 4 and 7. I am on, but actually before I talk about what committees I'm on, I wanted to describe to you the sort of purposes of the committees that we have on the City Council. There are ways for departments to sort of queue up issues and needs for the broader City Council and sort of that them through the committee structure, but there are also ways for the City Council to sort of do extra deliberation on and really do a deeper dive on some of the issues. A lot of times things will come to the City Council and then they'll be referred to the appropriate committee for further discussion and analysis. So with that said, the committees I serve on, the first one is the Tax Abatement Committee and so this is a committee where if tax payers want their taxes abated, we're a quasi-judicial committee. We have hearings. We're actually having our first set of hearings tomorrow if you're interested in such things. We'll be meeting at Busher at four o'clock, but that committee is set up to hear those things and then refer it to the full board, our recommendation to the full board on each of these cases and the full board is the full City Council. I also serve on the Parks, Arts, and Culture Committee, which is a committee that sort of is a Liakes. The City Council liaison to the Parks, Burlington Parks Recreation Waterfront Department, Burlington City Arts and the Library Department and so we talk about all things, sort of Parks, Arts, and Culture in the city. Two specific things that we're taking up right now is you've probably heard about the Dog Task Force. It was impaneled before I was serving on this committee, but essentially it's looking at a lot of the things related to dogs in the city, licensing, off-leash areas, and those sort of things. The committee is basically taking the input from the task force that was set up, so that's ongoing. Another topic that is more current is we've had our first meeting and we're going to have a second meeting on public safety in the parks. There's been a lot of interest in trying to find solutions to some of the activity we're seeing in the parks. Intersex was like some of the work CDNR is doing. We're looking at some of the camping issues in the park. How do we manage them? How do you enforce some of the ordinance we already have? There's vandalism, most notably that was brought to us is the vandalism down at the accessible treehouse we have at Oak Lege Park, and how can we manage that? There's graffiti and there's been some deep barking of the tree there, and there's also people who are camping there. How do we manage that? We talked about in our last meeting, we had a number of members from the community who came and related incidents and issues that they see, so we take the testimony and then we also enlist the help that the department had. We had Cindy White, Director White from Parks. We want to have someone from the Burlington Police Department in our next meeting. We had Scott Barker, the Chief Innovation Officer for the City Come, and we wanted to understand if there was a role for maybe, if we don't have the human resource to enforce things, could we at least use technology like cameras or something to sort of keep tabs on things. I know that's sort of a fraught topic, but we touched upon it and we're going to continue that discussion at our next Parks, Arts, and Culture Committee that hasn't been scheduled yet. And the last committee I serve on is the Transportation, Energy, and Utility Committee, so that's, as it sounds, deals with streets and potholes and sidewalks and BED and even the airport. The city's net zero, energy roadmap, and all utility matters. And it's a super interesting committee. One of the things I like most about it is the field trips. I get to see, you know, I've seen a lot of the infrastructure of the city and it's fascinating that we have these enterprises in BED and in the airport and the functions that they serve within the greater city. We had a, we call it transportation, energy, and utility. We call it TUC. And yesterday we met and we talked about updates on the North Manuski Avenue corridor project and specifically about how we're going to address some of the loss of parking. There's been some grants that have been set up for residents and businesses along the part of the corridor that's going to be, have parking displaced and how we can help them in this transition by finding additional off-street parking or finding other ways to manage that parking loss. So we spent some time on that. And we also talked about how the implementation of the new toter program, everybody's going to have, to have the covered recycling toters rather than the open bins that, you know, we've been used to having and how that's being implemented and what that timeline looks like. And we also talked about the new Shelburne Street roundabout and how we'll measure the effect that has on the traffic in that part of the city with queuing on the side streets or queuing in the roundabout. So there'll be actually a process for measuring all of that and it'll be done annually for the next bunch of years and there'll be reports for that to come to the city council. I actually, I should mention, I chair the tax abatement committee and I also, with Jack Hansen leaving, I'm now the chair of the Duke as well. My priorities and the other, I guess, one of the things that I'm also involved with is redistricting. I'm one of the four people on the council that's part of the notorious redistricting working group and we were sort of put together to represent the various geographic areas of the city but also political interests in the cities and try to take the input from the ad hoc committee on redistricting and some of the public forums and input we've received and try to craft a redistricting plan that's acceptable to everybody. I can tell you at this point we know that as of Monday it'll be an eight ward four district plan just like the one we have. We just don't know exactly what it's going to look like yet but stay tuned. We should have a decision on that on the seventh and lastly I'll say my other priority is trying to get a handle on reclaiming our downtown. I really do believe that Church Street and the marketplace are one of our iconic symbols of our brand as a city and I really genuinely believe we're losing that right now. We've got to figure out a way to manage the issues that are the root causes of the issues and through time we need to address the acute issues that we have right now. I know it probably dovetails with some of the conversation that Commissioner Grant has come to talk to us about tonight but I really want to get a handle on that and so I've been meeting with a number of stakeholder groups Burlington Business Association, Church Street Marketplace, various merchants, parks, Burlington Police Department and I'm just trying, myself and others are trying to find a way to sort of address some of us, what we're seeing down there because we're losing shoppers, we're losing restaurant goers and we have people that don't want to visit the downtown anymore and that's tragic and so I'll stop there. Other questions? We don't have any. I've got to speak into both. Sarah you mentioned the REIB office. I guess I'm curious if you found a new director for that office and how, I know that there was a bunch of sub directors that also resigned back in the spring. Yes, well, we have had the opportunity to interview a final candidate and we believe she's going to accept the position. She'll need to come to the city council and I believe it's going to be at our next meeting for a formal appointment. It's public, right? I don't know. I just don't know, I think it's so bad. Yeah, I mean, she's a finalist so I'm assuming it's public. It's a woman from Iowa and she's got very impressive credentials and is very excited about moving here and likes the northeast and likes the vibe of Burlington and has worked in the university town and so we're very much looking forward to her final appointment. The office has been struggling because they are understaffed but we're hoping this is a good start and that will happen shortly. Great, that's good news. My other question as you mentioned about alternate voting places and I know this voting place doesn't have to do with, it's in the old north end and I know a lot of, often we put voting places at schools but for some schools it's kind of a, they have to give up a day of whatever and like sustainability academy has, they share their cafeteria and their gym and the day of voting those kids they have to have packed sandwiches they can't use the kitchen and half a block away the city's now had for how many years the one community center why isn't voting moved to the one community center and if we want to push that forward what process, who do we talk to because I've emailed Joe McGee and got no response. I can certainly follow up the city council has the authority and in fact technically appoints polling places every year so there's no reason it can't change I would gather to say that there are certain wards are very attached to where they have been but it's not all that complicated a process and we should start that conversation right now the biggest impediment is it technically has to be within the physical ward and I don't know the boundaries of the lines. I think it's still within ward three. So offline I'm happy to kind of pursue that discussion it is a problem both we know to use the schools in ward four we looked at the potential of having it at Flynn and there was reservations because of the space my personal opinion which I've discussed with no one is maybe we ought to give polling day off to everybody and close the schools and that would a lot of communities do that and work places are giving you the day off so kind of on a parallel track I think the city ought to consider that because we haven't got that many big buildings and it wouldn't hurt us maybe twice a year to juggle the school vacation schedule a little bit to give everybody a day off. I think UVM cancels classes they do that. Thank you. Question about when we did the reappraisal process for the homes and did I hear that you guys redid the commercial properties because I know commercial properties were significantly lower like 20% lower and that was shared across homeowners so with our reappraisal so I was just I'm just asking you guys hadn't mentioned that you're part of these committees that was a question. Mark may be more up to date we know that in the appraisal that was done in 2020 the hotels in particular and anything related to tourist business was way down and undervalued it is my understanding that the assessor's office is re-looking at all of those properties the assessor has authority always to reappraise something if they're really going to go back with the market they typically don't do residential blocks unless something has changed a lot some of you will remember there was a huge jump in value a few years ago with lakefront properties so they were done separately I think the hotels and restaurants are going to be re-looked at this year so it's not a true community reappraisal but a commercial reappraisal on some commercial businesses because I know that I've had that question asked with taxes and I think what was it about 20% was then spread over homeowners because the pandemic had about a 20% dip as I understand it home values have escalated a lot at the same time particularly because of COVID commercial values decreased so the math number was 20% and that was just a function of home values increasing at a faster pace than commercial in 2020 just as a sidebar there is a special task force looking at the reappraisal process we've not gotten a report back from them but again my personal opinion is we need to do reappraisal more often it's painful process but elected officials don't like it but we waited way too long and that's we were just too far out of whack in my opinion that's what created a lot of the problem and to be blunt we are seeing continued escalation of home values right at the moment so there's some swath of pain that may come as well if that gets re-looked at I think the biggest priority is commercial properties at the moment I believe they are looking at specifically I know the hotel industry was depressed during the COVID years and that's when the reassessment happens so I know that specific sector is getting looked at thank you good evening city councilors nice to see you guys I just have a question I know you talk a lot about homeless I know you both did what's our efforts to get the people who are illegally camping in the parks and stuff like that to mitigate that I mean some of these people are there by choice some of them are there because they want to be some of them are there because they need to be I get that I mean we're not asking them to leave at the current time what are we doing to make our parks a little bit safer I mean who's to say we couldn't have an acampment in the IAA backyard and how would that be affected I mean those are really good questions David and I think I referenced four or five months ago we hired somebody within the city to coordinate the efforts with it we've had we are about to add 30 shelter beds but that won't answer the question because there's 30 or 40 more people we put some funding into what I call the coordinated entry system and I'm I mean sort of as a practical matter if a city staff either parks or police get a report they follow through meet with the person try to get a plan of action the frustration I'm going to look at our state officials is where do we send the person and a huge frustration particularly with parks department is people are removed from the parks and they pop up at another park and in fact our committee is going to meet with some of the department has to talk about that and how do we better align I think there's better work to be done about enforcement in what I'm just going to call truly public parks we still have this problem of we ask someone to leave and we remove them where are they going and just to add we now have we've had Lacey Smith leading that effort from Burlington police department and they've been she's been trying to find services for those folks you know warn them and try to find them places to go now we have urban park we have two urban park rangers who work through parks to do and that's all they spend their time on and when they came to the parks arts and culture committee we had that I described around public safety they said that's they're like tapped out just doing that all day long getting someone out of a park and then they'll show up somewhere else because as Sarah said there's not a lot of places for folks to go right now I think we need more shelter beds I mean and so the Elmwood proposal is a low barrier shelter with a high level of services we need more of that whether it's in the pod structure or a building structure we can't find enough places I mean the last was the Champlain I think it's the Champlain Inn on Sheldon Road many of the transient housing is outside of Burlington but it's a real and I'm going to eyeball Representative Odie and perhaps Senator that we need more resources it's a regional problem that's sort of landed in our lab and I will say this quite publicly it frustrates me to no end there is a waiting list to get a case worker and it may be you're right David people are on accepting of the services but they can't even get the case worker to determine if they need the services and I'll just add that I do have concerns that at Burlington is the only community that's addressing this issue that we will be the one who has the people who need the services and so I think there needs to be at least a county some sort of more regional focus on this and since we don't have county government it does probably fall to our colleagues in the state to try to help coordinate that with us I think it's very serious I've had discussions with several city counselors and with the mayor we have to take on this responsibility more at the state level we can't expect our cities and towns to do this on their own at all the city is doing an incredible job with what it's doing but it can't you can't get enough resources so it's something that's a high priority for me and I see senate candidate martin gulik shaking her head do you want to say something martin we'll be working on that we'll also be working on getting more funding for the high school speaking of high school we're going to move on to the school board mark before you go north avenue is the schedule still for 28th, 29th and 31st halloween I'm told as of last night so check your train actually thank you elected officials I think I'll jump in because we're starting five minutes late and we may be able to make up time so thank you for being here everybody we're talking about committees and I'm just going to start with kind of an overview of the relationship between committees and a school board which is not not a natural one actually when you serve a school board you're really working at a level of governance and you're not operational and sometimes a difficulty with committee work is that you become operational and so it's really important when you do serve on a committee to make sure that you keep you're staying your lane so to speak and make sure that your work is very well defined and clear so when we first got on the board there was only one committee the DE and I committee and since then we've expanded we felt the need right away for a community engagement committee because we felt there was a lack of engagement with the city and that was one of our first committees and we no longer really use that one because we have been engaging quite a bit in the last six years but in the meantime we've got some other finance and facilities which is a committee that Kendra and I co-chair excuse me and Monica is going to talk about her committee but all told we have five I believe is that right we have policy and governance we have personnel and curriculum finance and facilities and DE and I and community engagement is there when we need it although we haven't like I said we haven't been using it so anyway I just I want folks to know that because you know that I'm a fan of helping define what being on a school board is because sometimes that line gets blurred and people come to us and they want immediate action on something where they want immediate assistance and we are really governing so our job is to work on the budget it's to hire and assess the superintendent it's to engage the community around mission, vision and budget so those are really our that's our work everything else is at a district level so anyway that's my little spiel in terms of my current priority issues you can imagine there's one that is really high priority and it is first and foremost an issue of equity we have no high school we have no permanent high school we are temporarily in Macy's that lease is going to run out in three years and when I talked about equity I talked you know statewide why does the biggest high school why does the biggest city in the state not have a permanent high school I think it's baffling to many of us but then even within the city it's an equity issue if you are a family that is wealthy you can send your kid to a private school the rest of us our kids go to public schools and when we don't have one there is just this incredible you know issue of equity and moreover I would say this is an issue of community safety, of community health and it just I would say that's my priority and probably all of us commissioners right now we're all working very hard to get this bond passed so with that said I will pass on to my co-chair of finance and facilities to talk a little bit more about that yeah so she covered the bond which is really what we're working on right now and but we also obviously cover a lot more we're starting to work on the budget again for this year and we have equitable budgeting that we came up with last year that kind of mimics what we did at the state level so what we did at the state level with lots of our legislative health and coalition from around the state is that we worked on the state funding formula to account for greater resources for students who had greater needs so when we looked at our schools we looked at we're doing that same thing with our schools which is really cool so for example instead of every school getting the same library budget we're looking at the students the number of students and the needs of the students and then we're having a budget based on that so that's a really that's really been working well and we're working with all the principals and all of the schools that identify what they're going to do with that additional funding so it's a very cool kind of mimicking what's been working at the state level and martin mentioned what we do is really policy governance so we have a couple committees we also have special committees so she and I were co-chairs of finding the superintendent so that was a special committee and this student equity committee basically for the funding formula was another one that we worked on and basically in burlington we spearheaded that for the whole state on the school board level and burlington will be seeing that dividend from that so that is what we have been lacking from the state and that should come to fruition we should be seeing those funds in 2025 which is really exciting because that's when the bond if this bond passes is also going to be the full extent of the bond the funding for the bond so I want people to know that that we have been fighting for the past couple years to get the resources from to serve so this school is just part of this process of what we need to serve our students so now we need a physical building but that funding is coming from the state as well so I don't want people to forget that in addition of course there's a lot of other things on the facilities we are trying to maintain the rest of our schools to the best of our ability and that is always an ongoing job and I think I want to pass it to Monica so we have time for questions because I'm sure there's going to be questions I'll grab this thank you for that Kendra and Martine I know Kendra did really spearheaded the student equity formula at the state level and we have high numbers diversity numbers second only to the Winooski school district we have high numbers children that qualify for free and reduced lunch and high numbers of EL students, English learners so our district really needs those resources and we've kind of been you know without well making do with what we have I co-chair the diversity equity and inclusion committee and we meet monthly and we look at a variety of things currently we're working on some policies within the districts making sure that there's an equity formula that is applied to new policies we are passionate about dismantling about being anti-racist and dismantling systems of oppression that have typically been in all our schools especially here in Vermont which is a heavy white state so we work now that we have superintendent Flan again our committee works with the office of equity and the director of that is Sparks and so every month we get an update on different aspects in the district also when it comes to planning the new high school ensuring that we have gender neutral bathrooms gender neutral locker rooms so that kids that don't identify as cisgender either male or female feel comfortable in their school and feel accepted there's just so much to talk about when it comes to DENI we also often schedule like trainings for the board so that the board can be more aware of how we govern let's see yes yes I just wanted to lastly say that I hope folks are voting everyone should have their ballots now and please fill your ballots out get them in and Tuesday November 8th is the big day and we all know we have a very important issue on the bond this year so GOTV that's my message questions questions well they need you to hear you on zoom and we'll have to fine tune this system somehow I was just wondering if you could tell me the yearly cost of the lease for Macy's good question I don't have that exact answer because do you know I thought it was around 3 million I think it's a couple million but I don't have the exact yeah just over but I don't have the exact we don't have the exact three and a half was to get it going I think it's three got that from the state yeah thank you Carol yeah the three and a half approximately three million per year yes thank you I actually I get to ask that might be close okay Appletree Point well represented this evening tag teaming I promise so kudos on student equity formula is that the one you've been working on for ever and ever why why do we not know that did I miss an addition of Burlington Free Press I mean really that's fantastic so thank you my question is I didn't get the 15 to 16% dividend remark 15 to 16% of what the state budget property taxes it's the money that we get from the state for education we're looking at a hike between 15 and 16% we're looking at a decrease we will get more money 15 to 16% more money from the state for the education funding formula to our schools here in Burlington we've explained it really well earlier same tax rate that we are the change doesn't have until 2024 there will be a period of five years most of it will happen in the first three years where other districts who've been receiving too much will have to come down will have to have their rates go up and those of us who've been had our rates up to who've been not receiving what we should have received will start receiving more and more at the same tax rate that we are taxed at we will be able to pull in more money for our pupils and that will help taxpayers and it will help pupils it will help the schools absolutely and I can I speak or am I not you're on zoom okay great I am on zoom so here's the rub okay it's a hard thing to message especially I spent a lot of last year testifying because I'm someone who's worked in these over resourced schools if you will and I asked myself for years why am I working in this school here that has all of these resources and I come back to Burlington and we're struggling to just you know rub a couple nickels together to get things to work and when I learned about this waiting formula it was a light bulb it really was an epiphany for me to see oh now I get it but it's hard for us to tell this narrative of like well we're now going to take all this tax money and we're going to we're going to take this new rate and give it right back to the taxpayers because that's not what we were working on that's not what we were working for but now that we are potentially passing a bond hopefully for a new high school to me that is 100 percent a student resource that we absolutely need to further and better our educating our students Carol am I saying that correctly well it's your it's there's they're not really connected there they're not connected okay we want to keep them separate in separate buckets okay fair enough and so what we are what we are working toward is in there was an over collection of almost a hundred million dollars at the state level into the education fund we didn't over collect we over produced there was an over production of people who were during the pandemic they were spending a lot of money on goods and so we collected way more sales tax than we thought we would and so between that and some other things we were at almost a hundred million dollars of that money I have been fighting and will continue to fight when we go back to bring some of that money back for the PCBs it's somewhat it's in there under PCB heading and how will we be dealing with PCBs and so that will be the next collaboration that we will be working on it's a fight but you know it's just we need it we need it for our kids we need it for our tax payers now and we have to see what we can get there so that's for PCB for the high school to be taken down then we have a regional technical center and we were able to receive from Patrick Leahy Senator Patrick Leahy ten million dollars to put some of the technical center out at beta but we still are spending millions on building the technical center to see some money for that since it's a regional technical center and then also there used to be a one third help from the state if you were constructing something you got one third aid six years ago at the same time that I asked for a change to the weights I asked for construction aid to be reinstated and since then we've asked over and over that has not gotten a warm reception because we have so many buildings in the state to take care of as you might imagine however we're going to still push for it and see where we can come up with more money to bring down that one sixty five million so that I wish that we could have come up with these things before the bond vote so we could say well these things are in line to come on but we haven't been able to but it took I knew there was a problem with the weights in the 1990s at the very end because I worked on that formula to make it fair for Burlington and so the minute I got to the state house I've been fighting that took six years and it took a lot of people to get that and now we're going to work on this next thing and thank you so much we could go on but we should probably stop it's we've gone over now ten minutes over any other questions for school board alright thank you very much good evening Milo Grant from the police commission I just wanted to read what you wanted to accomplish when you sent your request to present the police commission would like to do more community outreach to encourage people to watch the monthly meetings review what the PC police commission is working on discuss current public safety issues and get community feedback so that's why you're here yes so welcome thank you thank you greetings words four and seven thank you for having me I have a lot I want to push through today I want to educate people on where to find information right we are on Facebook too much one read it too much and those are not the experts so I want to encourage you to watch certain meetings these meetings can be watched while they're live these meetings can be watched almost all of them are recorded by town meeting TV and can be watched at a later time at your convenience you don't have to watch the whole meeting at once you can watch 15 minutes here 15 minutes there you can watch different segments I'm going to go over a couple of reports of the chiefs report that is something that everyone should look at take five minutes every month and look at that report and that answers a lot of questions and I want to give you an update on recruitment and where that stands and if we have time my personal point of view about things because there's some things that I'm hopeful about there's some things that that scare me coming down the line I think some things are going to get a hell of a lot worse before they get better and that'll be a frank conversation so having said that let me start off and I think what I'll do is as I go through different things I'll ask for questions as we go along and then at the end do full on question and answer if we have some extra time so the police commission meets once a month and it's generally the fourth Tuesday of each month but as we're getting into the holiday season it might change in November and December but on the city's website you click on calendar there's a nice big button that says government meetings you're able to click on that and scroll down look for the police commission click on that you have the zoom link you have the agenda and you have any reports that are attached that we review we as a meeting when we meet each month we usually we have the chief's report each meeting and then we have a variety of topics we have been trying to do things where we get updates on current issues such as recruitment and the data related to the incidents in the city and we also try to have speakers and we try to have these speakers address things that people want to know about information that they need so just to highlight some things that we talked about recently there was a mental health summit back at the end of August and this mental health summit was made up of individuals from Howard center school based clinicians their crisis services age well and more the discussions were centered on what role the city has in supporting the local system of care around mental health key takeaways identify the need for stronger coordination between city department of mental health and the agency of human services identify the need for advocacy and continued partnership with local mental health partners identified need and desire for coordinated communication coordinated communication coordinated communication that really came through as a problem all these different agencies within the city and the state not working together in the best possible way to assist us with these issues that we are seeing identify the need for continued relationship building between mental health workers and the police department and much much more so this specific report on crisis advocacy and intervention programs is really an important read everyone should take a few minutes to read it it's available under the September meeting agenda and it doesn't say how to solve everything it says what we need to be doing going forward it says we're here this way now these are the issues we're facing how do we move forward and we definitely need the state to do more VIA Vermont Interfaith Action did a very interesting presentation of Vermont guide to community engagement with local police departments doing the protest of 2020 that really came out as a big issue for people and it came out as a huge issue for the city of Burlington and it's probably the main issue that I talk about ad nauseam if we had better communication we would have within the community better support we have individuals who are all the way over here they will support the department no matter what let them go out there bust a few heads we're great then you have people over here who like abolish the police we don't need police on the streets and then you have most people who are here most people are here so how do we get everyone where they're more on the side of supporting the police and we do that with positive engagement and some of that engagement has to be on behalf of the department as well their reports list things that they looked at the case for civilian oversight building trust and legitimacy technology and media, officer trainer education, safety, wellness and more so that is a great report that's also listed under the September meeting past speakers we've had have talked about officer wellness have talked about trauma-informed policing trauma that officers experience trauma that the public could potentially experience when interacting with officers we've tried to educate people on the experiences that officers have policing I can guarantee you the average Berlintonian doesn't have an understanding of what officers have to deal with on a daily basis I have done right along I'm going to be trying to do more in the future and so there's things that if people should be aware of so we try to have speakers that express that last night we had an excellent speaker her name was Tammy Buddha she's with the Howard Center street team very very interesting mandatory listening she did something on de-escalation presentation but she talked about her work as a street outreach person she talked about being in particular they do a lot of work in downtown area and around city hall park so they when they can be proactive they are trying to reach out to certain clients that they're aware maybe homeless trying to work with assessing improving their stability I should say but they do answer calls they answer calls from dispatch they answer calls from merchants they do take calls directly from clients and also citizens who see something that's concerning or family or friends of individuals who are concerned her observations of the change that's occurring downtown and in the parks was very very interesting albeit admittedly stark at times we unfortunately after having gone through the opioid epidemic seen an improvement we've now regressed now we have meth the city has meth and this is scary because meth is very different when we talk about de-escalating it's very difficult to de-escalate someone who's on meth meth affects you differently I do recommend seven days recently did an article on this it is well worth reading to have an understanding of meth and meth is going to make things very difficult for us the increased paranoia makes it very hard to de-escalate someone it's more difficult to get off of you're more likely to relapse multiple times so meth coming here is a very it's scary it's scary she also said she noticed a new element of individuals coming into the community specifically to prey on addicts and that was concerning so if you go into City Hall Park and you're a street team member and you're known by everyone you're losing some social currency as she put it when people no longer feel safe and they they don't come in she talked about increased threats she said outside Chittenden County they're encountering having guns pulled on them more inside of Burlington there's an issue with knives so street outreach team members are asking for vest but she was very very interesting and like I said not necessarily uplifting but information that we need to know stay off Reddit stay off Facebook talk to people who are doing the job and listen to what their observations are also with the police commission we encourage people to send us commendations everyone complains a lot about policing if you have a positive experience we want to hear about it and we will talk about it during our meeting okay great if I could have the police the chiefs report up please and thank you any questions about those details about what the commission talks about could you give the name of that article that you just mentioned not the seven days was it a video clip it wasn't a video clip it was actually an article it was about meth within the last three weeks in seven days and was there you said don't use Reddit what we tend to have when people get information on Facebook and Reddit is they're not getting correct information you know and sometimes you get posts from people who don't even live in Burlington I mean I've read some really outrageous stuff where people are being really alarmist in some areas I live very close to downtown I'm downtown all the time if I'm walking down in waterfront park I come back up to check out what's going on in city hall park I'm looking my eyes are open and I can tell you this past weekend was fabulous I'm sure a lot of the businesses and restaurants were very happy it was bustling it was safe you read some of these posts they'll make you think this is an active war zone and it's just not and we're not the only ones not that that's supposed to necessarily make us feel better but we do need to have an understanding that there are national trends at play and that they are affecting us here in Burlington and in the state for example we look at Bennington 15, 16,000 people we've had 15 gunfire incidents they literally had drug gangs from Massachusetts praying on disadvantaged kids sending them up here to deal because we have that thirst in our communities right so we can't incarcerate our way out of all of this that's a cold hard reality you can't incarcerate our way out of this there's only so much room and as someone mentioned earlier the lack of space for teenagers the corrections department was like we have no programs for youth we have no space for youth we have no training for youth we have to start to think as part of the overall public safety system dealing with root causes so yes taking people off the street that are actively committing crimes but stopping the pipeline paying more money for we've increased to be more competitive to try to get officers here but we need to pay social workers and street team members more money too because there's the same labor shortages there they need people as well so it's a lot of different things and it's not related to politics there's so much about politics that it's really unfortunate we're literally wasting too much time on politics and not enough time talking about solutions you can change over the entire city council tomorrow and it's not going to change public support if other things aren't going to be done it's not going to change the level of incidents if other things aren't going to be done so that is definitely a concern that I have was it just that one article or were there two? regarding meth it was one article yeah I thought it was very detailed article that really informed people about the drug if people aren't familiar with it because it's here it's very very very different so the first page I want to say I call him Officer Corey I'm glad he's back he just started he had been on a military leave so I'm happy that he's come back this is our sworn officer head count this is always included in the report so if you need any information on that just always go to the most recent report and as of October 1st or at 62 officers next page please there is a revised priority response plan so this is going to list the category how the incidents are categorized from priorities 1 or 2 priority 1 is situations that involve immediate life safety and so priority 1 because they're number 1 they're going to get the first response from sworn officers additional categories might allow for a CSO and that will be highlighted you'll see yellow highlighted for CSOs and then there are a couple of items that get referred to online reporting such as check fraud and things like that so this is a very interesting read I recommend reading through it once if you've never seen it to have an understanding of how incidents are triaged if necessary because they're going to go to priority 1 then there if they can't get out to something that's listed as a priority 3 it'll be triaged to be dealt with eventually but priority 1 someone should be going out I want to quickly advise concerning drug activity if you see drug deals occurring if you see individually there are people who live next to homes and they know things are happening they see people going in and out they have needles being left they see people doing drugs in cars they might see cars from out of state different cars different license plates using the drug tip tip line on the police department's site you just go to the city site click on police department and it's one of the first things you see and it's an online tip line for drugs you might calling this I would not do unless there is an immediate threat to someone's safety you want to be reporting the activity online because this allows the department to track what's happening across the city and if people are saying at this house on this particular address this is what I'm seeing and neighbors continue to do that that allows the department an opportunity to focus their resources and possibly engage federal partners unfortunately we can never know exactly what investigations are going on where because they can't talk about it if you talk about it you might compromise the investigation in some way but provide the information definitely don't think it's a hopeless situation next page please incident volume as of October 15th we have year to date incidents so as you can see the volume we had in 2017, 18, 19 the quote unquote COVID years 2021 and where we are as of 2022 so for the year to date incidents we now year to date I think this is the first month where we are surpassed 2021 for sure and now we have surpassed 2020 year to date at the very bottom it mentioned 16% have been stacked according to the priority response plan next page please this is a graph this year has a color and it shows 2022 is black and it shows how that is trending I did have a concern which I did raise to the chief and we did discuss it last night's meeting and you can certainly tune in for that full conversation I did not agree with adding 2017's traffic volume and foot patrols to overall incident volume I don't agree with that because those traffic volume is from 2017 it didn't occur in 2022 so if we are looking to use data for deployment I personally I had trouble with that and I know from constant community feedback over data we want to keep it as clean as possible now I do understand this is this year's data but you're saying if we were and I don't think that's appropriate we're going to have to agree to disagree because I don't have a lot of time I don't think that's appropriate to say if we were to add data from 2017 so that happened in 2017 to 2022 I disagree I understand what the chief says because traffic stops were discretionary and we know that officers right now don't have the time they need to be more proactive it's very reactive right now and in the case of the priority one response plan it can be triage at times depending on the day and the time of the day and what's going on I just think that data shouldn't be there happy to talk to you about it further the extended conversation is recorded on our meeting next page please this is a graph of priority one incidents as you can see they are scanning higher next page please okay these are selected Valcor incidents Valcor is the system that our officers use to keep track of what the incidents that they are responding to now a couple of things two things can be true at the same time which is that historically incidents had been decreasing but and that's overall incidents but specific incidents are increasing right that's totally possible so if we go through the different categories things that drug use has really got me concerned especially with meth because in our particular ward we have lived predominately in wards two and three we have seen a lot of drug activity and we have been bombarded with crimes of opportunity and in the late spring early summer I could see this really spreading out and it did where it started to really hit the other wards more than it ever had so packages being taken and this is coming up folks you want to sign for those packages if you can't sign for the packages they need to be delivered to a place that will accept it or you need to have them sent someplace else where you pick them up if you have a package that says it's been delivered and it's been potentially it's stolen go out and look for stuff drug addicts are opening these boxes and they're looking for things that they can eat if they can't do it some of the stuff is just being discarded many people have talked about walking up in the street and finding some of the things that they've ordered in the street because a person didn't want it they were manic so when we take a look at things like larceny that's mental health issues overdose the increase in stolen vehicles that is definitely related to drugs so many people who have had these vehicles stolen talk about needles being found in them where there was clearly activity there have been some cases when police officers have recovered some of these videos people are like sleeping them or passed out in them lock your doors don't keep spare keys don't keep anything in your cars these are very very simple things that for a very long time I was worried about when I got here from New York City 35-40 years ago I was like what's wrong with you people you got to lock everything I was always doing that but now it's well and truly we have to take those basic steps and it sucks we don't want to live this way I get it but a lot of these individuals who are drug addicted they're looking for something quick and easy how many of you have seen people trying to open car doors I've seen that five times in the last few months that's a lot that's not just people talking anecdotally that is what I have seen and so if their doors are open they're going to grab stuff and so there's a lot of that happening people leaving their cars running with their keys in it at quick stops going in and get a cup of coffee someone gets in and drives a car away so there's a lot driving this related to drugs and so as I said yes we want to get drug dealers off the streets but someone's coming right behind them if we can't control the addiction in our community if we can't get counseling it was mentioned earlier people getting case workers you can't get a case worker you can't get treatment on demand we don't have beds the state needs to do more the mayor recently seemed to believe he is now understanding especially with regards to meth he has been talking to the governor he believes the governor understands the issues but when I watch the gubernatorial debates I don't hear a man who understands the issues so it's important our state legislatures thank you continue to talk to them about it and continue to direct concerns to the governor's office because we need an influx of money we don't even have beds for we're sometimes called low barrier if you have someone who has mental health issues and you jail them and they get out what's going to happen the same behaviors they have to have treatment if you have someone who has mental health issues and they're dangerous it may not be appropriate or humane to incarcerate them where there are risks to other prisoners they need to be in a facility that holds them in a safe manner to protect them and others so these are the resources that we have and that we're sorely lacking we lost waterberry hospital maybe we didn't need all the beds that they had but we sure as heck need a lot more now so these are really state level issues so these val core incidents definitely a page worth looking at and taking a look at the trends over the last few years so these are some of the incidents next page please this is comparing five year year to date average the chief will add up the numbers from the last five years divide by five so it's 2017 to 2021 and then compare to 2022 dramatic once again huge on larcity gunfire stolen vehicle next page please these is a page that is tracking gunfire incidents the bottom is sorted by the type of incident white is a gunfire incident the light blue is a gunfire incident known to be at a person the dark blue is a gunfire incident where someone is struck henceforth a shooting and a red is where someone has died so this is kind of breaking it down where we can see the increase that has occurred over the last several years this is unfortunately a statewide and national trend too doesn't make us feel better but we we need to be aware of kind of like covid we need to know what's happening every place else if all of a sudden every place else is having surges then we need to start to protect ourselves to prevent a surge in our area we have to look at what other places are doing is it working is it not working these are things that I believe that we need to think about next page please these are the totals of available officers so we have 62 minus officers that are on leave supervisors detectives airport officers special assignment that leaves 21 officers on patrol next page please building other capacity this is talking about our community service officers who when we talked about the previous page that showed the priority one response plan it indicated types of incidents that could be responded to by CSO's officers we're budgeted now for 12 so trying to hire more and then the community support liaisons these are essentially similar to the street team social workers who are embedded they have the expertise in mental health and substance abuse disorder as well as homelessness and all these things are related if you have a substance abuse problem our mental health problem that can lead to unstability maybe you can't work well then that puts you in a situation where you could be homeless all these things are related and need to be attacked from a number of different directions hopefully to hire three more CSL's by July of 2023 correct if I'm reading right next page Milo could I check in with you on how much more presenting you'd like to we're almost there because I think everyone has questions sure to have dialogue too with you and I'd like a clarification on something too which I take a few minutes no problem at all range training day if we could go to the next page recently our leadership staff for our department to a conference the international association of police chiefs in Dallas next page please this page shows some of the different types of panels that were available to them next page please next page please this is the increase in salary point for starting pay and the top pay as well as the hiring bonus additional benefits that have been added to be more competitive in the labor market and to attract officers next page please great I will say with regards to the chief's report while he was at the conference he did visit a couple of colleges in the area specifically to do some recruitment they attended panels discussing oversight I was very thankful to hear that attended a panel on looking at historical trends in policing because of personal concern of mine and a number of people in the community has been racial disparities we had a conversation about how we have gotten any lateral transfer applications yet the answer was no the feeling was that the atmosphere has not changed enough in the city to someone feels that the money is still not enough to come into a community where they feel that there isn't the support that they would like to see politics was blamed the police commission was blamed I didn't think that was necessarily fair we're doing a lot of things differently but we're certainly doing a lot of things that the community called for and I would leave that there you had a I'm actually I'm really glad that chief mirad came because you both brought up a point so I attended online the commission meeting you brought up about statistics from 2017 and you both are at a disagreement about what those mean and I could not understand either of your points and so a huge passion of mine is breaking down a lot of the discord we have in our communities and I think a huge part of that is just misunderstanding and so if we could leave this meeting tonight just understanding like you to speak and then have chief mirad speak to about that statistic because I can see this one incident snowballing and becoming bigger that there's like a misunderstanding about whether or not that's like a valid statistic sure I believe we can talk about the need for more proactive policing I believe that if we didn't have to triage we could look at things again like community policing and other things like that I do not believe it's appropriate to say traffic stops that occurred in 2017 should be included to say if we include because that's what it says it says if we include then we're looking at more incidents than we ever have I'm like no we shouldn't include those we're not going to include those because it didn't happen in 2022 and I understand it says if we include I'm just not comfortable with that statement I can you clarify I guess this is where I'm not understanding are they not included for every year in just 2017 like what's the 2017 the number in 2017 is the number in 2017 we could do a full meeting on why traffic stops declined what they did and they declined sharply so were they included for the other years too they're in the other years they're in the other years I believe if a traffic stop included in a year it should be included in the year and figuratively just to say if we added now numbers in incidents I think we just need to be very clear with people and not I know the chief doesn't like the word mislead but that's my feeling does incidents happen in 2017 and we shouldn't talk about including them in 2022 because it didn't happen in 2022 we're in 2022 and they're not happening we can't talk about the need to be proactive for community policing should we be able to increase the staffing of our department I think I'm understanding your point better can you speak at a microphone so you're on zoom as well thank you thanks for giving me a chance to sort of clarify it and thank you for going through that report so thoroughly if I do them every single month I don't have staff to do that this is something that I put a good deal of time into they are all available online you can go see the cumulative progression of them for the past two and a half almost two years and I do think that they are a key component for being transparent being transparent is incredibly important our data is I believe the best police data in the entire state I think that it is very very thorough and I'm happy to have it up there in regard to this particular issue it stems from the notion that overall incidents have been declining over the past several years and in fact they have but a decent percentage of that decline has been owing to a diminishment of proactive police work including traffic stops so we have diminished traffic stops on purpose for quite some time it was driven in part to address racial biases that were being seen in our traffic stops and if you look at that slide you will see that traffic stops were well over 2700 in 2017 and they are barely over 300 year to date this year so we have lost a huge number I am simply saying that if we did traffic stops at the same volume that we once did which is a proactive choice by officers our incident volume would not be that much lower than in previous years in fact it would be almost identical and what that indicates to me is that what we are seeing with regard to incident volume and the decrease of incident volume and how often our neighbors call us and how often our neighbors want our services and how often people in our city need us this is a point I have been making since June of 2020 because the data was clear back then as well if I took traffic stops and foot patrols both of which are proactive officer decisions they are generally driven by and officers observing something not a call for service not somebody saying hey this is happening can you do something about it it is about officers saying I have got some time or something that my agency has told me is important or this is something I believe is important as an officer and I am going to go do that those fell away for a combination of reasons partly because our community was saying traffic stops aren't important anymore our agency was saying traffic stops aren't important anymore and as a result officers said I can't now we have a situation where we simply don't have enough officers we are routinely patrolling the entirety of the city with two or even three officers for 44,000 people in 15 square miles and they are running from call to call to stop cars my point in making that hypothetical and it does say if we were to do these things was to say that if we took the traffic volume that we used to see a proactive officer decision and added it to our current numbers we would be right back up at the old levels of total incident volume and that is indicative of the fact that although incident volume has shrunk it hasn't shrunk because people are calling us less and that is really the whole point of that so am I understanding you correctly that it is your experience that the violations themselves haven't necessarily gone down it's the intervention on them that's gone down yes and I think that our counselors will agree with that because we hear it all the time we hear it all the time from every single NPA in the city every single ward in the city the fact that people are incredibly frustrated there is a watch group over on Starfarm that is tremendously frustrated right now about the number of cars that are rolling through the intersections in the vicinity of the Starfarm playground and the Starfarm dog park and the bike path they're just charging right through them and what we haven't seen so far and I see it too in my neighborhood I live over in Appletree we see it at the intersections of the bike path in Appletree Point Road what we're seeing however we have not seen a tremendous spike in accidents with injury and fatality and that's the most important one for us crashes happen and they're important too nobody likes to be in one but what really drives our metrics with regard to going to deal with traffic in our city from a safety standpoint is traffic crashes with injury and or fatality we haven't seen a tremendous increase in those although this year's are higher than any year since 2017 so something has changed this year have we reached an elasticity point at which we really do need to go back to traffic enforcement because that has a role in changing driver behavior that's possible as a city we've decided that driver behavior is better addressed mostly through engineering standards we've put in a lot of different kinds of roadway obstacles tables speed humps, speed bumps we've changed the number of lanes everyone knows what challenge North Avenue was I mean I don't know maybe I shouldn't even bring it up but we well and definitely right now when it's all great the surface is uneven but by Halloween right is that what we said? so that obviously something that we've done as a city is understand that engineering is often a better opportunity to address driver behavior than enforcement but enforcement has a role and we may very well have reached a point where our enforcement is too low with regard to traffic traffic violations but at this moment I couldn't change if I wanted to I would love to park a cruiser at the intersection over on Star Farm and address that neighbor's real concerns as I said I have three officers in the city and I do have CSOs I'm building up our ranks of CSOs in fact I got a picture today of a CSO parked over there because there's a dog park and that's the vicinity he goes to but he can't enforce traffic laws so this is we made a choice as a city that we didn't want as many cops as we had and we wanted other kinds of things and we're learning that cops do a lot more than we thought they did and a lot of other roles can't do the things that cops are allowed to do so I think just to clarify I think what I'm hearing is where the disagreement lies is not necessarily with data but what data and what maybe qualifies as data was included in that report is that kind of where the disagreement is okay so I'm going to try and keep this because this is going places that I didn't want to go but so when we had the vote I think what's very important is the city council vote didn't vote to fire officers that vote did not fire officers it was to reduce the number by attrition and then the hope was to get these additional positions to as we talked about earlier attacking some of these issues in multiple ways when you talk to officers they don't have you know they want more training regarding mental health they don't have that training that a social worker has they have some training but they don't have it officers repeatedly express being at times overwhelmed by mental health incidents involving mental health issues because you tend to see the same people over and over again so it was supposed to be by attrition but all these things all these forces come to bear in our country and officers left far more than anticipated they left of their own free will not just in Burlington and other cities and towns in the state and across the country just google it it's part of the overall labor force issue but in particular there's a lot of change in the labor force and policing going on across our country the number one reason they leave is because they do not believe they have the support in the community it's the number one reason now sometimes they blame city counselors I will say again the entire city council can turn over tomorrow can have all republicans all democrats, no progressives that's not going to change the level of support in the city that's going to change the level of support in the city there's real engagement which I still believe can be done now like I'm doing now and addressing community concerns traffic stops are really loaded folks they're really really loaded because you have basic traffic stops you know someone running through a stop sign and then you have other stops that are called pretextual stops which can be a tool when trying to build a case against people who are trafficking drugs and then you have a combination thereof our city unfortunately like a lot of other cities and towns in the state had issues with racial disparities and traffic stops so you don't necessarily know who the person is if they're driving by in some cases you might if it's pretextual stop you're sitting, you're looking at a drug den whatever individual comes out probability that they might have made a buy how can I visit about their car that I might have a reason to stop them to initiate a search well if you are just only doing that with BIPOC people that's a problem if you are more likely to stop a black individual who is less likely to have contraband that's a problem and that was a problem that we were having so traffic stops it's a very interesting article it's several years old go into 7 days and google force reboot force reboot when I served on the committee to review policing policies and that article came out it was very telling to me that at that time there were a lot of concerns within the department and within officers themselves about the the trend in how traffic stops were handled and why they were stopping traffic stops it wasn't like the issue around racial disparities was being addressed it was more the fear that if someone was sued the city wouldn't have their back or the department wouldn't have their back and there were some interesting quotes from the individual officer who at the time was on the union's leadership so I definitely recommend that and please feel free to tell me if you have any questions about it because it's a very interesting article and gives you an insight to what was going on at that time so we are over our time were there any other points you wanted to make that you would feel like just really really encouraging people to watch the meetings read some of the reports even if you just read the reports but you get the information that's telling you what's going on talking to your representatives getting in contact with the governor's office we need funds in this city and we need funds immediately people's almost talking to me about graffiti I don't care about graffiti, I care about meth because that should be the top priority over meth and the other drugs we want to have a dialogue about could we have this be an ongoing part of the NPA? I would love to do that absolutely it becomes confrontational no I felt very uncomfortable it's it's an issue and I would love I have previously asked for mediation I would love it it has been very tense civilian oversight is bumpy it's a great starting point thank you both for clarifying that I didn't want that to hang in the air yeah yeah absolutely ME Grant at Burlington VT.gov ME Grant at Burlington VT.gov you can email myself Kevin Garrison tends to work in the evenings but his email address is available online Shereen Hart recently resigned her position I'm sure there will be notice on that going out thank you so much for coming and sharing thank you for having me it's been great