and commitment but then there's a second goal of slowing down the conversion of single-family homes and that also I don't believe is insurmountable but I do think that the University of Vermont needs to house more of its students and they need to do it in areas that are um undeveloped or underdeveloped and that's in the neighborhood project I hope that that will be a priority um for the city and be a priority for for all of us to work to house for UVM to house more of its students you take hundreds of students even a couple hundred of students out of the neighborhood you are going to put pressure on landlords and you're going to hold them more accountable and they there is it's a supply and demand issue and I I hope that that will be one of the um uh you know one of the goal one of the action items and I hope that that will really be something that the city and the university will work really work hard to do there is there space for it and it can't be in the same spaces where it's been for many many years it has to be in other areas of the city um and I'm a very appreciative of the fact that that goal is highlighted on page 28 of the report I hope that that will be one of the goals that we pursue um significantly thank you thank you councillor paul councillor jang and then councillor roof and then we should be ready to send this to cdnr committee for further work I will be very short but I will start by saying thank you and I think the presentation was engaging thanks thank you and thanks for laughing about that and thank you too for the work you've been doing so now my question is very specific this is called neighborhood and we know uvm is part of our neighborhood Champlain is part of the neighborhood and the approaches here you mentioned many people community work and all of that but you did not mention any of them as to how did you work with them to create this document um as you know burlington is a very high touch community and we got a lot of feedback um and a lot of drafts uh from a number of people when we I think in terms of the timeline actually some of several of the ideas and all honestly actually came from some of the walks um from some of the walks uh that some of the members of the neighborhood had had and said you know it would be great if we had something they could go do this and then after we molded through it became a question of yeah that makes a lot of sense now the question is what does that actually look like in practice um and um uh so so there's a there's a lot of I mean we you know we heard the we heard the comments and like I said I have two college age boys so I kind of get what everybody else is talking about as well uh at the same time what I can also say um is while we we listened intently and we took a lot of their advice and worded things in ways that uh puts things on the agenda the other thing I will say um at the same time is there is also been there's a lot of it's really time to focus on trying to solve it it has been hanging around for a while and it's just it's kind of time and the problem is that the the demogra you know there was one comment about the market forces but the other thing which also kind of marches inextricably ahead and and if the economy slows the market forces will change the other thing is demographic change and that's very real in these neighborhoods and I think that's something that everybody has to think about in terms of how the speed at which you have to move so other than maybe mr speed speed l sorry spider um looks like you did not talk to the leadership of uvm nor a charm plan you did we did okay but now have you looked into the housing agreement between the city and those institutions yes okay thank you that's all I needed to know thank you councillor jane councillor roof and then the mayor will have the last word great um thank you for the report and all your work as someone who's been with this project since the beginning it's exciting to see it here in an office cdnr where I'll continue to be involved that at that level I just want to note two things right first while this report focuses on near campers neighborhoods it absolutely does have an impact on the entire city and we do owe it to all of our constituents across the across the city to make sure that we move on this because the out-of-wack housing market in my neck of the woods does have that ripple effect and is absolutely a contributor to citywide affordability issues secondly without going too deep into it I do just want to rise up a little bit more in this conversation the role in conversation with the university of vermont because they have indicated that they are ready to come and have real conversations about what new development looks like on their campus and I I do think just for transparency and being open I do think the most logical place what's if they have a depth chart which I'm sure they do number one is going to be trinity campus and so while we're thinking about as this moves forward it's that's most likely where the conversation is going to start from my perspective and from my experience and so I just wanted to elevate that conversation so I look forward to the continued conversation and thank you for the report thank you council roof mr mayor thank you president right the administration is very excited this report is finally complete in in the hands of the council people not that many people may remember the roots of this now going back to when the eagles landing as it was then called now 194 st paul street project was mediated one of the out gross of that was this multi-party agreement between champlain college uvm city of berlington preservation berlington to fund this fund this study and and it is exciting that it's finally before us and thank you kevin for the hard work you put in over a long time on this and jillian thank you for what you've done to keep this uh on track and finally get it get it to this point um you know as you all know if you get me talking about housing we can be here for a while i'll try to be constrained and simply say this this yes this problem is a function of market forces but uh what needs to be understood is we shape the market the people at this table our predecessors the city leads local regulations very much define what the market is for housing here in berlington and this problem is in many ways a function of how severely we have restricted housing creation over a long period of time now this is starting to change uh you know we see the commission a report recently that that is promising you know and the it found that uh in the way at least this report uh defined housing creation we saw the creation of 67 new homes in the in the six years leading up uh to 2012 when we started working together on the housing action plan in the seven years since then we've gone from 67 homes departments being created in berlington to nearly 600 being created over the last uh last seven years and that is before some of the major um uh results of cambrian rise and city place berlington and uh others hit and so we could see that number up go uh dramatically and that doesn't even also doesn't include uh one of four st paul street so the production numbers are starting to go up uh but we we have a long way to go our work is not done that is why we are um as i mentioned in the state of the city going to have a housing summit and the date for that uh we will be promoting details on the on that event and that date will be june 11th and we'll have more details of it coming out this week and some of the strategies um that are in this report very much be part of that discussion at the summit thank you president right thank you mr mayor and thank you for that presentation and we will now we have a motion on the floor to accept the neighborhood project report and refer this to cdnr all those in favor of that motion please say aye any opposed passes unanimously thank you very much we now have item 5.06 which is a public hearing regarding the 2019 community development block grant and home proposed allocation slash proposed 29 many hats tonight so tonight we provide you with uh i believe this is a public hearing yes relative to the action plan for our use of federal community development block grant and home funds and and val russell and todd rollings are here from the community economic development office to explain a little bit more about what this is about and i'll let them speak i'm todd rollings i'm the uh acting assistant director for community housing and opportunity program um and i'm actually gonna uh val russell who is currently the acting housing program manager has done um the vast majority of the legwork on this report and plan and i'd like to turn it over to her hello i'm val russell um so we're here tonight for public hearing like david said on the draft 2019 action plan for housing and community development uh comments received on the action plan will be incorporated into the final action plan before submission and cito is also accepting public uh additional public comments through may 10th uh the action plan is required each year by the u.s. department of housing and urban development in order to receive over 1.2 million dollars in HUD funding the action plan combines the funding recommendations of the cdbg advisory board with the goals and objectives of the city's five-year consolidated plan and shows how the cdbg and home funding recommendations correspond with identified needs and action strategies um a draft 2019 action plan has been presented to cdnr uh they have accepted the draft and it is our understanding that one or more cdnr members will sponsor a resolution to approve it um and submit a final action plan at your may 13th meeting so yeah right now we're here to receive comments all right so we now need to open the public hearing close public hearing and you're also looking for comments from the council that would yes should we do that before opening the public hearing i'd suggest the public hearing and then if the council have comments you'd like to offer as well all right so let's open the public hearing is there any member of the public that would like to speak on this anyone in the public going once going twice we will close the public hearing and any questions or comments from the council councillor pine thank you mr president i'll be very quick the uh the way that burlington allocates the community development block grant funds is something that um began when uh burning standards was our mayor and it is a tradition that is not just something that we feel good about but the rest of the country looks at what we do as a method of involving the community in making these decisions and in prioritizing how to spend scarce dollars and says that's a great model so i just want to highlight that and say um you might not agree with everything they do the advisory board but in the end i think the process is inclusive and it brings people in to understand a piece of burlington that they might not otherwise understand and in doing that i think they make a great um they make hard choices but they make it's a great process i think i want to thank the citizens for doing it and i think cito staff deserve to be recognized for overseeing that process thanks thank you councillor pine anything else from the council hearing none thank you very much item 5.07 this is what you've all been waiting for this is it b-city usa councillor busher thank you so i'd like to move to uh wave the reading and adopt the resolution and after a second i'd like the floor back for just seconded by councillor hanson councillor busher thank you um little did i know when i made the comment about pollinators in plan btv that actually unbeknownst to me going on in parks and rec was um a process that had begun to make us a b-city affiliate um so i didn't know that when i made this comment earlier um but um this is really an important step um there are if indeed we adopt this resolution we would join 81 other b-city affiliates um and if you look at the communication that was carefully drafted by parks and rec by uh cindy white and dan cahill and all other people also that collaborated um what would happen is we would create there would be a web page and people could look on the web page to find recommended native plant species um and those would include wildflowers and grasses and vines and shrubs and trees and also a list of local suppliers where you could obtain those also important would be um a whole educational process regarding pest management and and a goal of reducing the use of pesticides not only reduce the use of pesticides but also if indeed you use them to use a pesticide the least toxic and also um an education about when to apply pesticides so that you'd have the least impact on pollinators um i think all of these are really important steps um you know i did speak about the fact that and it's been in the paper and in the news over and over again that the bee population the honey bee population is is dwindling and really without without bees to pollinate there goes our food supply so although some may smile at this this is really serious business and it has to do with the fact that all of all of this is about climate um change and we are living it now um the other thing that will happen and then i'll just make two other comments the other thing that's going to happen is that we will monitor on an annual basis the number of pollinator habitats that we've either created or enhanced and i think that's important also we'll track our progress we'll see if we're making advances um so um and i don't oh i do see the mayor over there um you don't have to come towards the mike but i certainly hope that city hall park will have pollinator friendly plantings not only in flowers but plants and trees and shrubs i'll be looking for those thank you thank you councillor busher there was a rumor that you would be dressed up as a bee coming up soon is that true that is a so there's obviously some truth to that rumor um anyone else wanted to comment on this mr mayor do you have anything you wanted to add no you don't um councillor yes i would just say briefly this is this is critical especially as the impacts of climate change um become more severe that we're really looking out for pollinators which are so critical to the food chain um and also just wanted to acknowledge you know past work that's been done by um former councillors colburn and dean and and busher on this this issue as well but i'm excited to to move this forward thank you councillor hansson councillor pine as the spouse of a beekeeper i would just add there are a um there are plants which get actually the insecticide is is literally applied to the germination of the seeds in stores and then you go to places that won't name any but you know the big stores they sell plants that literally have insecticides in their seeds so when you do that uh those are really harmful to bee populations and a lot of people don't know that when they buy these incredibly robust looking plants in some big stores that they take home and they bring the insecticide with them and those are actually part of the problem that's threatening the bees bees everywhere so just wanted to point that out and hopefully that will be added too so it's not just you applying insecticide it's actually where you get your plants and what plants thank you councillor pine councillor freeman yeah i just want to say i'm very excited about this um action and um i wasn't involved in bringing this forward but i'm just really excited that it's happening i there have been constituents of mine that have reached out to me about um creating a better environment for pollinators and for insects overall um i don't know how many folks know this but i believe the population of insects is um diminishing at like 2.5 percent globally every year it's an indicator of um a six major extinction um so i'm very excited about this um i think it's something that we can kind of take lightly in this moment but it's actually so essential to our ability to live sustainably sustainably and really sort of regenerate you know for for generations to come so this is really exciting and thank you for everyone who's worked on this it's exciting anyone else all right uh all those in favor of passing this resolution please say aye hi any opposed thank you very much congratulations to the sponsors of this i think you created a real buzz around this issue i know it's i know it's important i you know we can still have a sense of humor though okay item number five point i'm losing track here five point oh eight is turn the page resolution update regarding the structure of public works water resources um chapelle Spencer and mega moire so we are not going to need to go through the entire presentation obviously we had that last meeting so if you can just update us on what changes were made thank you very much uh director chapelle Spencer here with assistant director megan moire please use the microphone i mean have it close to you yes indeed thank you we've appreciated the uh april eighth council work session in the april 15th council meeting where we had a chance to detail uh much of this proposal for the reorganization of the water division of public works uh thanks to all of your good comments uh megan has worked tirelessly to incorporate them into a memo that's in your packet and revisions to the resolution in front of you megan will detail a few of those edits yes thanks again and good evening counselors um so we understood that in order to balance your clear commitment to clean water with your uh very understandable growing concern regarding rate affordability um you need more clarity and some firm timelines around what our currently planned work is um regarding reducing the impact of rate increases on income constrained low income low volume users and so to that point after speaking with a number of the counselors we've updated the resolution to include more detail in specifics um specifically uh starting in line 42 we referenced we did find the resolution uh from september 24th that was part of the issuance of the revenue bonds where this issue was first mentioned um and then starting in line 47 we detail that during the fy 20 fiscal year we're going to be looking at three different packages um with regard to the water resources rates we're going to be looking at alternative revenue sources so figuring out if there's other things that we could be charging for um that wouldn't necessarily impact the residential user uh looking at alternative rate structures including progressively priced tiers to protect access to essential water so that initial amount of water that everybody should have access to without necessarily having to make tough choices about not eating or buying medicine and then the third piece is looking at a potential affordability frameworks um and that kind of runs the gamut from discounts for certain qualifying ratepayers potentially water conservation programs if people are using less water then they won't have as high a bill um and also looking at the we've talked with a number of you about the need for potential grants and loans for upgrading upgrading service lines um we also commit to a robust stakeholder process so an initial stakeholder process where we're talking with people about what their concerns are and what their ideas are and then coming back to people at the end of that process or towards the end of that process to share with them a report on the proposed solutions um so those are all through the background and then we resolve or you all resolve to you request that we specifically provide the city council with the results of these these evaluations um as expeditiously as possible so we're gonna it's in our best interest to get this to you as soon as possible it does take time it is a lot of data and there's a lot of analysis and figuring out who's going to be paying what um but we would be bringing this to you no later than March 15th of 2020 uh for consideration well in advance of FY 21 budget conversations so you would have at least two months before we really get into the meat of the budget presentations and that was the the earliest that we could get it to you firm okay open it up to the council questions from the city council councillor busher so um i will be supporting this resolution i did supply a communication which talked more generically about concerns i have with process um and so i won't and i made a lot of those comments at the last meeting so i'm not going to repeat those um and i know there's a sigh of relief from everyone so um but um but i do want to thank the department i was one of the councillors who took who took you up on the ability to meet with you and talk through all of this and um looked for some expanded um language that would better detail what you would be looking at when you looked at at a new rate structure and i really appreciate that new language in there um one of the things that and i know you um the timeline you said you'd do it as soon as you could i i have some concern about waiting until march 15th and i just want to be clear um the council before you is made up of 12 members four of them got elected last time they're the district councillors eight are up for reelection in march now that doesn't mean that you won't have some of the same faces around the table but there's always a chance that you may not and so i would like to think that those council this council who has been immersed in this and trying to work with you on this would have a chance to look at the options and provide some additional insight so i would like to propose an amendment to this saying that rather than online 80 to change march 15th 2020 to january 31st 2020 so move councillor busher has moved what was the line again line line it's line 80 yes councillor busher has proposed an amendment on line 80 to change the march date to january 31st is there a second to that amendment seconded by councillor freeman discussion on the amendment councillor shannon thank you um i'm all for doing it sooner rather than later but uh i know that there are constraints on the staff to delivering that so i'd like to hear um what their thoughts are on that can it be done by that date uh we can certainly start the engagement we talked about a two-step engagement process uh our intent here is to move as quickly as possible we do not at this point feel comfortable that we could guarantee hitting that january 31st date given the leaves of absence we're facing given the procurement that still is underway but has not been completed and some of the robust engagement that you all want that we want to work through the community we do feel like we need that time through march thank you okay mr mayor so i really strongly object to what councillor busher is raising here i think it's not fair to the team here they have engaged for the last two weeks on this issue and come to this substantial discussion around this and it's been asserted again and again that this is the the best schedule that they can commit to making it on the uh the whole premise of the councillor busher's remark i gotta say i disagree with the it is gonna be the next council that is going to be the ones will be making the detailed decisions about uh what kind of new rate structure gets approved for f y 21 and there'll be ample time for that next council to engage this uh on the timeline this is committed to you know you have a small department that is struggling mightily to uphold its responsibilities here and is doing great work and this is unfair micromanaging i hope the council won't go along with it and we'll stick to the resolution that was agreed to and discussed at length coming until tonight thank you mr mayor councillor jane yeah i think the mayor has a very good point um especially councillor busher's amendment the reasoning behind it it's just because of the council composition will change i think if it was something more with substance we could work around it but at the same time the mayor's point to the team and also let's remember we've been moving this until today to me we were just coming and supporting it and i think we all should be happy that we at least have march 15 in there i mean reason why i won't vote for it thank you thank you councillor jane anyone else on the amendment may i speak again councillor councillor busher yes um so i i appreciate the mayor's comments um and um i think that there are there are several things i i stand behind what i said um but i do think that march 15 is after town meeting day okay there are there are i didn't expand but i can the other thing is that that's pretty late for a budget to be formed to be adopted for f y 21 because normally we have got things rolling so i believe that you know although the city council doesn't get involved the mayor and his administration get involved a lot earlier in the budget process so i'm not naive in this and i so i do take issue with the fact that there is um is a suggestion that that that there it's not self-serving it is somewhat because i do feel that this council has been involved and and would like to to has asked for this rate this tiered rate um proposal so i don't feel like that there's any flaw in that thinking but i also feel like it should be i would like to have it ready by town meeting um and i also think that it would be more timely to have it ready for consideration for the budget process thank you thank you councillor busher councillor freeman um yeah thank you i i mean i just want to say i do um support an earlier um generate the 31st deadline but um and it's not to put undue burden on the department and by any means it's just for me really trying to um weigh this aspect of um the impact that changing rates is going to have on on low-income and working people and i it's really hard to even quantify what that means for one more however many more people to be impacted by i just i don't even really know how to articulate it but it's yeah and i think councillor pine at our last meeting spoke about this about you know folks who are already just eating i think the example used was baked potatoes for a week and i think that's why i'm i'm just really pushing for as much as i don't want to i want to respect the department and the work that y'all are doing and and not put undue burden um on our city employees i it's just i don't know that's that's that's my rationale at least thank you councillor freeman councillor hanson so my question around this and this is to anyone who who might have the answer but if we did move it up i think i agree with what councillor freeman has said and i think anything we can do to get this relief in place sooner is is beneficial if we were to move it up would that allow us to change the rates sooner or would we still need to wait until the change over of of the fiscal year because that was we've had a lot of conversations um about this and i'm not 100% clear on that but could these changes be implemented um sooner um or do you know does it require the the the change in fiscal year i don't know if any one does not regret i mean there's nothing structurally you guys could change the rates today if you wanted like can you turn that microphone to it's pointed away for me thank you um i think traditionally we have changed them at the fiscal year and i guess i don't know how to convey to you all the sort of if we're i want to do this right i want to do it comprehensively i want to flip over every stir stone because we do not in my professional opinion want to be changing things every fiscal year for a number of fiscal years customers are already confused about how water rates work and so whenever we implement a storm water utility or change rates we get a slew of questions and we're going to be fundamentally changing how how we charge for water with this potentially progressive rate structure um and so i guess i want to balance the need to bring relief sooner with you know bringing a well crafted plan we don't have our consultant on board yet once we have them on board we'll be examining how quickly we can move but i'm not going to go i'm not going to go fast at the the expense of doing it well um because i think burlingtonians deserve that and i think you all deserve that um i certainly if we can i agree getting it sooner rather than later and getting it before town meeting day is to my benefit as well um changing a council is hard for departments to manage as well because you have to bring people up to speed so we will be working towards that i just i can't professionally promise that i'm going to be able to deliver on a good product for you all by the end of january i i won't i won't promise my team to doing that there's too much else going on that i can't control if nothing else unplanned happens for the next eight months then maybe i will be here on december 31st but that is not the world that i live in so you're making clear that you cannot make that promise but that you will strive to do to do that date if possible yes i think it's to all of our advantages to figure out where we're going as quickly as possible but i i i can't make the commitment professionally that i mean even even the march 15th is potentially sooner than we would have been able to bring it um and so i was comfortable committing to that as sort of my thanks yeah thank you councillor shannon then councillor paul i just want to say that this seems um really not the way we do business here we have always when we want to change in date we work with city staff to change dates to come up with realistic dates not kind of artificially imposing a date on the council floor that the staff is telling us they can't meet i i honestly can't think and i have been here a long time as has been pointed out sometimes i can't think of a case where the staff is telling us no we can't meet that date and we do it anyway it's really disrespectful so i hope the council will not proceed down this road thank you thank you councillor shannon councillor paul and councillor pine and i'll pass so we can get on councillor paul passes councillor pine and then i'm hoping that we're ready to vote yeah he would just um say that the um the spirit of what councillor busher has proposed um while i support it i feel that we've tried hard to we've worked well with staff on this issue and we've i feel like we've in good faith worked towards something over the last couple of weeks we had a post home at which i know um from a staff perspective never is ideal but um again we serve the public and we're accountable to the citizens so um but i do feel that you know our intention you know we'd like to see this as soon as possible i trust that you will push for the soonest you can possibly deliver something um and i hopefully that march 15th is actually um you know the furthest out it would go and it will happen sooner but um i i'm probably i'm not going to be supporting this because of that thank you councillor pine i think we're ready to vote all those in favor of the amendment to change the date please say i i'm sorry all those in favor of the amendment please raise your hand and those opposed that fails by a vote of 11 to 3 and now we're back to the actual resolution um and i think we've had some significant discussion so hopefully we're ready to vote on this now unless anybody else needs to speak all those in favor of the resolution now please say i i any opposed i pass this unanimously thank you very much thank you very much thank you item 5.09 is resolution increasing access to publicly available bathroom facilities councillor ruff thank you president right i move that we waive the reading adopt the resolution and after a second ask for the floor back for some brief comments councillor ruff moves it it's seconded by councillor pine councillor ruff this resolution is a continuation of a process looking into where and when we as a city are providing publicly accessible restroom facilities throughout our community i want to thank councillor pine and jang as members of the public safety committee in supporting this coming forward the council may recall a report that aimed to map out excuse me map out where our restroom infrastructure where they are and make recommendations for various types of facilities and potential locations this is not a contained issue as it relates to conversations surrounding city place memorial and city parks including city hall park most recently in short the resolution calls on the administration to do a few things first to identify locations for adding additional publicly available restroom facilities to open existing bathrooms controlled by the city especially those in our parks and a report back in june on what short and long term solutions are available to us i'll close by noting that this is not an effort to do piecemeal budgeting this is instead a result of a multi-step process that involve both city departments and community partners in the report back date for june is intentional so we can match up this exploratory process with the city's forthcoming annual budget process thank you i feel like i flushed that out pretty well and there's not going to be a big debate here because people are leaving i'm gonna so i made an error council roof so i'm actually going to suspend this for just a moment um councillor pine just one second okay so and my mistake i thought that we had motion on the table for the last item we had the amendment on the table but i thought someone had actually moved it and apparently had not been moved so we need to go back and re-vote on the last one and i'm going to recognize councillor palino thank you president right i move item 5.08 and waive the reading to adopt the resolution to update the staffing to the structure of the public works water resources division seconded by councillor paul i hope there's no discussion okay we'll try that again my mistake i apologize for screwing that up all those in favor please say aye any opposed and that now has passed thank you and now we're back on council roof the same speech again don't give the same don't give the same speech again wasn't right i moved that way okay y'all sat it's been moved second moved and seconded any further discussion on this item okay we're ready for the vote all those in favor of this resolution please say aye aye any opposed that passes unanimously thank you council roof item 5.10 is a special event outdoor entertainment permit application this was consent agenda item 4.05 it was removed by councillor busher i believe and so i'll recognize uh councillor roof to move this laptop just broke sorry about that i will move 5.10 approval of a special event outdoor entertainment permit application for every sat every saturday may 12 2019 to october 12 2019 for bca 8am to 3pm lower block of church street bca summer artist market thank you councillor roof seconded by councillor tracy discussion councillor busher the only thank you president right the only reason i removed it was that i had asked um councillor roof about um the conflict with the jazz festival because of that one week when they have their tents up in lower church street and um and so that's why i removed it but he did get a communication from dorian craft so i don't know whether he wants to just speak briefly to that and that's the end of it i'll read directly directly from a communication from dorian craft who wasn't able to be here but i did ask her to provide a comment uh in short it reads the bca team and jazz are working very collaboratively on how we make the jazz and the the artist market successful this year chelsea the manager of jazz is excited about having the market with jazz alongside jazz and we too as are we rather there is no conflict only goodwill all right thank you councillor roof also councillor busher all right all those in favour please say aye opposed that passes unanimously thank you very much we're moving on to item number six which is committee reports any committee chair that would like to report on committee activity councillor tracy so as we talked about with the uh cswd item the transportation energy utilities committee will be meeting on may 7th at 5 30 down at dpw um in addition to the cswd item i have also asked that we discuss the um green mountain transit schedules and the college street shuttle issue that we heard about today uh wanting to get more information on um how that plan is proceeding as well as issues of fare uh charging on the college street issue on the college street route and then um if other councillor also wanting to see the committee engage in the conversation about uh the work that we'd like to do so if councillors on that committee have that work please let us know uh what you're interested in either putting on the agenda or think about what you might want to address in other agendas thank you thank you councillor tracy councillor busher so yes um as acting chair of ordinance for one item only we will be meeting on may 7th 2019 at 5 30 location to be confirmed to deal with z a 19-07 which is commercial uses elm thank you councillor busher other committee chairs council councillor shannon thank you uh thank you the PAC committee will be meeting on may 8th at 5 30 uh location to be determined and it'll be our first organizational meeting some review of uh the items that are in committee now and planning for uh what the committee wants to take up for the year thank you councillor shannon other committee chairs hearing none we'll conclude item number eight excuse me number six moved item seven which is city councillors on general city affairs uh president right and we need a motion and it's a 10 30 magic time and so councillor busher would you like to make a motion i'll move to complete the agenda do it um what is it to suspend our rules and the rules excuse me and complete our agenda councillor busher has moved that we suspend our rules and complete the agenda this needs a requires a two-thirds vote in favor all those in favor of suspending the our agenda expending suspending our rules and completing the agenda i'm having as much trouble as you were with that please say aye aye any opposed that passes and we will continue seconded i'll second if it wasn't okay did i miss that just answer shit okay okay all all those in favor aye any opposed we have suspended the rules and we are on to item number seven general city affairs councillors councillor shannon uh thank you councillor pine and i had the pleasure of meeting with a delegation of mayors and city councillors from jordan um and it was a very interesting conversation and one of the things that came up was uh they have a lot of refugees from syria in jordan and as we discussed further it um i asked them how many refugees they had and they said it's 110 of the population and at first we thought that they meant it was like a 10 increase in their population but in fact what he means is there are more refugees in their community than there are uh citizens and i asked them where do they all live do they live on the street how do you accommodate that many people as our country country is so worried um about the refugees that that we have taken in and uh and concerns that refugees are going to be bust to burlington which we have said we we welcome them i think um and they said well we consider them our arab brothers and sisters and we take them into our homes and i thought that that was just you know it it was just a really profound moment for me uh and made me reflect on why we have these you know why we have sister city relationships and um the council on world affairs and having these kind of exchanges really are meaningful to us um and there were a woman also there were translators involved in our discussions uh and one of the women in the group asked if as a woman sometimes do i feel that sometimes i'm not listened to because i'm a woman and the translator translated the question and then there was a lot of conversation in a language that i don't understand um and then the translator translated what he was saying to her which was that um she was talking too much and that she shouldn't she shouldn't ask so many questions um i believe it was her first question and there was another man who had been talking quite a lot uh but they was also interesting that they have quotas for women on their council uh but that it's becoming more successful so that women are starting to win seats beyond the quotas that are that are you know required for for women so they do feel like they are making some progress on that but i would encourage counselors to take advantage of these opportunities that we have to to meet with um foreign government officials because it is it's it's pretty amazing we learn a lot also i want to um again uh just remind people about the 2030 district meeting which is um about uh making our buildings more efficient and addressing climate change in that way um in ways that are uh economically effective and and market driven even um but can make a real difference and the meeting is at 5 30 on monday at i'm sorry on wednesday may first this wednesday um and i'm sorry i need to look up main street landing that's where it is thanks thank you councillor shannon councillor busher um yes i i guess i need the mayor to educate me on a couple of things one is the college street shuttle this seemed to catch me off guard that i thought we partnered with uvm to help pay for that free shuttle so i was confused by this conversation and um maybe i i need someone to point me in the direction to get educated about what's going on because this was a big surprise to me um the second thing is um is it mr glasberg is is the person that interfaces with the with the town center and um if he's overseeing that maybe he should be reporting to us on a regular basis that's a question i once again have for the administration i'm not sure that's the right thing to do but it seemed like um they were meeting with him and maybe we should get information from him also so those are two questions for the mayor to ponder or point me in some direction to get to get answers to the last thing is i was in boston last week and they were having a pilot of e scooters and the mayor of boston came on tv and said no way know how not yet because of safety issues with e scooters so i just wanted to report that to everybody here thank you thank you councillor busher and the mayor can either respond in his final comments or he can talk to you wait i didn't mean yes yeah i know you don't any other councillor on general city affairs councillor freeman i just wanted to announce quickly that we've organized for the ward two and three npa on may ninth uh thursday may ninth to have a section regarding public safety and have invited the chief of police and um our like liaison from the community justice center um there were folks that had questions about the uh shootings that had occurred in the neighborhood and just wanted to make sure that the public knew that we would be having that forum and it's it would be a good place to come and um be part of that discussion and address concerns thank you councillor freeman any other city councillor hearing none we will conclude that item and item eight i have no announcement to make at this time so i'm going to move ahead to mr mayor general affairs take us home mr mayor great thank you president right um uh so i wanted to note um a couple um milestones uh that that i think the council the public should be aware of and uh we did put out a press release on this um but i encourage people who haven't checked it out to go to the mayor's page and see it is uh the arborist has committed the city's arborist has committed to a plan where this year 360 new street trees will be um planted which is really an impressive total when you consider that um at least there we haven't gone back decades and decades but you know a big year a few years ago was considered to be about 140 150 trees in a year um so this is a big jump from that uh i think it's really uh interesting and exciting the uh the way in which um uh vj comai the new arborist is bringing new methods and and new technologies um to bear to make this possible um the um one of the methods that uh the public i think should be aware of is using volunteers uh to do the tree planting we had the first um of these uh out in a new north end community this past weekend it was a community we started with because uh there's a real need to increase the number of street trees being planted because we are expecting the emerald ash borer to be hitting berlington in the coming years and that's going to have likely a devastating impact on our ash tree population this neighborhood is at least in the the five blocks that the volunteers were focused on is nearly a hundred percent ash trees on on the street but there will be additional volunteer efforts throughout the season into the fall we'll be planting in the fall as well and you can find more information about that um in the in the release we put out last week another you know notable uh milestone that's been in the news recently and that i think speaks to some of the conversations we had here tonight is um that uh and this was a surprise to me that we were doing as well as on this as we were berlington has been named the fourth city in the country per capita in terms of solar installation um which is uh you know uh something that is really come about um we have very little solar in 2011 and we have increased the amount 16 times since then and um the uh berlington is unique um in northeast cities making it high onto that list and i think it really speaks to the efforts of the berlington election department has spearheaded with their solar shopper efforts with their partnerships with the schools and the university and the airport and um we're gonna we're gonna as you know we'll be talking more about this as we come back with the the roadmap to get to net zero but um uh just thought this would be some of the public and then the council would want to be be clear on um is uh an interesting sign of the progress we're making together um looking ahead this weekend is maybe the best weekend of the year in berlington we will have little league opening day i'm gonna make it to all three leagues if i can or the gbgsl soccer league starts up this weekend as well it's also a green up day on saturday um information uh is available through the parks and rec on some details about how you can get involved in the green up day activities this weekend and then we're looking ahead one further uh week another great parks event is uh kids day coming up on may 11th and uh hope uh hope to see everyone um out there uh for that great tradition as well um i think uh with that um um president right i'll turn it back to you i'm not talking to you thank you mr mayor uh i think we're ready to adjourn is there a move to adjourn so moved council roof seconded by councilor freeman all those in favor please say aye any opposed we are adjourned


I first ventured beyond the confines of American Unitarian Universalism in 1999 when the congregation I served in Appleton became a partner with the Transylvanian Church. A dozen years later, we added a partnership with a UU church in a village of mostly subsistence farmers in the Philippines. My engagement with our global faith deepened from 2016 to 2020 when I served as Executive Director of the Unitarian Universalist Partner Church Council. This organization supports partnerships across the world, including FUSs with Najoyta. I have learned so much about our global faith and partnership over these 22 years. I have learned a lot about myself and about my own individual faith. Another treasured part of partnership experience for me has been the opportunity to develop friendships across the world. I'm so fortunate to have Unitarian and Unitarian Universalist friends from Colombia to Transylvania to Northeast India, the Philippines, and Indonesia. And I feel like I have good friends in Najoyta, too, after a brief but lovely visit there in 2018. The high point for me in that visit was staying up until the wee hours talking with Reverend Leventa and Yutka as they graciously opened their home to me. So here's some of what I've learned in partnership over the years. In Transylvania, I learned a lot about the most important roots of our faith. Our faith goes back there over 450 years. I'm reminded by my interactions with Transylvania that our faith is not some new fad, even something that goes back a couple hundred years in this country. Its deepest roots are in the soil of Transylvania. In the Appleton Congregations partnership with the Philippines Congregation, I learned also about the breadth and width of our faith. Experiencing such a vibrant UU faith there made me realize that we were probably selling the possibility short in Appleton for our congregation. We too often bought into the common American UU delusion that our faith really works well for highly educated middle and upper class, mostly white people and maybe not so well for other people. If our faith can fly high in a Philippines village of mostly subsistence farmers, maybe we learned there would be more interest in Appleton than we were thinking. Maybe there's more potential in Madison too. Another thing I've learned is that American Unitarian Universalism is not the pinnacle of our global faith. Too many of us here embrace what I have come to call spiritual Darwinism. Like social Darwinism, it's a misinterpretation of Darwin's theories. Spiritual Darwinism is the idea that our Unitarian Universalist global faith is an evolutionary pyramid. And guess what? We're at the top, of course, in Transylvania. This is often translated into viewing our partners as spiritually primitive. We believe that over time, you know, they'll outgrow those Christian superstitions. We don't really take their faith seriously. We don't imagine that we might actually learn something from their Unitarian faith that will impact and change our faith here. A story to illustrate. I'd say about two-thirds of the congregation I served in Appleton were former Catholics. A number of them had unresolved, powerful issues with their Catholic upbringing. As I shared at the Christmas Eve vigil here last December, the minister of the partner church visited one Christmas and I invited him to lead a Transylvanian style communion service at one of our Christmas Eve services. With four services that day, I figured the people who might somehow be offended by a Transylvanian Unitarian Christian communion service would simply go to another service. To my surprise, a lot of former Catholics with issues showed up for that communion service. Many said they came out of curiosity. I had a sense that a few came with the expectation, perhaps even the hope that they would be offended. None of them planned to participate. Several were kind of sitting like this. Well much of the Transylvanian Unitarian communion service looks and feels like a traditional Christian communion service. But as I said in the Christmas Eve vigil here, it is thoroughly Unitarian in its theology. It focuses on remembering Jesus' teachings especially about love and honoring him as a person, not as a divinity. It is completely symbolic. Well for some of the Catholics that night in Appleton, the juxtaposition of a familiar ritual with a very different theology just broke something open in them. Most of them decided to participate. Many came forward with tears streaming down their face. The Transylvanian communion ritual unexpectedly brought them a moment of healing and wholeness. You see encountering a distinctly different version of our UU faith can cause us to see truths about our faith, about ourselves that we might have missed. Our partners have gifts for us too. Our global faith is not an evolutionary pyramid with us at the top. Another thing I've learned is that partnership is not about charity. And that's true even when there's a massive disparity in wealth, even when we often send money to our partners. And so it's not about North American Unitarian Universalists saving Transylvanian Unitarians and others with our largesse. Transylvanian Unitarians saved their own faith as it came out of the difficult years of Communism. I'm not saying our money didn't help. I'm sure it's helped. I'm sure folks in Nagyota would tell you that. But that is not the point of partnership. Ask your partners why they're in the partnership and they're going to talk about relationship, not money. They'll talk about sharing our lives and our faith, our struggles and our dreams and most of all our love with each other. Partnership is about mutual relationship. My heart broke a couple years ago in my partner church council work when I talked to the leader of a long time partnership here in the United States. I talked to that leader because they had decided to quit the partnership. I asked her why, her answer because they don't need us anymore. So for this partnership the fact that their partners in Transylvania became more financially self-sufficient was bad.  Another thing I've learned is that disagreements between partners is okay. An example, in 2017 the Hungarian Unitarian Church Synod, that's the governing body of the Hungarian Unitarian Church in Hungary and Transylvania, approved a statement affirming their state definitions of marriage as being between one man and one woman. And the statement passed by more than 85%. We North American Unitarian Universalists are in a different place on this issue. So why did the Hungarian Unitarian Church Synod choose to make this statement? Some Transylvanian Unitarians have told me that this simply is where the vast majority of Unitarians in Transylvania and Hungary are in their beliefs. And I would point out not all that different from where most American Unitarian Universalists were in the 1970s and even 80s. Other Transylvanian Unitarians told me that the vote was about alignment with the Hungarian government which strongly opposes marriage equality and LGBTQ inclusion. Since Transylvania was given to Romania in the treaty that ended World War I, ethnic Hungarians have treasured their identity and often been persecuted for it. The current government in Hungary has taken remarkable steps to connect with and support ethnic Hungarians in Romania, including by offering citizenship. Others have told me there that as an oft oppressed minority, they avoid anything that separates them from other ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania, most of whom are Reformed or Catholic. And the Reformed and the Catholic Churches both have strong stands against marriage equality. Still others have told me that the Synod vote was all about money. The Hungarian government is giving millions and millions of dollars every year to the Transylvanian Unitarian Church and other ethnic Hungarian institutions in Transylvania. And honestly this is far more than American partners have ever given. With good reason, folks there believed that this money spigot might be turned off if the Synod did not take this step. While I was a part of a group of global Unitarian Universalist leaders who wrote a public statement of concern about this decision of the Hungarian Unitarian Church. President Susan Frederick Gray of our UU Association in the United States and leaders of the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists signed the statement. So why did we voice our concern? Well not because we had the authority to tell the Hungarian Church what to do. We don't have that authority. We don't want that authority. Rather, we were motivated by concern for LGBTQ people in the Hungarian Unitarian Church and because some LGBTQ allies there asked us to speak up. We were also motivated by a vision of partnership that includes sharing deeply with one another including when we have a disagreement. Too often we've avoided talking with our partners about anything where there's even a whiff of disagreement and so we end up talking about the weather and our families and our partnerships never get deeper. So I encourage American Unitarian Universalist partners neither to ignore the marriage equality issue or other differences nor to try to change our partners overseas. Instead, let's share openly our point of view and let's listen to theirs and let's offer support and solace to those who are fighting for change. And finally, I have learned a lot in partnership about commitment and fidelity. Partnership spanning generations that survives and thrives can only happen if both partners are deeply committed and faithful. Kelly's message for all ages makes a great point of how in some ways partnership is like a marriage. We Americans are not always very good at the spiritual practices of commitment and fidelity. It's really important for us to know that there was an earlier movement of partnership between U.S. and Transylvanian churches in the 1920s and 1930s. There were actually over 120 partnerships in those days, including I believe First Unitarian Society. What happened to those partnerships? Well with very few exceptions, the American partners lost interest and moved on. Being on opposite sides in World War II did not help. We moved on, and then we forgot about those partnerships. So I haven't found anyone here who knows the location of FUS's partnership in that first movement. We need to understand that whoever that partner was in Transylvania, they do remember, even though it's 100 years later, that they were partnered with FUS. If our partners in Najoyta had a partner in that period, I bet they remember who it is. And surely they remember the story about how American Unitarian Universalists moved on from partnership in the 1930s and 40s. I have a sense that many Transylvanian partners have been wondering for 30 years when we'll lose interest and move on. So here's another couple of times where my heart broke in my UU partnership, partner church council work. One was when a new minister called me up and new minister of a long time partner here in the U.S. and said, you know, partnership's not my thing, I'm going to try to kill it. A second one was when a U.S. partner said, we're ready to move on from our partner in Transylvania. Could we get one in Cuba? Yeah, they got bored and they were looking at the newest shiny object out there. But failures of commitment and fidelity. So I'm going to close with several suggestions for FUS in its partnership with Najoyta. Always remember that your partnership is about mutual relationship, not charity. When you give money, give it and let go. Let your partners decide how to use that money rather than having you tell them how you think they should use it. Commit yourself to making travel financially accessible. Every trip you take should include scholarship money so that FUS people who can't afford to go can be part of the trip. And help your partners come here. Most Transylvanians don't earn enough money to come to the United States even once in their lifetimes. So this is an excellent use of partnership money. Take ways to get youth and young adults involved in your partnership. You should not take a trip without bringing along youth and young adults and this should be a focal point of your scholarship efforts. More people need to get involved in the partnership here. I am so grateful to Margie and Pete Marion, Ethel Bureau, George and Alexis Gill, Polly Kelbs, Eva Wright, Rita Horvath and Reverend Kelly for their decades of incredible loyalty and commitment to this partnership. But it cannot rest only on them. If it does, the partnership will die. These dedicated folks have been carrying the water for FUS and its partnership for a long time and they're going to welcome more people to get involved with open arms and hearts. My dream of partnership teams and congregations is that there's a mix of youth and young adults, middle-aged adults, older adults and a steady influx of new people. If we were having this service in person here in the atrium, at this point I would do an altar call. Yes, I would call those forward in this congregation who want to get involved in the partnership in any way. Alas, we're virtual, can't do an altar call so here's the next best thing. Let Reverend Kelly or let me know and we will connect you with the partnership team. And then finally, be faithful in your partnership. It won't last another decade, let alone 30 years, if there is not deep, widespread commitment. First Unitarian Society in Nagyoyte have a strong partnership. May you renew and deepen your commitment to your life-giving, faith-giving partnership with your spiritual kinfolk in Nagyoyte. May it be so.


We're going to talk about reversing the transformation, and basically in this talk, I will try to present the results of decades of research in 40 minutes. So I'll try for simplicity and clarity, but this may not be achievable. I have provided links to these slides, and within this slide, there are other links to more detailed explanations of some of the things that I will be talking about. So without further ado, let's begin. So there are always more than one way of looking at things. And in fact, I would like to say that there are 7 billion different perspectives on the world that we live in. Objectivity is the greatest myth that we have been educated to believe in, that there is a way to look at the world, which is free from all subjective biases. There are no objective points of view. And since that's the case, the next best thing is the ability to look at multiple perspectives on the world we live in. And so a paradigm is one framework for looking at the world, and it's very helpful for our self-liberation to be able to look at radically different perspectives from the one that we have. So I'm going to present a non-euroscentric view of the world in. So I'm going to talk about the great transformation, which took place from a traditional Christianity-based society to secular modern society. Economics was a branch of moral philosophy, and Adam Smith was a moral philosopher, and this morality was grounded in Christianity, and that was called the scholastic-astic school. The great transformation turned economics into objective science on par with physics, and with nothing to do with morality on the surface. The non-euroscentric view that I will describe will be easily understood by pre-modern Europeans, but would be almost incomprehensible to secular modern people.  So we all know that the current state of planet is really very bad, and I just don't need to count the list of horrors that we are seeing all around. So one of the reasons for this is the myth of objectivity, the idea that there is a collection of facts which is true, and in fact I have access to this, and nobody else. So people who agree with me, they are also factual and rational, and anybody who doesn't agree just doesn't have access to the facts and is also irrational. So once he realized that there are no facts, there are only subjectivities, this kind of arrogance, epistemic arrogance, would not be possible. So I read a long time ago, and I tried to find this quote, but I couldn't, that our ability to learn the truth is limited by our courage. When I first read this, this struck me as very strange, because I also trained in the Western intellectual tradition. So I was taught to believe that truth depends on facts and logic, and not in the feelings of our hearts. But courage is very much a quality of the heart. So how can we understand this apparent paradox? When people trained in the binary logic of true, false, it's very hard to understand what courage has got to do with truth. We have been trained to believe in a model of knowledge whereby we learn something, and then we learn more and more and more, and ultimately become all knowledgeable, or as knowledgeable as we are going to get. But suppose this model is wrong. Suppose that, like Kuhn discovered, science precedes in revolutions. We have one framework, one idea, one paradigm about the world. Then we throw it away and we start all over again, when a completely new and different paradigm, like the shift from Ptolemaic to the heliocentric to the Copernican model. So this is actually how courage matters in the sense that personally, when I found that the frameworks that I had used to analyze the world I live in were wrong, because they had led me to be miserable. So I said that I have to abandon these and start rethinking how to live from scratch. And at that point, I had to say that if I abandon everything, then I know nothing. Everything that I have believed up till now has proven false. So that was when lyrics of Paul Simon, I have come to doubt. All that I once held was true. They became very significant. And so you see, I have come to doubt. All that I once held is true. So in the mainstream European intellectual tradition, and we are all part of this tradition, the essence of truth was lost. Now there are exceptions to this everywhere, even within the European tradition and in the East as well. The spirit of humanity shines through. And our intuitive and heartfelt connection to truth is the same for all of humanity. No differences between East and West there. So we're going to look for what was lost on the path to modernity. Unfortunately, this thing that was lost cannot be found under the light of reason and logic and facts, which is what knowledge is confined to. But so the key thing that matters is that the most important questions in life became meaningless. What does that mean? What is the meaning of life? Who am I? What are the hidden potentials within my soul? What should I be doing with this extremely short and precious life that I have been given? So in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, deep thought thing is about the ultimate question and comes up with the answer 42. So this is just a reflection of the tendency that we have been trained to believe that these deep questions are unimportant, are meaningless, and not worth wondering because they have no answers. So there are even deeper questions which arise. How did these questions become meaningless? It's not true that they were always treated as jokes. Rather, people paid very serious attention to them and they were major disputes. So we need to relearn what are important because we have been trained to believe that they are irrelevant and we have to learn to find the answers. And ultimately also, how does this relate to the great transformation? Well, one aspect of the great transformation was the loss of meaning of life. So where do we look for the answers? How did this happen? Well, this is an unexpected source for the problems we face today. Who would think that philosophy has anything to do with so? Actually, there were multiple wrong turns which took place in the western philosophical tradition. And I've discussed these at length elsewhere. And I won't take the time to discuss it here. But the story is a bit confused because there are three kinds of philosophy. There's high-brow philosophy in which the big questions continue to be discussed, but they are no longer the center stage of philosophy. And then there is middle-brow philosophy, which is philosopher's exchange to public. But what really matters is the folk philosophy, which is how the philosophy affects the common people. And the common people include students who are getting PhDs in economics because they are ignorant as philosophically as I was. So this folk philosophy is extremely important and highly neglected when I say that people have been misled by logical positivism. A philosopher, as I know, that philosophy has been dead for 50 years, nobody believes in it anymore. That may be true at high-brow and partly true at middle-brow, but in folk philosophy, positivism is very much alive and well. There's a very interesting article in Wikipedia which says that if you take any article at all in Wikipedia and you click on the first link and you keep doing that, ultimately you end up with the article which is classified as philosophy. So what this shows is that all human knowledge is founded on a philosophical basis. And so what I want to say about this, there are three things that I want to say in this slide. One is that all knowledge has philosophical foundations. Two is that very people are aware of this. And the third is that massive confusion is caused by failure to distinguish between the three levels of philosophy. So some of the critical errors which took place in the development of Western philosophy was dualism, the split between the mind and the body. Now we all know that I think, and by thinking I can affect the motion of my body, but philosophers deny this because they say, well, how can mind, thought, act on the body, everything must be subject to natural law. And this natural law leads to the idea of determinism, again, which is vastly in conflict with our personal experience. We all experience the reveal as a map, a part of our lives. But philosophers tell us that no, this is an illusion. And then this positivism that knowledge comes from facts and logic, science is built on facts and logic, and this is the only valid type of knowledge. And the real tragedy of this is the exclusion of the heart and souls, our emotion, and our spiritual experiences don't provide us with knowledge at all. So this exclusion of subjectivity has been a tremendous loss. So instead, you can gather all of this by confining attention to logical positivism, which sort of encapsulates all of the errors that I have been talking about. And we can summarize it as this, the world that we see consists of appearances, which are observed, which are observable. And then there is the hidden reality, which generates these appearances. So in economics, the paradigm, diplomatic example for this is the behavior of human beings. Economics, the critical issue is the, we see, we observe actions of human beings, but we don't know what's inside their hearts, what motivates them.  Just focus on what you can see, how they act. This is encapsulated in revealed preference theory. You can look at the choices, don't worry about what heart. And this is a big mistake. So the social sciences, we are used to thinking, believing that social sciences go back a long time. Economics goes back to Adam Smith. But this is not true. Modern economics and the social sciences were born in the early 20th century, on the 20th century, on the basis of a double mistake. One was a misunderstanding of what sciences that is captured by logical positivism. Logical positivism was actually an attempt to understand and explain what sciences, but it fails miserably at this. And then, since the misconception was born, again, the only valid type of knowledge is scientific knowledge. So the attempt was made to cast all of the humanities to study, restudy it via the scientific method. And this is what led to the name of social science. And so the idea that we can apply scientific method to the study of human societies, this has been a disaster. And this is the disaster that we are currently living through. So the modern economics was born in the 1930s with Lionel Rapp, Robbins in the scarcity definition. And Sam Wilson gave a definitive shape in his book. He's the founder of modern economics. And basically, the transition which was made was a shift. Economics was previously as contributes to human welfare. The idea of human welfare is an internal idea, which has to do with our hearts and souls. So this was discarded. And only the observable choices were taken into account. And that's where the scarcity definition came in. So before scarcity, we could distinguish between needs and wants. So we could distinguish between a hungry man looking for bread and a millionaire looking for a car. But after scarcity, both of these are just demands. And if the billionaire has the money to fulfill his demand, then it's efficient to fulfill that and leave a billion people hungry because they don't have the money. There are no moral judgments involved. This is just the way the system works. So what I would like to say is that this was a big mistake. Economics cannot be a branch of natural science. It has to be and it remains a branch of moral philosophy. But the only problem is that morality has been hidden within mathematics. So the issue is to find out how moral judgments are hidden within mathematics. So one of the important books which helps us in this regard is a philosophy that facts and values are inextricably entangled. I like this phraseology. So there's a book which I have pictured Economic Analysis by Hausman and McPherson, which explains how all of economics, morality, moral judgments permeate all of economics and policy. Single specific example of this is scarcity, the idea that the scarcity is foundation of modern economics. This idea is based on three normative judgments. One of them is the private property idea, that idea that what I have belongs exclusively to me and I have the right to do with it. What I please and I have no, the society has no rights over me in terms of how I use my property. All of these are moral ideas and there are, most societies don't accept these ideas. The second one I've already mentioned and wants its distinction, tastes are exogenous, this also leads to scarcity and then the strict discipline boundaries. So ignoring politics and psychology, again, this is important to, in order to make scarcity the central notion of economics. So, the point here being that morality is embedded in economics but it is hidden and it pretends to be objective but it's actually built on moral foundations which are toxic. So how did this come to be? Again, it's useful to make a brief excursion history. There were centuries of devastating religious wars between Protestants and Catholics and this led, this actually personally impacted the lives of the Enlightenment philosophers, some of whom were under threat of excommunication and all of them suffered from the religious wars in some way or the other. So basically they started, they started searching for a tolerant society philosophy and they rejected Christianity as a basis for building society which was very sound in the sense that that was their experience. And so, but having rejected Christianity, you're at a loss because all that you know has been rejected and so you have to start rebuilding knowledge from it. And so what happened was that they jumped on to the idea that science is the only producer of valid knowledge and we should only trust what we can see and touch and we should not trust our experience and our hearts because these testify to a greater reality. So our hearts deceive us. So that's why we have been trained to ignore our hearts and so believe models which just seem absurd to us. We have learned to believe in models which are absurd and so basically sinitism is the faith in the ability of science to answer all important questions. But of course, science cannot answer the questions about meaning of life. So the, what was the impact on modern economics? It led to an absurd theory of human behavior, the home economics who, who maximizes pleasure obtained from goods and services. Nobody does that in the, on the whole planet, whole planet. So the question is, how are we trained? How are we deceived into believing this? And of course, if you are doing social science, then the fundamental unit of behavior is the human being. And so, you know, if you have a terrible theory for behavior for human beings, then you will have a bad theory of society. And then the second problem is the absurd idea that economic laws are like the laws of physics. This again comes from the idea of social science. Economic laws to the extent there are any place with culture and society with social norms. And this is so easy to prove that it's really hardly a question. Nonetheless, the idea that economics of the science suggests that there are economic laws which can be fine, which are invariant to time and place, and same across all societies. So the laws for Bolivia and Brazil, Brazil, and the laws, economic laws in the Middle Ages are the same as the laws for modern society. It's just absurd. And again, the third absurd idea, which is on which modern economics is built, is the idea that economics can be studied in isolation from politics, from society, from geography. This is a deeply flawed methodology, which is the basis of modern economics. And I have written a paper about how it happened that we were able to put forth models which should just be laughed at instead of debated seriously. And this has to do with again, Kant tells us about the nuamina, which is the unobservable reality and the phenomena, which is what we can observe. And from what we observe, we try to deduce what is going on in the hidden reality. So that's our mental models of reality. Prior to Kant, it was thought that a good model tells us what's happening in the real world. So the standard for judgment for a good model is that it matches the hidden reality. But what Kant said was that this is an impossible task because you never know what is unobservable. So we should abandon this. Instead, what he said was that that is a hopeless project. So let's do something else. Instead of looking for a match between our mental models and the hidden reality, let's try to figure out how our mental models are created from the observable data and from the prior knowledge that we have. So this was basically the abandonment of the attempt to find out what is going on inside human beings. So if we talk in terms of methodology, there was a shift from surrogates to substitute models in the terminology of one of the philosophers of science. So a surrogate model is a substitute for reality. And it is judged by seeing how well it works as a substitute in the sense of how well it matches reality. But a substitute model is just ignores reality completely and presents us with an alternative. So Lucas says that anthropologists study real societies but we economists simply make up artificial societies which are populated by robots and we study these societies. The robots are omega and we make our deductions about the real world economics by studying a world which was filled with robots without any feelings. And we discuss what economic policy would be like. This is exactly what the economists do today. The models are models of a soulless and heartless world. And these are what he used to decide what economic policies we should follow. So this method all important models will have wildly inaccurate assumptions because there is no match for reality is no longer a relevant criteria. And the consequence of this is Bob Solo says that Lucas model is lunatic asylum class. He literally says that and engaging it with it means seriously instead I just laugh at it. But Solo criticizes Lucas's model but not the methodology which was used in producing models. So Solo himself produces a lot of crazy models but he thinks that they are reasonable and the ones that Lucas uses are not reasonable. But they are all crazy models. They have no match. They are all crazy models. They have no match to the real world and they don't even try to achieve this. So instead of trying to find the good models, some models are bad and some model good, we say that the whole methodology is bad and we need to go back. The idea came up some time ago that reality is so complex that no model can capture it. And so all models are false. This is true. Nonetheless, the effort to try to match reality and to simplify it is useful but this idea was abandoned. And so you can make literally just too much arbitrarily, arbitrarily. We can say that okay, there are gremlins behind the scenes and they do everything and they are not subject to laws. So economists came up with a protocol which was optimization and equilibrium. So any model which has optimization and equilibrium qualifies as a model and then they are judged on their match to something or the other. So within this methodology, there is no fix that is possible to economic theory at all. So the alternative is to go back to a qualitative and historical methodology. This was actually originated by Ibn Khaldun. And one of the greatest masters of this methodology is Pulani. This methodology has now been forgotten. So if you want to go back and I think that that's one of the things we need to when you say reversing the great transformation, one of the things involved in this is to change the methodology that we use for social science. Social science tells us how we should build society and it's completely rotten to the core. So we need to rebuild all of the social sciences from scratch and we need to rebuild it using a historical and qualitative methodology. But nobody knows how to do that anymore because this methodology has been lost and forgotten. So it's a useful place to start. And there are three principles that I've listed here. One is that theories are born as an attempt to understand history and then theories are used to generate policies, how to respond to that history. So they shape history on this how theories shape and are shaped by history. So basically the interaction between theories and history is necessary. You can't understand a theory outside its historical context. So when we study Keynesian economics, we can't understand what Keynesian economics is without studying the Great Depression, without studying the Great Depression because Keynesian economics was a response to the Great Depression. So modern methodology, textbooks teach Keynesian economics, but they don't mention the Great Depression. And so basically it's impossible, the task that is being done. A second principle is that economics is based on methodological individualism, but actually it is groups, communities, shared ideas, common visions, which change history. So we need to look at the group level, meso economics instead of microeconomics. And finally, we need to consider the process of social change unfolds in all dimensions simultaneously, political, economic, environmental, so we need to study them together. You can't study economics in isolation. So the goal of Polani, goal of Ibn Khaldun was to study the process of social change. Note how this is different from studying equilibrium. There are no equilibrium. Our society, if you just open your eyes from the textbook, the world is continuously changing. There are no equilibrium to be found. So the thing, studying equilibrium is studying a hopelessly useless concept. Instead, we should try to learn if there is any system, any patterns in the process of social change. So some of the things that Polani talks about, Polani talks about how we go about studying social change. He says that there's usually a trigger for social change, some exogenous event, like the Great Depression. Then people try to understand this change which is occurring in before their eyes and they develop theories to understand the change. So many different theories are developed by many different classes and these theories have multiple functions. They define goals for a particular class of people. They define identities. They create alliances. They build communities. They provide, the theories allow us to create a policy response. But there's also another important function of theories that they have to have a broad appeal because if you want to enact policy, so theories are also designed to appeal to a broad class, which means that they hide their class orientation. Like let's say fear is very beneficial to the wealthy because it says we can do whatever we want with that wealth. But it is presented as a policy which is fair to all because it says everybody can do whatever they like. And this doesn't, this seems to be fair, but it's actually very beneficial to the wealthy and very harmful to the people. So the theories have to make appeal to a broad class of people. So coming back to real-world economics, what Polanyi says about the great transformation is that the driver of the change was the industrial revolution. The invention of big, the invention of big machines is what he calls it. So once the big machines came into existence, then they led to excess production. Now the excess production is a problem because pre-modern society, people pride self-sufficiency. So if you are self-sufficient, you don't want to produce more. Why produce more than what you need? And you don't want to consume more than what you already have. So what you need to do is to create desire in consumers to have more. Also, you need to create money because if you sell a lot of useless stuff to people, so you create the stoken money which enables you to get stuff in the future. And of course, this money has to command social consensus to be useful. So a whole set of mechanisms has to be created to give value to money and to enable it to be used as a universal token of purchasing power. So there are three basic artificial commodities which Polanyi mentions. One of them is money, and the other two are money, and the other two are land and labor. So if we organize production, we have to use labor and we have to use land as factors of production. But these are not commodities in the sense that they are not produced by the market. They are given to us beforehand. And so this commodification caused the capitalism by commodifying land and labor by making human beings resources for sale on the market automatically creates the worship of gold. If you can use money to buy and sell human beings, then there is no doubt that money is the most important thing in the world. And that is what capitalism does. It teaches us to believe that money is the most important thing in life. Now, what is exactly the great transformation? How Polanyi defines it, there is lots of debate. There is lots of debate about it. But one simple idea is that in normal society, markets are part of society embedded within society. But after the great transformation, society became embedded within markets. So what does this mean? It's useful to understand this clearly. So suppose I need medicine to save the life of my child and I go and say, I don't have the money to buy this, but please give me this because I need to save the life of my child. So there's a social relationship between me and the shopkeeper. As human beings, we participate in the pain of the others. And so on the basis of human relationships, you should give me the medicine and the gratitude that I feel to him, I feel to him will be more valuable than any amount of money that I could give him. And everybody understands that. But there's a market relationship. He's a shopkeeper, I'm a customer, I don't have money. So if the market relationship is Trump's, the social relationship, then we have a market society. If the social relationship is stronger than the market relationship, then we have a traditional society. So one of the books Amartya Sen wrote long time ago showed that famines occur not because there is scarcity of food, but because people don't think society doesn't think that these people are entitled to it. That is, if we had students that as it is the collective responsibility of society to feed anyone who is hungry, this is part of Islamic law, for example, then famines would not occur because we don't, it doesn't matter how the person is hungry. It doesn't matter why he has no money to purchase. If there is someone hungry, then it is our collective responsibility to ensure that we get him food. So what happened as a result of the emergence of capitalism? I've already said that it's about worship of money and the commodification of land and labor. So it's very strange that the 40s, what Polania wrote was amazingly prescient. And actually the reason to go through this is to understand that these are the toxins which have been implanted in our brains by the education that we have received and reversing the great transformation involves self-analysis to how this poison affects our thought and actions and to liberate ourselves from these. One of these is the birth of the industrial revolution led to a greed that all human problems can be solved by material commodities, by wealth. So this is talks number one. The antidote or the correction is to look at the eastern paradox which shows that money does not buy happiness. Commodities don't bring us long-run pleasure. Long-run pleasure depends on social relationships, social relationships, and on character traits, not on amount of money and not on our consumption levels. So money doesn't buy happiness. The commodification of labor means that our educational systems are designed to produce human resources, not human beings. And how do you turn a human being into a human resource? You have to strip them of their relationship to their society, to environment, to their history, to all higher visions relating to how I strive for something which is bigger than myself. So all this has to turn us into a human resource. And the commodification of land leads to the environmental catastrophe that we are seeing because the land, the flora, the fauna, their value is reduced to what their market price is. So if we have a species of animals that we can't buy or sell or trade in the market, then it's worthless. It's worth zero. And basically this problem, this is the source, this mental attitude which has been created on us by living in a market society that the worth of something is what that's the source of the environmental catastrophe. So we have been trained to think of ourselves as inputs to the production process. And we have been trained to value ourselves in terms of our lives in the terms of money that we can make. We value ourselves in terms of our lives in terms of money that we can make. And these are all toxic ideas, deadly to our personal lives and to our long-term welfare. So now we come to the final section, which is what can we do about this? So because the great transformation was so great, so we'll need to make great efforts to undo it where the great transformation created a market society. We all live in this market society. Everything is valued in monetary terms and everything is for sale. So we have to understand that the central driver of new status in a capitalist society, money is the biggest marker of social status. So we all seek money not because money brings us happiness, but because money brings us social status. And that's what we are all hungry for. So we need to, if we want to stop valuing money, then we have to change our reference community, change our reference communities. We have to find friends who don't value money, value something else, value something, value higher goals. And we have to de-link our self-image from what society thinks of us and find healthier communities. Ponderers, what's the purpose of my life? What are the goals worth striving for? And in particular, it must reject the capitalist answer that the purpose of life is the pursuit of profit's pleasure and power. And the positivist answer is that this question itself is meaningless because there's no facts and logic which can be used to answer it. And the existentialist answer, which is what I started out when I first encountered these problems, my own experience is that this is also a deadly answer there. Existence precedes essence, which means that we build, create our own meaning. As individuals, we are not capable of creating meaning. We need to do, we need to look at the higher level. And so we adopt an attitude of epistemic humility. I cannot find the answer on my own, but large numbers of philosophers and religious traditions have grappled with these questions over centuries. So let's latch on to a tradition and study what it has to offer and lead, let our heart guide us the direction because logic and facts cannot. We have short lives and critical is that we can't, any individualism is a toxin. You can't achieve anything. You can't be anything on your own. You have to find communities and build communities too. And one of the things is for detoxification is to spend some time living close to nature. So I was recently in the USA and the Appalachian Trail, I saw lots of people with a backpack traveling from months. It seems like a crazy thing to do. I think it is a crazy thing to do, but it does accomplish something which is it shows you that you don't need to follow the capitalist way. You can live with a backpack and a pair of clothes and clothes to nature for a long time. And that's what we need to do. And this is my last slide. I recently joined Ahuat University, which Ahuat Foundation has given microfinance to a lot of people. And that is it gives interest free loans to people to allow them to build their lives. And it's done enormous amount of work. So they have recently launched this university, which will provide a free education to everyone in Pakistan who is eligible. And eligibility poverty is one of the criteria. But our goal will not be to give them a university education. One of the ways in which we will distinguish our goal is we will take students who are imbued with the desire to serve humanity. You don't want students who will be looking for degrees and careers to make names for themselves and to pursue their individual lives. You want students who are built with the desire to serve humanity and they will, we will teach them the agriculture they need to go back to their rural communities and serve and help to upgrade them. And we will give them real world skins as opposed to book, book knowledge, which has no value at all. And we will teach them to build communities and we will teach them about history and the real world economic society as opposed to the textbook theories of social sciences, which basically abstract from European historical experience and are completely irrelevant for Pakistan. This is who I guess I have one more slide. If you want to see more along these lines, there is a talk that I gave earlier in Helsinki on sustainable development and this has developed the ideas of how we can become the change that we want to see. So, as this picture shows, the task that is facing us so enormous, the fire that has been lit in this world by capitalism is so enormous. We as individuals are so tiny that it seems completely hopeless, futile to try. Why should we even make the effort? But each drop of rain contributes very little. Electively, the raindrops are enough to put out the fire. And so we have to shift from outcome orientation to process orientation, outcome orientation, looking at whether or not we can put out the fire. And process orientation is, am I part of the solution or am I part of the problem? So as long as we are doing what we are doing, what we can within our capabilities, that in itself is satisfying and perhaps the maximum as satisfying as it can be, as life can be. So process orientation is what we need to resolve this. I seem very tiny and powerless and helpless to change things. Okay, so that's the end of my talk and I'm going to stop sharing and we can have question answers. Thank you so much. Wow, there's a lot in there. I'm glad we had some extra links that we can all follow up. I hope we can perhaps share the slides later if that's okay. Oh, yeah, sure. I've given links to the slides themselves. Yeah, excellent. Thank you so much. If the slides are already online, perhaps I can post a link in the chat. Oh, yeah, I'll do that. Oh, wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. So we did have a little bit about Pellani in there, but I wonder if anybody has specific Pellani related questions that we could start with. Otherwise we could invite Jeff to contribute. Jeff, you're still with us? Oh, yep, I see you. Oh, thank you for the link. Excellent. No, that's not mine. Oh, that's Alice's. Quick. Oh, I see. Okay. All right. I was about to put it in, but if that direction, then that's fine. Anticipation, he says. Okay.