Just say something, Charlie, or... Hi, Eleni. Hi. How are you? So the Board Development Committee suggested that we have some more training on the MPO function of the RPC. And so we're going to do two or three sessions on it. This is the first one. So a little introduction to the MPO function. And Eleni and Christine and Peter, I think, are all going to do pieces of this. So welcome, everybody, for this first session of the MPO training. This is our thought about the topics that we want to cover for the two or three sessions. And we are very much open to suggestions. If you have a topic that you want us to, you know, like present, please let us know at the end of this one or any time. So we're going to touch upon the authority responsibilities of the MPO, the role of the MPO Board, and talk about the larger context of the transportation planning and decision making in the Metropolitan Transportation Planning. And then we're going to end up, we're hoping to have, like, the third session, very specifically about the work that we do here at the RPC, our work program, and just focus on that for just that last one and how a number of staff come and talk about their specific expertise within the organization. So this is the agenda for today. We're just going to start very high level talking about what is an MPO. Why do we exist? What are the responsibilities of the MPO Board and the role of it as well as the role of the staff? And how do we do our work? And just this is kind of our thinking. Please feel free to just jump in. I pretty much hope that this is going to be a discussion and not just a presentation. So that would be really wonderful if you do that. This is just such a highly attended briefing session. Are we going to make this presentation available on the website? Yes. Absolutely. We'll do all the presentations available in the works. And also, you know, just before we actually start, maybe we should just go around and do a round of introductions because I do see some new faces here. So maybe we can just say our names and our affiliations and something like that. So, Mike, will I start? Sorry. It's okay. Michael Bryan from Winnieski. Yeah, Charlie Baker, the director of the RPC. Rob Fish, the alternate from Burlington. Jim Donovan, representative from Shawak. Jeff Carr, representative from the town outside the village in Essex. Christine Ford, CSRPC staff. Eleni Churchill, CCRPC staff. Dan Caron, Essex. And Amy Bell from VTrans. Regina Mahoney, Chittinac County Regional Planning Commission. Jason Shrest, CCRPC staff. Marshall Vistal, CCRPC staff. CCRPC staff. Here at Union Region Fund. Tom Eaton, hopefully the AGC filler. The latest victim. Welcome. Welcome. So what is an MPO? You know, high level, what is an MPO? It's a forum for collaborative and comprehensive transportation planning and decision making in the metropolitan planning area. That's what the slide says. The metropolitan planning area in Vermont, it's Chinatown County at this point, where the only MPO in the state that meets the requirements of an MPO. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that in subsequent slides. Does it include Buells Gore? It does not include Buells Gore. Thank you so much. Thanks for the clarification. A little bit more detail about the MPOs. I think we just covered the first bullet already. The important thing about that first bullet is that the MPO is governed by representatives of our municipalities and local officials. So on the MPO board, you have representation from all municipalities in Chinatown County except Buells Gore. We have Buells Gore on the CCRPC side, of course. And we also have representation from state agencies as well as federal agencies and some of our other partners like GMT, which is the Green Mountain Transit, our transportation authority in the county. So MPOs are mandated by federal legislation and the governors of each state are required to designate the MPOs for urbanized areas more than 50,000 people, which we, of course, meet here. Yes. I was wondering how the actual designation of MPOs. With the census, every census there is re-designation of MPOs. And, you know, so the area of the MPO can shift. Is that your question? Yes, but like why over into another county in some of those towns, especially north where they're getting more populist. That's a possibility in the future. I know it's always been a possibility, but I don't understand the mechanics. So the Census Bureau defines the urbanized area. We have about 110,000. And, you know, if you think about, I don't know, I always say about where the sewer systems run. But, you know, and plus Colchester. But, you know, down to Shelburne, up to Colchester, out to Williston, maybe Richmond, I can't remember if Richmond is, might be a little separated from Williston enough that it's outside the urbanized area. So it's that area, but in addition to that, though, there's a second process that happens at this table where we designated the area that we want to do planning for. So that's how we got out to the county boundary. Excluding bold. Or, I'm sorry, not bold. That's what I meant, the other B1. So there's kind of a two-step process. And so there is, and the last census, the Census Bureau created a rural separation between Colchester and Milton. And so they're not contiguous, they're not part of our urbanized area. They're called, Jeff, help me, what's that? Cluster. An urban cluster, thanks. So it's possible if that area between Colchester and Milton fills in, and then that might even extend over the line into Georgia, it would complicate things around this table a little bit to maybe involve Georgia or something, and maybe it goes all the way to St. Albans at some point, but that hasn't happened yet. And it's dynamic, too, because we were worried that there was another part, the conjunction, Lebanon and New Hampshire, was growing, was going to be. So that didn't happen last time, but we've got another census coming up, and depending upon how population thresholds and other definitional thresholds move, we could end up with a second MPO in our area. And to your point, Jim, like the third bullet down, it talks about that some MPOs, they can be multi-jurisdictional, that goes across county borders as well as state borders. So, yeah, and a lot of them have very different organizational structures. Some of them are standalone MPOs, organizations like we used to be before the merger with the RPC. Some of them are part of DOTs, and some are just part of planning agencies. So very different MPOs out there. There are more than 400 MPOs. I know that a number of staff tried to figure out the exact number of the MPOs, but we couldn't come up. 408 or 420. 408 or 420. So this is a map. I know you can't really see it. It's just each state has at least one MPO. But as you can see, there is a cluster of MPOs where the population centers are, east and west coast and in the south. There's about 160 that are smaller than us.  And the largest is 18 million in Southern California. One of two states that only has one MPO. That's one in Portland there, and that's the only one in Maine. I'm just looking up north. They have more than one. Sorry, I was just saying, we're one of two states that only has one, us and Hawaii. Rhode Island. Rhode Island, the whole state is the MPO. One county, one county, one state. Yeah, that's true. Smaller state. So now Christine is going to go over the history. You want to drive? Yeah. I want to just do this. It's not going to cooperate. Why don't you just sit over here? No, you stay. Let's go. All right. So I just wanted to talk about why MPOs exist, and I think really the best way to do this is to go back a little bit in history, because MPOs are very much an evolving organization that happened over time and really starting, like land use planning also in the United States, really kind of got going in the early 1900s when there was really a lot of urbanization. Cities were really growing, and there led to a lot of conflicts between land use and transportation, and not a lot of planning was happening at that time. After World War II, there was also rapid suburbanization. So roads were going out. They were creating these meses. People were not necessarily happy about that, but for transportation, the time that really got it going was the construction of the interstate highway system, which started in 1956. 41,000 miles of interstate was set to be constructed in the United States, and I think a lot of that was kind of an engineering exercise connecting A to B, not a lot of thought about planning, about communities, and there ended up being a lot of negative feelings about where those were going, going through urban areas, going through neighborhoods, disadvantaged communities, and all that stuff. So really there had been organizations similar to MPOs since the early 50s, but they didn't really, they were kind of not, didn't have a lot of authority. So, excuse me. So it was really in the Highway Act. So the first thing that really happened for MPOs in the Highway Act of 1962 was this idea that we call 3C. So it made federal highway aid available to areas over 50,000 people, contingent on establishing a continuing comprehensive transportation planning process carried out cooperatively by the state and local community. I wanted to read that so I got it clear. So the two things that happened is this recognition of wanting to have planning in cities, so that number of 50,000 people. And also to say, okay, if you make this organization, if you plan in this way, you can have some money. So the states that already had planning organizations and others that didn't have them were trying to make these organizations so they could get some federal money, which was pretty good. But it was really in 73 that MPOs became required by the federal government. They said they must exist. And from that point, there was a lot of incremental changes. It really changed over time, increasing authority of MPOs. Really, this dedicated funding source was a big deal. So I said before that federal planning funds was given to the MPOs. But then around in the mid-70s, this half percent of the federal money, so a specific funding source was made available. So there's money. And then also this idea that the projects had to be in a TIP transportation improvement program in order to spend federal funds. So that really said, okay, DOTs, you have to pay attention to these organizations. So it would be great to say that that was where MPOs took off and everybody listened to us. But it kind of didn't exactly happen that way. During the Reagan era, things really pushed back a little bit. MPOs became less important, less money. The federal process just really rolled back. And it was when ICE T passed in 91 that things again got really rejuvenated, I guess. And at that time added more money, more authority. And a big thing that happened then that we don't have to deal with here, we can be grateful for, is that it tied transportation planning to air quality funding. And that's transportation conformity and we can forget we heard that. Because since we're in attainment with Clean Air Act, we don't have to do that. So a lot of effort for larger MPOs to do air quality modeling. So the structure that was set up with ICE T really continued and the transportation bills that have happened since then. MAP 21 set up this process of performance measures, which we're going to talk about later. We have been talking about and we're going to talk about later. This slide is actually one giant run-on sentence in the federal regulations. Because I guess the federal government felt that we should put everything in a single sentence as to what the MPOs are supposed to do. So, yeah, so it's everything. We're supposed to, we're still supposed to do this 3C process. That's remained since the very early, since the 50s. It's got to be performance based. It's got to promote safe, efficient development management and operation of a multimodal transportation system. Has to serve mobility, has to serve freight and people and economic growth and resilience and fuel consumption and air quality. So, yeah, that's a lot. And we have to work together. So that's ultimately what's come out of this, is that we all have to work together. The state, the transit operators, we have a public involvement process that we're required to do. We have to have an idea in intelligent transportation systems, infrastructure. We have to have an elderly and disabled program. I mean, there's just all these programs that we have to do. The TIP, the STIP. We're going to talk about this a little bit more in the other sessions. Everybody knows what the STIP is, right? The state transportation improvement program. The state transportation. Ours is the transportation improvement program. And unfortunately, Tom, for you, it's only the municipal members that are part of the MPO, the organizational, or other people that represent groups as part of our RPC. They weren't happy to sit and listen, but they don't vote. So, the MPO structure, you know, this is the board. There's not a lot of specifics in the federal regulations about how the structure of the MPO is for larger areas over 200,000. There's a little bit more definition. But generally, they have a policy board. They have some advisory committees, a director and staff. And we have to have a written agreement with the state and transit providers. So, detailing how we're going to work together. And we do have guidance on our website. We updated that a couple of years ago, maybe. And it's just a slide that talks about, it just tries to show in a picture format the groups that we work with. And, yeah, we all work together. Peter, is that you? Sure. I'd like to make a comment, though, before proceeding to the slide here. I know there's some new members around the board here. I want to give you a word of encouragement to not be too discouraged. What you're going to hear today can be pretty complicated, complex, convoluted, overwhelming. But we do have some very veteran board members here that I think you ought to top into. One of these are Michael Bryan. I've been around the table for quite a few years. And you can probably attest to how long it might take to feel comfortable. What the learning curve might be to figure out all this stuff. But don't get discouraged because there's a lot. Feel free to ask any questions, really. We're very happy to talk to you. We're very happy to work with you in any of your issues. So to do a little comparison between the Regional Planning Commission and the MPO, Christine and Elaine, you've already talked about some of this stuff. Regional Planning Commission are creatures of state law. They're established on the state statute that goes back to the 1960s. They exist all over the state of Vermont, including one in Chattanooga County. There are a total of 11, I believe. MPOs, on the other hand, are creatures of federal government. And we've talked about the threshold to gain to become an MPO. 50,000 population. The 1980 census, the urbanized area population of the Burlington area, exceeded 50,000 threshold, so an MPO was born, so to speak. The organization itself got founded in 1983. It was appended to the Regional Planning Commission at the time. It had a separate board, but there was one staff, the Regional Planning Commission. It did expand in 1997 to the entire county. It should go back. The urbanized area at the time was just around Burlington. We included most of the urbanized areas just around the city of Burlington, but all the rural towns from Westford and Underhill, Jericho, Bolton, et cetera were not part of the organization. But in 1997, they all did join. Countywide, it was an MPO. The two organizations went through some issues back in the late 90s. They separated politically, organizationally, staff. But then came together a few years later. We remarried back in 2011, so to speak. So we're now one big happy family, hopefully. We already pointed out 400 MPOs in the U.S. The only one in the state is Charlie pointed out. Only Wyoming is the other state with one single MPO. I think he said it was Wyoming, right? Charlie pointed out. Hawaii and Rhode Island. And Rhode Island. Anyway, it's the Regional Planning Commission slide. There are 11 around the state. Most of them are based in county lines. The one up in the Northeast Kingdom is three counties. But most of the boundaries pretty closely follow county lines. But there are some exceptions. A little bit about the whole organization of the Regional Planning Commission here, the Regional Charter Board of Directors. You're all going to be members of the Board of Directors there. They do have an executive committee, a subcommittee of the Board of Directors that meets monthly. There are two committees, the yellow ones to the left and right there, that are subcommittees consisting of board members only. Board development deals with recruiting members, holding annual elections, that sort of thing. We're commissioners, right? What did I call you? It says Board of Directors, but we're actually commissioners by our bylaws, right? We're commissioners. I don't think so. I'd have to check. No. No. Really? We may jump back in. Board of Directors? We may jump back and forth. I thought we were commissioners.  Yeah, we do jump back and forth. We do. We use both terms. Okay, anyway. I don't have the source of this. What was the source of this? Board of Directors sounds so corporate. That was definitely the MPO term, right? It was. That was the MPO term. Yeah, I think maybe we did get to the Board of Commissioners in the update when we merged. This chart did come from, I think, the manual for the board. I did want to point out. The MPO board? That the clean water, that bottom square, I put my great artistic skills, I put that. Has anybody updated the MPO board training thing recently? It has been updated, but not recently. Yeah, we do that after we work. We should do that because we have so many new members. They really need to understand the delineations and the responsibilities between their RPC responsibilities and their MPO responsibilities. Because even this great food that you're serving tonight wasn't enough to get some of our new board members here. Some of the old ones here. Was that? Got some of the old ones here. Well, we're all. You guys heard there was two. We all could reuse a refresher course in this. So to finish with this, there's a finance committee as well to deal with all things money related to the organization. Christine pointed out that clean water committee kind of keeps stuck in on the needs because it couldn't fit. But it would be equal to the other blue committees. Unified planning work program committee. It's a group that meets usually in the winter and spring to talk about and come to some recommendation on what the tasks we'll be working on in the subsequent year. The long-range planning committee is usually only meeting when we're updating our long-range plan with the regional plan, the metropolitan transportation plan. They'll meet for the two or three years. We're developing that in a couple year hiatus. The planning advisory committee and the transportation advisory committee are two standing committees that meet pretty much monthly. The planning advisory committee consists mostly of municipal planners, planning staff. And the transportation advisory committee will also meet monthly public works directors, town administrators like Brian and Barbara and town planners as well. Then they meet monthly to talk about transportation issues. Most of what comes through the MPO process will come through that transportation advisory committee as well. And clean waters, newly established committee this year with all the water quality issues. Before you go off that. That was made monthly. Back in the earlier requirements, they talked that we need to have a citizens advisory committee. I don't think it's a requirement. I think that's... The previous slide said it was. It's a transportation and citizens advisory committee. I think what happened here is that it got merged into the TAC together, is my sense. It didn't mean that it has... It said that many MPOs have. Okay, so we don't have to have those. I read that. And we only have a fixed group of standing committees. We bring ad hoc committees together, but our whole deal was we only have a certain number of standing committees, and ad hoc committees can come and go based on need. But I'm thinking clean water advisory committee is going to be more like a standing committee. That's in the bylaws now. But which we're going to act on, or we did act on that. Yeah, we added them to the bylaws a few years ago. But I would say, at least my experience with MPOs, most of them do have a citizens advisory committee that gives you that other perspective. The UPWP process is very citizen driven. So it's... It's also, I think, just... The other thing that I found coming here is that because you're all local governments, that it was more grounded locally here than where I worked for counties were at the table. I've been working in the Philadelphia range before coming here. There are 367 municipalities, but there were only nine board members for the nine counties. So having that extra layer of citizen committee allowed more engagement that I think occurs more naturally here in Vermont. This government structure is different. You know, to the citizenry, so... We have county governments. Except for a couple. Exactly. Anyway, the key responsibilities of an MPO are these. In fact, I'd say the top three bullets are the main ones. We have to develop a long range transportation plan every five years, looking out 20 to 25 years. We just completed it recently for those of you who are around the table. We adopted a plan in June, I believe it was, Regina, if I'm wrong, and we'll have to revisit that. We'll start that another couple of years. We have to do a transportation improvement program, which is simply a list of all the agreed upon projects that will receive federal funds over the next four years. And it's something we very closely coordinate with the Agency of Transportation, and we update it annually, and sometimes amend it monthly. In fact, a very common activity at the board level related to transportation will be to consider amendments to the transportation improvement program. It may be the most obvious transportation-related activity that you undertake. The third bullet, unified planning work program. It's simply the list of everything we intend to do in the next year. And it's a list that might be as 90 or 100 tasks, and it's pretty intimidating more than that. Better not to count. Might be closer to 190, but... Closely tied to funding sources. Yeah. And it's something we update every year. And the last part is the public participation plan. This is actually a new wrinkle in the federal legislation that came about, I think, a few years ago. MPOs have to have a public participation plan identifying how and who we involve in our process. And it's something we have to update, but not on any regular basis. We adopted our last one in 2014. I think 14 is the date on that. There were minor edits in that year. Okay. All right. So those are the main things. I would say, being a board member, 90% of the transportation-related activity that you will consider or take action on is going to come up under one of those top three bullets. And most of them under the second one. All right. So a little bit about how the decision-making process unfolds. The staff might develop something. We'll go through a public process to do that. We do employ consultants quite a bit on specific projects. Sometimes we don't. We'll do some technical analysis, evaluate things. Eventually, we'll come up with a recommendation that we'll take to our transportation. Why? It's kind of the normal process. It's what the transportation improvement program goes through. It's what the UPWP goes through. The TAC will review it, maybe make some changes. Most likely not. Make a recommendation to the board. And that's the second bullet. After the TAC reviews things, it goes to the board and we ask the board to take action. And if history is a guide, the board has pretty well respected most recommendations that have come from the TAC. Just thinking about other things that go through this problem. We sometimes have like specific topic, transportation topic plans, park and ride plan, or a bike-ped plan or something like that that kind of supplement more detailed ITS plan that are more detailed than the broad transportation plan that also go through this process of recommendation to the board. The other thing I think that's important is this organization and on MPO business is heavily driven by committees. That's why we want to have not only actual board members that are sitting on those committees but we also encourage alternates to participate on them because if you're an alternate, you can actually have an impact on the decision making by participating in one of the committees. Yeah, very much. Just some things to consider. If you're a new board member, when you come to the table and a transportation-related item is on the agenda and we're asking you to make a decision on something, things to consider in that decision-making process. This is kind of generic to all MPOs and the second one is what Jeff is referring to. You know, very often everything pretty much goes through a subcommittee process and a recommendation will come up to the board so that's a very important piece of the process and to listen carefully to that. But look at the bigger picture. In our long-range plan, the ECOS plan just adopted, we have a vision for the region. So think about what that vision states in making a decision. One, we encourage, solicit, and sometimes get an awful lot of public comment. So listen to those public comments, especially if they're from your community. And if your local government has particular issues and points to make, most of you are going to be representing a community. So whether it's Jericho or Essex or whatever, listening to the local government and bringing that view to the table is pretty important. Consider the environmental, economic, and the operations on the transportation systems impacts. Funding, this is a big issue when it comes to the transportation improvement program. We know how much money we have available. We have to program and map the projects. Considering cost-effectiveness as well when it comes to specific projects. Federal, state, and local regulations are pretty important. Obviously, we operate under them so being aware of them is very important. And the last one is pretty important. I think sometimes we hope we bring information to you that's complete, been thoroughly vetted and then you can make a decision on the information that's been provided. But if you feel there's not enough information, always ask for more. I think it's a rare event, but if it does occur, please ask for it. All right. So, yeah, just finishing up here. So Peter talked about the role of the board. This is the role of the MPO staff and we did talk a little bit about this, you know, through the slides. So our role here is, of course, to provide information and technical support to the board and to all the advisory committees, usually the TAG, but sometimes we do provide information to the other committees as well. So we also provide technical assistance to our member municipalities, either through, you know, with work that we do in-house or the work that we do through managing our consultants. We basically develop all the MPO required plans and documents, the ones that they're going to go through the TAG and then come to you for approval and adoption that Peter talked about. Again, we manage all the transportation projects and initiatives that they are on the UPWP and Charlie said it's upwards of 190 tasks. So we do that. And the foster interagency coordination is very important. Christine talked about it. It's just, you know, we need to, and we do work collaboratively. We have veterans and other state agencies. Jeff, you're right. As well as our regional partners. It seems that this happens all the time. We have a board meeting and there is somebody cleaning upstairs. So, and, you know, Peter talked about facilitation. You know, we do try to just engage the public in all the work that we do, whether it's plans, projects, everything, and we do take those comments and input and feedback very seriously and it informs our plans and our projects and our recommendations. And finally, this is some of the challenges but also the opportunities that I see. We see facing the MPOs in general and us in particular. There's also potential changes that happens in the federal transportation bill. There are some funding implications and changes sometimes. There are some unfunded mandates, some funded mandates, but we need to respond and incorporate those changes into our work program. Accountability and performance-based planning and programming, it's something that we do more and more and the federal government is requiring us to do now more performance-based planning. And we're going to talk about that. We have a presentation at the very end of the meeting tonight that we're going to talk a little bit more about that. One of the challenges is that the performance-based planning from the federal government puts a lot more emphasis on the NHS, the National Highway System. We're going to talk about the National Highway System too later during this meeting. So we have these, you know, the NHS versus some of the local transportation systems and issues. So our challenge and our opportunity here is to balance all of those needs, all of those modes with limited transportation funds. So we need to address safety issues, roadway operations, vehicles, trucks, also transit, bicycle, pedestrian, all the modes, as well as address environmental, air quality, economy, resiliency, energy, health, and that can go on and on on all these needs that we have out there. So our job here and your job is to actually balance all of those needs to achieve our vision here that is articulated in the MTP. So that's kind of the end, I think, of the first session. And do you have any other questions, any suggestions for further discussions? And we are starting to put together session number two already, but we are open to suggestions. How would you like to hear more detail about it? Well, I think the important thing is for, particularly for new members, to understand the difference between our PHC business and MPO business. And a lot of members will see on the thing there'll be an item on our agenda and it'll have in parentheses MPO business. Or should I notice that it wasn't tonight? I wasn't going to bring that up, but it is a pet peeve of mine because what it does is it makes sure everybody understands what's being discussed. And our non-minicipal members, we have a state and a federal representative that participate in MPO business, but they maybe don't participate in an RPC business that's related to what it is. And then our non-minicipal member commissioners or directors, whatever they are, they need to understand, it's nice for them to understand what's going on, but they need to understand that when the voting happens, it's just the municipal members. So there's no disagreement, they don't waste their time looking at something they don't need to look at and those kinds of things. So if we get into the mechanics of delineating the responsibilities of an MPO board member and a commissioner because all of us who are representing municipalities, local municipalities, are both. Right, and how we vote. I mean, an RPC business, we're all equals and MPO, we're weighted by the population counts in our communities. So Burlington gets four votes and Essex only gets two, split between the village and the town inside the village. And Colchester gets two, right? In South Burlington. In South Burlington gets two, that's right. We're talking about further things that we might want. I have questions for you. I'd be interested to hear, we went over the history of the MPO and the Regional Planning Commission here from 1966 on what I'll have you. I'd be interested to hear the, you know, we do our planning for the future on projects and such, looking 25 years out. Obviously back, not to bring up the SOAR subject here, but going back to the Syrac Highway, the Circumvential Highway was something that was proposed, as my understanding is, before 1966. So I'd like to know who had the forethought to see the need for that. Obviously there was a need, they saw. And then, you know, how it came through, you know, it's demise or well at least, I don't even call it demise. I think it's something that eventually as much as maybe people wouldn't agree with this, it's going to happen no matter what. The need is going to be there. As I came in from Essex today with the traffic, it's never going to go away. And so it's, you know, maybe not in all times, but it will happen, mark my words. This video will be history. You're recorded now. On record. On record. That's right. Dan Karen, Essex Junction. How was that Crescent connector coming? Yeah, that's coming real well. Any other suggestions for deeper dives next month? My take on the inclusion of the word resilience had to do with some grant that this organization had to sponsor, become a sponsor for a year ago or something or has a mitigation plan. Something like that. And was that related to, there's a bit of an outlier. Opioid. I don't know what it was. What was that resilience word on there? The others I could read and kind of imagine what the metrics might be for those. But that word resilience. I'm just wondering what did that refer to? Yeah, I think you're probably referring to the hazard mitigation plan that we worked with old towns with. Going two years ago now, I think probably, and we're probably working on it three years ago. You know, where we kind of look at the impacts that weather events have. Resilience is kind of like that. What do we do, you know, when the river comes up? And a lot of this work has happened after Irene. Right when we had, you know, a lot of damage in our transportation system. So we started looking at more of a resiliency and evaluating resiliency of specific roadways. Sure. What also might be helpful is suggestions for best practices and communication between us as commissioners and representatives for our communities and our legislative bodies or local planning commissions. For example, I always like to know when the executive director is going to go to my select board. So I have the opportunity to go support the executive director when he's before my select board. He does. But at the same time, one of the things that I haven't done well that I'd like to do a better job on is when there is a result from a scoping study or something like that that I'm also there to help support the MPO and RPC staff when they're involved in that if for no other reason that sometimes the, you know, beyond the technical staff, if you're appointed by your legislative body, sometimes you can be helpful in communicating things that otherwise might not be received well by an RPC or MPO staff member. I've done a good job of tracking that the last time you walked in. I saw that our sidewalk, one of our sidewalk studies got done and there was a controversial end result to it that I could have possibly been helpful with in terms of communicating and getting the understanding because, you know, as a former select board member I kind of plugged into the way select people think. Any other suggestions before we close this down? Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you for the start. Yeah, we're going to have another one next month. Stay tuned. We'll have pizza next time, right? Okay, I suggest. We need to try to get something to get everybody interested to come. Pizza, what do you think? Pizza and beer, how's that? No, okay. Beer, I don't know. Thank you. It's not morning. Holy cow. Why don't we do that? I missed that detail. I don't know what main street we're in. It's a sidewalk. According to the clock on the wall, we're going to start at 615. So we'll start our September meeting of the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission. Are there any changes to the agenda? Hearing none. This is an opportunity for any member of the public. You may be here to comment on items that do not otherwise appear on the agenda. Is there anybody here who would like to make such a comment? Hearing none, there are no consent agenda items. So we'll move on to approval of the July 18 RPC minutes. Motion. So moved. Second. Any comments, questions, edits? Yes, Catherine. Any other comments? Hearing none. All in favor of the motion say aye. Opposed? Ayes have it. The next item is the appointment of an agriculture sector representative to the board, namely Tom Eaton. Turn over to Charlie for that. So there is a memo in your packet about this. We haven't done this in a while. So it would be good to remind us about how we do, how we appoint what our bylaws refer to as regional board members. So these are organizational members as opposed to municipal members. And we haven't had an ag sector representative since maybe 2011 or 2012. At which time we had one for maybe 18 months. So I want to first of all thank Tom for, I'm not sure if you volunteered or got volunteered Tom. A little bit of both. Excellent. Thank you for your interest. And Tom and I had a chance to sit down and kind of review what the RPC is about and some of the roles. And his resume is attached on the back of that memo. And so certainly staff and executive committee are recommending that the board appoint Tom Eaton as representative of the ag sector. Move we approve Tom Eaton as the ag representative for the CCRPC. Second. Any further discussion? Yes. Most of your, some of your work is with dairy farmers. That's right. Yeah. So I just wondered whether there are opportunities for you to engage with some of the other diversified farms in Chittenden County? Oh, for sure. Yeah. No, it's the structure of our business is structured towards larger dairy farms. I don't personally work with a lot of vegetable growers, but I, you know, I around the town of Richmond, I interact with a lot of veggie growers and a lot of farmers and share a lot of trade stuff. So it's, but that's definitely. How many dairy farms do we have in Chittenden County? I don't know how many dairy. I would say probably 15. Yeah. Maybe they have in Hinesburg. My point is, I think it's important for anybody in that culture to be here. Yeah. But we should recognize that we probably have more diversified vegetable and. In this county more than any other county. So, you know, as long as you can also bring forward. Oh, for sure. The issues. Yep. Glad to have you. Yep. Any further questions or comments? Hearing none, all in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Opposed? The ayes have it. Congratulations, Tom. You can flip your little. And having a, you know, my maternal grandparents having. Operated at Dairy Farms. Yeah. And having a, you know, my maternal grandparents having. Operated at Dairy Farms. And my mom grew up on the farm. I think it's been a long time. And I'm glad to see that we don't have an agricultural sector person. On the RPC. Welcome. Next item, I guess Emily is going to be handling the St. George town plan, public hearing and approval. Well then, if it's a public hearing, we should have a motion to open the public hearing on the St. George town plan. So moved. All in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Opposed? There we go. Now we have a public hearing. Thank you. I guess we don't have any public comments. We do have the St. George town plan in your packet, or as a review is in your packet. And this is something that the PAC reviewed in the November 2017. And they recommended that the plan and the process be forwarded to the board for approval. The town adopted the plan in February of 2017. And they recommended that the plan and the process be forwarded to the board for approval. And in February of this year, and our full review and review process with the PAC is detailed in the memo that's in your packet. As staff, we're recommending that the board approve the plan and approve and confirm the planning process as detailed in the resolution that you have. And that's all. Are there any questions or comments about the St. George town plan and the process that went into it? Are there any members of the public who would like to make results? Just a quick one. I was noticing the staff comments that there was a lot of data updates that we wish they could have gotten to but may not have. And we are hoping they'd include at least some references to other sources that that get incorporated. So we made those comments in November, as you said, about the plan that we reviewed at that time. And they updated about half of what we referenced in there. So that's all. No, nothing. And St. George is not one of the more highly staffed planning commissions in the county. Yeah, no planning staff. And yeah, they worked really hard on this plan. Yes. I would move that we approve the St. George minutes will plan based on the PAC and the staff recommendations and that we confirm their planning process. Second? Second. Any further discussion? Hearing none, all in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Opposed? The ayes have it. Do we have to move to close the public hearing before we move? Oh, sure. Otherwise it would be open and get messy and stuff. So actually, can we go back? Oh, you're closing afterwards. We're ratifying the implicit closing of the public hearing. Is there a motion to close the public hearing? Second? Second. All right. All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed? The ayes have it. The hearing is now closed. Retroactive to that point in time before the vote was taken. So for burning, so that was the plan. And did you catch the second one? Yes. Okay. Okay. Can we let the minutes reflect the fact that we closed the public hearing before we approved the plan so we did it right? Sure. We could do that, but I don't think we would need to. Thank you. Next item is the Winooski Tactical Basin Plan Oversight. Oh, I'm just skipping right over. Thank you. I checked it because I was going to go on to it and then I went back. I'm lost in time and space. Yeah, you screwed everything. Dang it. I was on a roll there. Guidelines and standards for confirmation of municipal planning processes and approval of municipal plans review. We have to come up with a catchy acronym for that. I would leave approval, according to the staff recommendation. Seconded. Okay. We have a motion and a second. Why don't you just quickly for... I just want to mess it up. No, it's okay. In case there's anything. Briefly for our audience at home, people are being very, very efficient. She blots out everything I say. Jeff, you move. I move. And the second. And you have a second. Thank you. And I'll say it. All right. Quickly. Very briefly, as you know, we have our regional energy plan. We got our determination of energy compliance August 9th. Now we can give it to other people. So we put that process in our guidelines and also we made some other housekeeping edits that you can see in the memo. Any further discussion? Questions? Hearing none. All in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Opposed? The ayes have it. Now we move on to item eight. I'm going to ski tactical basin plan overview. Dan. I ask your patience with this. This will go a little slower than the other items. And also just to... We have a few presentations tonight. I think it'll be more efficient to let the presentation take place and then we'll do questions and discussions after none of them are so long that we're going to forget what we had questions about. But I think it'll just be more smooth if we can just let them do their presentations. So I thank you for that. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, again, for the record. Dan, all back senior planner here at RPC. So I'm going to give an overview of the plan. One thing I know that I'm not... Well, I'm familiar with this plan and have read it through and been watching its draft development. It's not a plan that we wrote. So it's a DEC plan. So if I don't know exact some of the details, I'll try to answer the questions at the end or upon further review. So I'm going to walk through... First, sort of at the high level, what are tactical basin plans? What's our role in them? And once that introductions over, I'll get a little bit more into, okay, well, what is contained in the plan and what are its essential elements, especially as regards to municipal responsibilities and obligations. And then I'll conclude with a little bit of discussion of the next steps in our process, which I'll see you here again at our next meeting when we do our formal comment and conformance letter. So the DEC has been writing tactical basin plans for many years. It's been on every five years around the 14 basins, I think, 13 or 14 basins around the state. It's a planning framework around watersheds and these are updated every five years. And I put these three bullet points there because it's really about, like many plans, assessing the condition of the resource and in the case of a natural resource, trying to protect what you have, the high quality waters, maintaining them and then restoring any degraded streams. And the rationale for why you do these in addition to their intrinsic ecological value is that because they provide a public benefit both in terms of health and safety and enjoyment and uses of the waterways. So all tactical basin plans in the state share this common framework. So again, and you'll see this reflected as I go through the plan in more detail, but again, like many plans, assessing the conditions, what's the baseline understanding and the way the state does that as it goes through, you know, collects any data they can confine. Their own data, data collected by others, monitoring stations, public input, et cetera. Once you assess the streams and the sub-basins within the watershed, within the larger basin, looking at different stressors and then based on what those stressors are understanding what those pollutants might be and then going from there, you begin to implement either total maximum daily load, formal plans such as phosphorus plans or regulatory programs to address these areas of concern. I'll morally touch too much on this, but there are different goals for certain types of streams. So A1 is a classification referring, and Don probably knows the details, but you're very high quality, pristine wilderness waters down to lower designations depending on what other uses go on in that system. And then finally, the plan concludes with implementation in terms of broad strategies and what is different about the plans more recently is that rather than sort of a spreadsheet of projects ranging from physical on the ground projects to education and outreach, this is more in terms of categories of projects and you'll see that as we walk through there. What also makes the Winooski plan a little more of a more robust exercise is that this plan as well as we address the Lemoyo plan most recently is also incorporating elements of the state's efforts to implement the Lake Champlain total maximum daily load, the TMDL. So this is a demonstration of two EPA of the state saying, in addition to our regulatory programs, here's this planning document that outlounds how we're going to meet the targets we said we would meet when the state filed the TMDL. So our role in tactical basin plan development has really strengthened over the last few years as a result of the Vermont Clean Water Act in the spring of 2015 starting in the summer of 2016 began to have annual contracts with DEC to a contract that DEC provided funding to us as well as the other regional planning commissions to improve outreach and education efforts to municipalities on water quality generally and also more specifically promote involvement in the tactical basin plan development. So you remember late 2016 we had a temporary clean water advisory committee and then we ran it for a few months and it came formal and we've used the clean water committee advisory committee which meets every Tuesday after the TAC meeting the transportation advisory committee meeting to work on different issues and lately it's been a lot about the basin plans as well as keeping municipalities abreast of other key issues. So through the clean water advisory committee plus multiple emails from me to the quack members keeping them abreast of different issues permit issues, webinars, grant opportunities new regulations, et cetera this is the way the input is gathered. So in terms of the tactical basin plan development we're charged with working with the basin planners to organize sub-regional meetings we've had some in Huntington and Richmond we have our quack meetings we have our very active MS4 communities municipal separate storm sewer system communities that are very active both in terms of participation as well as their own staffing so we gather that input we update the information on municipal zoning bylaws and provide that to the DEC to show what our municipalities are already doing with setbacks and buffers, et cetera right now the last few months we've been sort of in the working draft stage where the nice is that the DEC is giving us the rough document we don't have to wait for the formal formal 60 day window and that's it we've been seeing rough drafts of the plan for several months now by Karen Bates from DEC and so we're now here actually in these middle bullets here where we're having our first meeting on this we'll have a formal public meeting in October and then we'll have an early October public forum more casual meeting and then at the end we bundle this up into an RPC recommendation on how the plan conforms with our regional plan, the ECOS plan and we're also charged with helping the secretary of ANR to prioritize water quality projects so just to put our area of the Winooski in context it's a very big basin it goes way up I guess even into part of the Northeast Kingdom almost I think and it's big so our context however is very different from the rest of the basin as you can see because we have quite a bit of cultivated land and developed land as well more locally here it's several of our urban communities and then our upland communities in the more mountainous terrain and then some major tributaries such as Muddy Brook or Allen Brook which gets a slice of Essex and a little bit of Westford and so on it includes several of the impaired streams so that's a consideration those streams you see in red are the MS4 stormwater impaired streams so as I mentioned the state looks at different stressors you can see them there I won't read them all out but the key ones we have of course are nutrient loading phosphorus and we do have some flow alteration in the main stem of the Winooski obviously because of the dams but those have been around since the 30s so the dams are there, they're not changing too much and then channel erosion and then encroachment or historical encroachment I should say within the landscape before our stricter zoning so again in the document you assess these different stressors and then as we'll see in the next few slides the state makes a determination on what is the condition of some of these tributaries or segments of a river depending on whether they meet water quality standards and whether they provide for the uses which are designated swimming, fishing, drinking water, etc. habitat so depending on those levels of whether it meets the standards or does not it gets one of these designations whether the use is stressed, altered and impaired in our particular case a lot of these are stressed or impaired impaired being the most common for phosphorus and storm water as a pollutant and in some cases altered for invasive species so the distinction here is really about whether if you look at altered whether it's a non pollutant such as invasive species flow or there's an actual pollutant we'll talk about some of those so in terms of our area we have 14 streams or certain segments that are considered either stressed or impaired the problem area so to speak and you can see several of our storm waters impaired streams which we've talked about for some of our municipalities for quite a while Morehouse Brook for example Centennial, Allen Brook Sunderland Brook there are several others for example in Monroe Brook and Shellburn or Potash and Engelsby in South Burlington but those are to the west of the Winooski Basin proper those are what are called direct to lake streams that's a different basin plan but they're there so again phosphorus is the one we hear about quite a bit but there are others from a planning standpoint and making everybody aware we've got some other issues going on as well too that we have to keep on top of the collective we have the state, the municipalities and the public so for example we have Sunnyside Brook which is impaired because of chlorides and that's a plan a TMDL that is coming down the track and there are other streams as well in the state that are affected by chlorides primarily from road salt we've got the long-term issue of Shellburn pond which is altered because of the presence of aquatic new species and I think there's about four of them there isn't really a TMDL formally identified or something like that but there's a recognition that there's assistance needed whether it's to community groups, the towns that abut the pond it's quite a large ecological system there but if we don't pay attention to it you know we don't want to come back 20 or 30 years later and go oops it's completely overrun and you can't really fish there anymore never mind the snakes and then an issue of flow and land use the plan identifies Joiner Brook and Bolton that is altered because of some portions of it that receive insufficient flow and that's a matter of working with Bolton Valley on the issue of water withdrawals for snowmaking as well as general land use etc so again it's an issue of the way it's talked about in the plan is that review of the data and some sort of protection is needed because you get too low a flow on altered flow it's hard for the bugs and fishes to make their home there and stuff so and then it could get further degraded so those are again several issues to think about you know whether it's you know Mercury Stormwater chloride E. Coli for example in Allen Brook some of these have multiple problems not just you can have phosphorus plus another issue as well too so back to phosphorus because that's the 800 pound gorilla here some of you may have seen this chart before because it's from our 2015 ECOS report so the the TMDL document estimates that there's a current estimate of 31 metric tons of phosphorus going into Lake Champlain on an annual basis and the relative contributions by different sectors the plan over the next 20 some years and maybe we only have 18 years left I think is to bring that down by 34% so the plan lays out an overall goal of 34% but that allocates those targets reductions depending on the different sectors so you can see AG is a pretty heavy lift at 30% forestry so on and so forth the ones I bring your most attention to I'll follow up here with another slide is wastewater treatment because that's a municipal responsibility and the developed lands framework get on that Tom so so breaking it down now okay so we've got to make these reductions over the next several years within the municipal framework the total it's currently about 28% of the load the base allocation comes from broadly speaking the developed landscape and then another 9.85% from wastewater so in order to meet the targets over the next 20 some years the developed lands we've got to reduce their overall load by about 20% those things you see there the roads MRGP that's the municipal roads general permit which is applicable to to all municipalities in the county with the exception of the Gore and then VTrans obviously owns some roads and some parcels the MS4 responsibility and so on so that lift is about 20% so then the plan then goes into okay well where you're going to get this phosphorus from it's in different areas and these are the plan recognizes that these geographic and they have several maps like these the plan identifies where some phosphorus can come from where are the heavy loading areas depending on the types of use and so not surprisingly you see within the develop landscape these areas where there's presumed heavy phosphorus loading so those are the quote unquote hot spots you'd want to hit in terms of projects to reduce phosphorus within the develop lands in terms of roads again this is partially a function of the network of roads but it's also a function of how many roads segments are hydrologically connected and you've heard from Chris Dubin our staff person about the road erosion inventories and municipal roads general permit so you see sometimes some fairly high loading in areas that may not be that populated but it's steep roads that are very close to streams etc etc that's where the presumed high loading areas are so the next thing that sort of that outlines where the phosphorus is where the potential areas are there's also of course this plan in addition to identifying projects there's also an identification of unknowns or data gaps in a way and areas of concern so we have several streams and I would urge the members from these towns to keep an eye on these and work with me and the other staff here to advocate for keeping an eye on these streams because if you don't keep an eye on them A you'll have no data to really assess the baseline but you may end up with a problem and it'll show up because you weren't keeping an eye on it watching it get to be a problem so there are several small streams which are of concern here as well as some ones that are more obvious because of the development impacts that are nearby so see there's just some of the goals and they're very basic the macro invertebrate and fish data is a key baseline data to collect to understand the health of the stream so the as I referenced rather than a list of a spreadsheet of projects what this plan does and I'll touch on in more detail is it links back to what's called the watershed projects database but it sets forth categories of projects which I think personally is a useful rubric because there are so many projects being identified over the past few years and more to come with more ecosystem restoration project grants the own UPWP type projects that we've helped scope to assist with the MRGP as well as literally I think 400 plus projects in the MS4 communities alone that are identified because of flow restoration plans and then there'll be another batch once the phosphorus control plans get done by those MS4 communities so you go nuts trying to keep updating the spreadsheet in the back of a document so the state refers to the watershed projects database but within the plan itself it outlines these categories of projects and this list is comprehensive it captures a lot of the key concerns in our areas which in communities it's primarily about implementation of the MS4 permit which includes a flow restoration plan for those impaired streams phosphorus control plans for all those towns and then stormwater master plans which which we've helped out with a few most recently Jericho, Richmond and Underhill we've completed our consultants have and we're about to do one for Milton as well too there's lots of projects being identified out there river corridors of course I've always been an issue with all the fluvial erosion hazard research what's called the river corridors now and then the second bullet here is a very key one for all our municipalities but especially our rural ones municipal road erosion and the good thing is we're ahead of the curve on that we've done the inventories for all the communities we've identified top problem areas roads that need to be fixed and we're working with the towns to help the grants and getting our consultants to help scope the design so it's just a feedback loop wastewater of course is another key consideration and then there are some other key objectives which are a little more related to the rural landscape of logging and elsewhere so to sort of recap within our area of Chinman County within the base of the lower Winooski we have these sub basins so we have the overall main stem which again is going to be assisted through strategies that help the MS4s as well as general landowner education within the impaired streams those tributaries I talked about it's again MS4 work with permit implementation as well as other stormwater management and river corridor protection etc the midland or the lower mid Winooski again some concerns that have been identified with higher stream temperatures as well as stormwater runoff from roads and so on and then the smaller tributaries as you move on up with again concerns about road runoff other activities that impact some of these streams and in some cases like Huntington more specific issue which has been under monitoring for quite a while of septic seepage in the village area that affects things and then you see this thing about driveway education and outreach the issue of driveways and private roads and their discharge two meetings at Huntington and Richmond that came up at both meetings it's a real recognition of something assistance needs to be done with private lands discharging into the municipal right of way so again as I referenced so again there is no giant spreadsheet of projects within the plan it refers to the watershed projects database which is the state that initially started cataloging some of the grants they had already supported but over the last year through reaching out to the municipalities and others more projects identified purely a dot on a map to scope with the design cost estimator in there and like I say some of them are conceptual and some of them are truly shovel ready the last bullet there is essentially the way the state says how do we meet the goals in this plan is the DEC is going to prioritize their staff time and they're going to direct internal external grant funding towards recommended actions so when you see the ERP grants which come out about every three months now it was a strong directive to does it implement the plan what is the pollutant load reduction it can't just be oh this is a good idea and we should clean it up we really want to see proposals that are directly linked to the problems identified in the plan so where we are now so the plan we're in the process of preparing our common and conformance letter Regina did an initial analysis and this is the statute quote here is directly from part of the text of the of the clean water section where outlines the duties of the secretary in consultation with the RPCs so Regina identified three of our ECOS plan strategies which really support and is consistent with the tactical basin plan and vice versa develop an areas plan for growth etc number three water quality protection and restoration is the primary one and there are several sections that are water in ECOS three that really mimic the goals of a tactical basin plan river corridor plans etc as well as water quality projects so our next step here is that I've been working with the quack has seen some of our preliminary staff analysis already previous meetings I'll draft up a conformance and comment letter give that to the quack and the quack will then finalize that letter pass it on to you guys for your next meeting in the interim we will have a public meeting here on October 2nd and on October 17th again as part of a public meeting here we'll obtain any other input that people want to give to the plan which we can then forward to DC and then we'll finalize our conformance letter and submit that to the DC we anticipate that the public draft will come out around September 24th 25th but it's a 200 page document so if DC pushes it to October 1 that I wouldn't be surprised thank you thank you Dan are there any questions or comments about this document and where it stands and where it's going the big question I had was about the project prioritization the watershed projects database a lot of the language in here makes it sound like the authors of this report slash the state you know the sort of research side of things are coming up with priority projects and adding them to the database and they're just literally one line item descriptors in the database that say whether they're funded whether they've been graded presumably to funding and I'm just wondering is this sort of setting up a framework where the regulatory side is going to identify the projects and then pull in the town or these sort of organically bubbling up from the towns or some combination I couldn't really I scanned a lot of this but it wasn't clear to me where this was headed in terms of a project mandate framework versus just a nice compendium of good work that everyone's doing of their own right it's a little bit about the state obviously has projects that they've identified over the years more from the assessment and research angle the projects are all mostly real in the sense they came from a plan or a research project such as a river corridor plan all those fluvial erosion hazard studies storm water master plans etc what is a challenge and I'll let Charlie elaborate is that the state sets these broad frameworks but when it does an ERP it's sort of serendipitous who happens to apply for one and submit a grant for it rather than the state saying there's 800 projects identified we'd really like to see a proposal for projects one through 50 and then so that's a little bit of a challenge there in part because the state runs it by grant it's not like they have a 50 biologist and engineer who's ready to go and do projects and I guess it's pretty vague right now in terms of how it'll roll out when we get to an assessment stage we're anticipating this is going to be reviewed on a five-year cycle there's all the happy talk about we just do the BMPs we'll meet the targets the next cycle there'll be more of a reckoning I'm sure when we make that evaluation of okay what have we have funding for what have we had municipal partners for what have we accomplished and oops we didn't meet the target so I was expecting this to at least anticipate maybe it's just the state you know the policy side needs to give the writers of these plans more you know of a clear framework for how it'll get to project identification and implementation in the absence of grant funding or municipal or MS4 projects that are going to happen anyway I mean right now it seems like it's just a happy list of funding but looking over the horizon this is a regulatory plan to achieve an outcome and I'm just curious if anyone who's been more involved in the discussions has seen over that horizon to how this plan will require implementation of priority projects funding or not because that's what we all think we're headed towards and this is just sort of vague and happy talk about it it's it's kind of 30,000 foot level because it's not getting down to the project level and I think frankly I think in the LaMoyle Basin Plan that Basin Planner started to try to get down there and ended up with a thousand projects on the list and it started to overwhelm the system if you will for the plan so but to get more concrete I think what's a lot of this is getting pushed out through regulation you have heard Secretary Moore talk a couple times in the legislature that 90% of achieving our clean water objectives are going to be done through people complying with their permits so those are the ag BMPs the wastewater the stormwater MS4 permits and the MRGP the municipal roads general permit I don't know if that number is exactly accurate but at least that's the sense that is coming from the agency right now and so in that regulatory permit framework they are basically putting the obligation or prioritization on to the municipalities Dan referenced a couple times the MS4 is doing the flow restoration plans and the foster control plans those municipalities have to figure out how do we get to the target and what projects do they want to prioritize to get there so those things I think we have a confidence are being prioritized municipally and so it's more of a bottoms up here's what needs to be done that makes the most sense biggest bang for the bucket type things municipally and then we've been working with towns on the municipal roads general permit to do the same kind of thing for all the rural towns that permit looking at where the erosion is happening and trying to prioritize which project should happen first and the statesman putting some money behind that other v-trans funds better roads grants so I feel pretty good about that piece so to sort of translate that into you know how do you get from being identified in a priority area broadly to a specific project being required and it being a partnership effort to come up with the funding where the states at the table to help but at some point not if there's a thousand projects to hit the target and we're just sort of narrowly looking at the low hanging fruit potentially we run out of those and we get to unfunded large required projects and I'm just kind of curious so what I'm taking from it is if you're broadly identified as in a priority area or having a priority impact to be addressed expect any associated water associated permits to be looked at through this context this is providing the lens for a permit renewal which is a separate process but if it's a priority expect that a project will be required of renewal I guess that's what I'm trying to get to I have not heard them talk about using this in that kind of permit context that you're referring to it I've only heard them talk about using this as as long as your project that you came up with locally as a priority is consistent with this then it would be appropriate for funding and this is honestly a little frustrating conversation that I've been having for a couple years now with the agency that has done an analysis investment between the plan and these projects unless the municipality has taken it on locally and we've been fortunate to be able to do some of that and that's also what we're doing with stormwater master plans is trying to look at that townwide what are the priorities what makes the most sense to do and locally generate it but statewide that is not necessarily happening to sort of pick a concrete example if the authors of a report based on identify a priority project and place that on the list if you're the town where that piece of land exists expect that to be a conversation about implementing it I do not think that they have really gone down to that level they're not using it so it's an aspirational project list and you'll see even it's more objectives you know categorical if you will strategy level than individual projects down there just really I think mostly came from local efforts whether it was a watershed group or the municipality I have not at least I'm not aware where DEC has tried to dictate projects I was just focusing on one statement in particular on page 72 where it talks about identifying the highest priority stream segments so the highest priority stream segments in the basin have been assessed will be revisited as needed and have been added to the table and listed online in the watershed projects database so it's sort of the nature of the watershed projects database that's where rubber meets the road with specific projects and I just couldn't divine from this whether that was bubbling up from towns and MS4 is doing it anyway or if this is the planning process listing the projects and designating them themselves so it just seems like a distinction the towns will want to be aware of I mean once this is adopted it conforms with our understanding we sort of lose the opportunity to have that discussion other comments, questions Chris just a technical thing the Winooski basin doesn't include Charlotte at all but it'd be good to at least include the name Charlotte like the on that map on any of the maps of Hinesburg but Charlotte doesn't show up at all even though it's not in the watershed but you ought to put the name of the town there go back to that other no you had it the first all those other maps that show the basin oh this one? yeah and the next one where it actually shows it has names of all the towns oh this one? no other direction back more at the end these are all DEC maps these are all DEC maps okay well then you should make the comments I mean if that's what we're supposed to be doing is making the comments the other thing is is that the estimated percent hydrological activity by town I believe that that is for the entire town this chart but some of the charts say that it's within the basin and some of them are just for the whole town so it should be labeled that way okay what table is that? no the number of the table table figure 23 thanks so all those tables need to be saying whether they're talking about the basin or the town itself okay and the mysterious town is sure I'll answer it you don't have any water that's tactical I did not get a chance to look really closely at the whole report so I'm basing a lot of what I'm seeing here and in the comments and one of the tables you had up there showed that agriculture was a really significant reduction 80% which is like the largest category but throughout your comments and discussions and everything we saw here the only thing I saw in terms of the mention of agriculture was just the last page of the best management practices and implementation does this whole thing just is that all I talk about it or is there a larger portion in here that you talk about that that we just haven't commented on there is an extensive discussion of agricultural loading there are several maps like this related to ag and more detail because even though we're not necessarily a primarily agricultural area it is still a good part of our economy and as we talked about earlier there still is a lot of agriculture there and we just have someone on our commission now so I think we might want to at least try to look at that and provide some comments because we sort of seem to just ignore it all together we're going to have another crack at this next month so this is sort of a preview of coming attractions anything further seeing none thank you very much Dan for the October's discussion next item on the agenda is Clean Water Advisory Committee Membership so I am going to ask to hand out memo so I got mentioned in the last conversation but we formed a Clean Water Advisory Committee two or three years ago now and added them to our bylaws formally the language up at the top of the memo here tells you what was decided at the time as the membership of the quack which is really the 19 municipalities a board member Don is the representative of the board on the quack those organizations, the university ANR the city trans and the airport aside from ANR which is obviously the regulatory agency here the other three are MS4 permittees as in addition to the urban suburban towns so that's why they're members of the committee and then the last bullet is other voting or non-voting members as deemed appropriate by the RPC so at the end of August when I got the we have a Dan mentioned this we have an agreement contract with DEC to facilitate participation in water quality work but it's particularly the basin plans and so we got a a sentence was added in there to give some context to that that contract is not unique to shannon county RPC that is a statewide scope of work and they are I think trying to get some consistent process and representation going on around the state in these conversations and I think I get into this further this is commentary from me we are unusual in our quack compared to the other RPCs and not having the conservation district or watershed associations as members of their quack they may call it something different than a quack might be their natural resources committee or something but and so this language was added to this agreement this year trying to get us all consistent statewide doing this and another dynamic in background for this I think is building credibility in the legislature that the decisions that are coming out of RPCs are well balanced and are inclusive and reflect all the voices around water quality in the region we were pretty unique when we started up our quack I think we were the first ones to have one in the state it's also we're very unique in the MS4 situation because we have so many of our towns with MS4 permits and so there was kind of a sense when we set the quack up and those of you with better recollections may please pipe in but I think to keep it as very municipally focused because of all the permit requirements on our municipalities so I'm trying to say this with no no emotion and no blame or anything just what happened so you know so that's kind of some of the background in the two page the thing that starts comments regarding quack membership received a sense of work packet was mailed so the first number and there's nine communications here and the first one is from me to my quack friends noting just that I found myself in an awkward position because at the end of the quack meeting as you saw and there really wasn't a lot of time for this discussion the quack really wasn't prepared to make a decision and said they wanted to keep the membership as is until we have and can establish some guidelines for membership and I found myself in a difficult situation because this contract language kind of says we're going to have these other parties participate in our basin planning vote and as you just saw our basin planning vote is coming up in a few weeks and this is you know not the way anybody likes to do business you know it wasn't we'd have a lot of time to make a change if we want we either need to do it tonight or not do it or push it off you know for another time I don't know I got asked the question of the quack you know what's DEC going to do to us if we don't I don't think there's a gun or a fine associated with this but I don't think it's in the big picture the situation we want to be in in terms of the inclusive conversations at our advisory committees and positioning ourselves with regard to water quality going forward so I'm not going to review all these comments but just to let you know that I did get the comments based on the comments I got back I'm proposing a revised staff recommendation so at the bottom of that you can see highlighted in yellow are some of the things I picked up from my quack friends that would either clarify or maybe try to provide some guidelines so the first was it wasn't very clear about whether these are voting members or non-voting members my recommendation is that they do be voting members we're talking here about the friends of the Winooski the Lewis Creek Association and the Winooski Natural Resource Conservation District being added as members as voting members the previous recommendation that got sent to you wasn't the quack maybe develop guidelines here I'm suggesting that maybe the board actually set interim guidelines to have a backstop in place right away because there was some fear expressed about we get a lot of other non-profits or other organizations that maybe are not real partners with our municipalities but have other interests so I'm suggesting that we propose interim guidelines or institute interim guidelines for future quack membership the first two were in the original recommendation the primary focus is on watersheds that are within Chittin County number two there are established non-profit organizations with a track record of participating as partners with our municipalities on water quality and this is between Marty Ehrlich and James Charard some more detail about water quality project education monitoring and or implementation the third one came from James Charard who is the storm water person in Williston that they are not political or legal advocacy groups and then the fourth one kind of came out of some more conversation actually with Dennis Lutz this morning which is not reflecting these comments that it would help if the municipalities could actually nominate organizations that they are partnering with and so suggesting that there would be at least two municipalities nominating an organization based upon their partnerships with the organization and then finally that these guidelines can be updated by the quack as they determine in the future so I'm trying to thread a strange needle that I hadn't had to confront too many times in my ten years here of not having an advisory committee fully on board but trying to put the RPC and the board in a decent position with regards to making particularly a recommendation on the base and plan for the Winooski next month and I guess the last thing I'll note is we're talking about inviting these organizations to the quack table they may or may not participate and I'm going to feel like Jesus we're having a lot of anxiety here and they didn't even show up that may very well happen and people will make fun of me then but that may happen so anyway I just this is the I'm trying to fit a solution here with this recommendation I'm happy to take questions or comments Don I think Jeff had his hand up first well let's start again I just want to reiterate a couple of my comments first of all the quack had all of five minutes perhaps to consider this so it's no surprise that there wasn't a vote by acclamation personally I think that the we're taking too narrow a view of who deserves a seat at the table I think it should be broader as broad as possible that said there are plenty of other avenues for organizations or individuals to comment on something like the tactical base and plan other than sitting around at the quack so we're not really depriving anybody of a voice I don't think by keeping a narrow focus finally this is the first I've seen or thought about it I really do have to object to number four here on the criteria that kind of smacks to me of a secret society kind of thing where you have to be nominated by your buddies to get in but if you don't you can't I think that's a little bit too exclusive to serve as a real rational criterion for asking somebody to come and sit at the table I mean as I understand it that was intended to address the desire to make sure that these are organizations that have historically worked collaboratively with municipalities that's already included in item two so four seems to be a belt of suspenders if the substance that is sought to be addressed by four is what is stated in two how important is four to that it was just a notion I think that I think gave the municipal members of the quack a little more security I think what really is frustrating and was frustrating to the quack and if you read all those comments you'll see some of that come out is the external force to expand the membership it wasn't something that either got talked about at this table or their table to say organically it would really be nice to have these members and I think this was a notion you're right on to make sure the additional members came up from internal conversation not external just a point of clarification on the voting versus the ex officio membership I just don't know what the thinking was behind that I mean I think the thinking behind having people be ex officio versus voting was the voting members had the responsibility for implementation or the ones that could be expected to have to bear the fiscal consequences of doing things it's very easy for someone who doesn't have fiscal consequences to making recommendations to say yes without balancing whether or not it's affordable for the member community so in one respect I'm troubled by people who vote I want them to have skin in the game I don't want them to be able to just like we do school budgets contribution is capped by their income so it's easier for them to say yes to increases because they have bear no fiscal consequences to that and so I was wondering why like Jim Jutris for example his recommendation that it be ex officio didn't make it through the final cut because that could affect whether or not I support this or not yeah so I think you're getting to a good question about what does the quack vote on and what is there I'm sure I have a follow up after that uh oh you already knows and you know I think one of the primary roles of the quack is certainly the basin plan you know and it's hard for me to imagine well so and also let me put one piece out here which is what makes recommendations to this board none of these organizations have membership on this board and so the municipal concern of municipal control I think is still here at this table even if the quack membership expands so I'll put that out there first the secondly and I think the focus in this recommendation about these guidelines focusing on the partnership was really so that they are organizations that they may not be financing as in how the municipality uses their taxpayer funds to finance a project but they these three organizations are organizations that do apply for grants and acquire funds to do projects sometimes they're with a rain garden at a school or things like that so they to that extent the reason that I was proposing them as voting members is because they are actively bringing money into the region to put into water quality projects and then and therefore have you know and are talking with people about which project should happen they've been active partners in our stormwater master planning trying to help the community decide on priorities very much more in a partnership and so I I guess stop that if they don't have a voting membership so my sensibility was to go a little further extend that hand and say sure have a vote here you're three out of 19 or 3 out of 22 with 19 towns and so now like the airport are they ex-officer or do they vote they have a vote there are there any currently non-voting members or is everyone a voting member yeah and everyone is a voting member right now and again I kind of get back to they're not this committee doesn't spend money they don't I'm looking at Don to see if he can remember of any situation I honestly can't think of a lot of things that we have actually voted on and of those few that we have voted on I can't recall any close or even non-unanimous votes so I think the voting is really a almost a phony issue you still have your follow-up yeah and I've been on this I've been on the MPO since like 2001 this is the absolute worst acronym I've ever seen come up with for any I mean call it CWAC or something like that but quack it's like water and they go quack this is the absolute this is the absolute worst acronym I have ever heard associated with this organization I'll duly note it and it shall reflect John I got a worse one I'll tell you after alright first I would if adding three was anywhere close to half I'd share Jeff's opinion but given the number how it works out having some more advocacy people at the table with a bunch of bureaucrats isn't necessarily a bad thing my real question here is is there a definition of political and legal advocacy groups simply because most groups that are involved in some sort of environmental charge they're there as an education group and that education is technically lobbying and that's they come to people with ideas and they try to influence public policy through the work that they do that's kind of their charge that they exist so I think I understand what three is trying to get at I read the comments and I'm aware of what's in there but I'm just wondering if we're trying to solve what I would consider to be a real issue with wording that's going to potentially backfire on us because I don't know what that but what does that really mean part of my thinking is this is something to put in place on an interim basis and then I would anticipate that the quack would take the time to actually think through some of those and come up with a set of more permanent guidelines that are a little bit more rigorous in that regard Dan just to follow up on this you're hearing what John said about it's only three organizations or groups but that's to say that we're capping the quack or the committee at this number of board members what happens down the road some entity, some group comes on as Jim Jutris states in his comments to Charlie I suggest this in the event you are challenged by another group that may meet their criteria and establish it's just a slippery slope as I'm saying Jeff I agree with Jeff that you're setting a precedent and it opens the door for more and I just see it as a potential problem I think out of that conversation kind of grew the more of the club rule of two municipal members having to nominate you because you are a good partner that was kind of the backstop on that now ultimately any other members would have to be determined by this commission based upon a recommendation of the quack and there's no entitlement not every organization that conforms with these criteria will get on there it just says that anybody who's going to be recommended for inclusion has to meet that so ultimately it comes down to this commission having the ability and right to determine who is or is not and I take that to mean that if one of these member organizations either does not work productively or falls out of compliance with our criteria whatever they may be they can be removed from the committee as well so ultimately we have that control and I think we need to have that Bart? Thank you so you know when I saw the comment or I don't sit on the quack I thought the final bullet here actually comes close to capturing it the other voting amount voting members as may be determined appropriate by the commission after a recommendation from the quack so it seemed like if we just follow that I presume that would mean that a majority of the quack members would vote people up or down and then the recommendation would come here part of my you know I'm reluctant to get into the level of detail that's here and would trust the quack to make recommendations based on what makes sense and then it comes to the commission what is the reason for having interim guidelines as opposed to just saying these three are on for now quack work on some guidelines that definitely could be I was really trying to just fast forward the conversation at least one step to like throw something on the table for them to work with just in case and partly also addressing the fear of like there's going to be another organization that heard about this and asked in two weeks well I want to be on the October agenda so I guess I was trying to help the quack a little bit having some interim backstop in case that fear came to life which I can't imagine but maybe it will Jeff Rob go first I mean he hasn't spoken you gotta jump a hill I just want to say I have my hand up I'm saying he needs to get his hand up too I have my hand up I just want to say I support them being voting members like these are the organizations that are out in the community the quack is simply making recommendations to the board here more likely to participate if they feel like they have a seat at the table that has a little bit of power and that their input is going to be respected as opposed to being only a non-voting member I'm not saying they're not going to be respected but it just feels more of a part of the decision making process especially if there are no other non-voting members right now so this is a new category I would support them being voting members if we had guidelines if it was fully vetted by the quack I don't believe it was based on the comments that have come in I would support adding the organizations as non-voting members and ask the quack for recommendation on whether they should be voting members and if the quack decides that they should be voting members then I might change my mind but I can't support the criteria as put forward making them voting members especially since we don't have guidelines because essentially what we are doing is dealing with an optics problem we don't have enough representation or we feel we might get dinged for it and I don't want to do something like this without having it thoroughly vetted and if the guidelines well developed and supported by the CWAC so I can't bring myself to say it now so I just I feel like we've run out of time we need to do something and we're doing this because we're fearful that we have a problem with the state in terms of how it looks and doing something like this without having something thoroughly vetted in a way in which we are giving a non-municipal entity a chance to vote on something and I understand about inclusiveness I understand that some may believe that the voting is a non sequitur but this hasn't gone through our usual process and so therefore I can't support it at this time I could support it next month if it goes through the process just to note on that like the University of Vermont is on there and that's not a municipal member like it's where do we draw the line do we just say that only municipal members can have a vote we're a municipal service organization and we can expand our environment when we do when we do it correctly and thoughtfully based on putting our executive director on the spot for taking all the responsibility himself I do think this is more than optics this is actually a term of our grant agreement which we committed to and indicated we're going to comply with and one of those requirements is that these groups participate and we are the only RPC that doesn't currently have participation because we are a unique circumstance our collection of municipalities is in a very different position than is the case with the other RPCs but so there are it's more than just an optics issue but I absolutely hear what you're saying Jeff, Mike the only question is I'm looking at this and the excerpt from the bylaws on the quack membership the last one I'm wondering if we're moving too fast I think that I think what was going to happen was the quack whatever you want to call it was going to look at this and make a recommendation but they didn't get a chance to if I understand correctly so do we really should we be stepping back and letting them this last bullet says determined by the board after recommendations from the quack and we haven't gotten a recommendation from the quack on this so should we back up a minute was a leave it as it is we are reversing from the quack is what I'm saying so according to the bylaws should we their recommendation was to keep it as is to be clear I'm saying something 180 degrees different than the quack but I thought there wasn't enough time we got the grand agreement a month ago or four weeks ago and we have to vote on the basin plan next month so that absolutely I'm pushing the situation in a very uncomfortable way me a couple and that would be best but for the fact that we're voting on the basin plan next month and this grand agreement for this fiscal year says that our recommendation on the basin plan will include these other organizations that's what really hung me up was how are we executing on that will there be a penalty we'll survive I'm sure but if we can I'd like to let's see if we can move this discussion from the abstract to the concrete is there a motion with respect to this particular matter Don I would move that we suggest to the quack that Friends of Loonewski Loose Creek Association and Loonewski NRCD be invited to participate or be advanced to the board for approval to participate and secondly the second part of that direct the quack to come up with a set of criteria for future recommendations for added members that's where you understood the first part of that well basically invite I'm not going to go no, no, no I would originally thinking I would just say let's invite those three organizations to be members but seeing this in the bylaw that we seem to be in agreement that the mechanism is that the quack brings the nominees to the board to then be invited to serve on the quack we were highest on the food chain though we can make a recommendation to the quack that they come back to the board with something that I'll rephrase first part that those three organizations Friends of Loonewski Loose Creek Association and Loonewski NRCD be invited to participate as full members of the quack and number two that the quack be directed to come up with a reasonable policy to guide future nominees for additions I'll second let's go John's friends John's the second and Don's the first for the motion and that the quack come up with reasonable policies and criteria to propose future additions I just want to say I'm going to vote no because I don't believe they should be voting members until it's fully vetted Any further discussion on the motion? No Sorry, unless the three organizations but I will in the motion so those three organizations be invited to participate as full members of the quack and that the quack come up with reasonable policies and criteria to I think they'd be instructed to it was a directive rather than a reasonable policies and criteria the question would come to me anyway nominations OK Can I just ask for clarification is that to come up with criteria to present to the board or they come up with criteria and that's that I just didn't understand that part I think it's ultimately something that would come back to the commission wouldn't it Well the board the board I think the board needs the full board needs to approve additions Right, I mean it says Other members may be as determined appropriately by the RPC if there's a policy that's developed that's going to guide the quack going forward with respect to these advocacy group members I think we need to take a look at that policy here because ultimately that's going to be guiding whatever recommendation we're to come to us Right, that's not what the motion actually said So I would propose an amendment to the motion that it amended as described by the chair Or is that a friendly amendment Repeat that amendment There are two people talking in the morning basically that it comes to I think the amendment would be for the friendly amendment would be that they would not be instructed just to come up with a criteria but that they would propose the criteria to the board to the full board I'll accept that as a Are you okay with that John? Is the second? Yeah, I thought that's what the motion was about It's making it clear so that we don't get any Before we vote if I could make one comment and Dan and Charlie correct me if I'm wrong but I'm notwithstanding this last bullet I'm not entirely certain that in the bylaws or whatever administrative words that describe the quack and its operation I'm not even sure that voting versus non-voting is distinguished in those bylaws because we don't there are no non-voting members now I'm not sure there is such a type of membership If you look at the top though in the bylaws it talks about other voting or non-voting members but what it doesn't say is are the ones above that voting or non-voting so it doesn't really it's referenced in passing once but it's not really it may be there I excerpted the minimum so there is more language in the bylaws around us but honestly it has never come up to my knowledge there are no non-voting members now how many how many non-municipal members are there three four let me let me try to let me try to make it so it's something I could vote for would you accept a friendly amendment that says that the number of non-municipal members will not exceed six that might be for the quack to talk about the group to vote but I'm not going to make that as an arbitrary I wouldn't accept it as a I'm trying to get to yes I'm trying to get to yes Any further questions comments? Yes, Andrea? Well first I'd like to disclose that I am a board member of the Lowes Creek Association and some of this has come about voting on the Winooski Tactical Basin Plan and Lowes Creek Association works in the watershed towns of Charlottes, Shelburne and Hinesburg and Chittenden County and then also towns in Addison County and none of the there's a very small portions in both Shelburne and Hinesburg that are part of the Tactical Basin Plan I would say that the Clean Water Committee would my sense is that there has been a long standing Clean Water Committee that has been really the MS4 towns and that it is very important for the rural towns to be able to participate in that and that the municipal staff for our rural communities really is not able to participate in that an awful lot of projects that have happened in Charlottes, Shelburne and Hinesburg have been because of non-profits working with the town but basically being the staff support to write the grants not only for education projects but for implementation projects ranging from $70,000 projects to $2,000 projects for $400,000 projects so I think it is valuable to have friends of the Winooski the conservation district at the table because it will bring a more robust conversation for the issues that are affecting the rural communities because I think our representatives from those rural communities are in a different league than the MS4 towns I have a point of clarification on that the meetings of the Clean Water Advisory Committee are always separate from at least on paper from the meetings of the MS4 community so there are other people at the quack meetings that are not MS4 already but I take your point very well I just want to be clear I'm resonating with the bending of the white bylaw bylaw is the reason not to vote for it but at the same time I'm hearing that there isn't time to take it back to the quack because the grant says do such and such and have people on such and such for when we approve this next month where we both approve 3D members to it but at the same time we're voting on the plan is there really that emergency and time pressure that is there or is the plan really not going to be voted on after public forum October 2nd not just an informal meeting so our next monthly meeting is going to be our final vote on the taxable plan so that this really is an administrative fix there is a quack meeting before the next commission but the commission would have to then approve the recommendation but I'm hoping to work on all the bylaws now given the timeline here we don't have the ability to send this back to the quack get them to come back to us let us decide how we're going forward and then have the quack review the tactical plan we're missing one month I just wanted to zoom back and say just from my perspective it comes down to what this board this board is the authority for all these questions to approving the membership we want to encourage broader participation in those discussions to inform our discussions we have a limited time to do that this is 3 out of 19 on the table today and we're going to undertake a more deliberate thoughtful process to come up with guidelines with the full input of the current membership of the quack for us to consider and then direct them in their future nomination so I'm 100% comfortable with the motion on the table as amended I think it represents the broad inclusive conversation the convening role this board has and I don't see any of the important considerations for the future I don't see them really having any substantive impact on the outcome of the quack deliberation so I'm fully supportive of this if there are no further comments we'll take a motion vote on the motion all those in favor of the motion will you maybe helpful at this point to re-read the motions it's been a while no more cookies for you after this I made a motion that those three organizations be invited to state the members of the quack and the quackings to come up with reasonable policies and guidelines for future nominations however there was a friendly amendment that the quack would propose criteria to the board for future nominations thank you call a question all in favor of the motion say aye aye all opposed say nay aye's appear to have a aye left handed members of the all right thank you very much folks that was a good discussion to have move on to item number 10 comment letter on there was no irony in that I meant that comment letter on DC draft storm water permitting rule continue the way to am quick on this this is the memo reflects that comment letter came from our MS4 subcommittee developed a comment letter of again all permities, nine municipalities and the three what are called non-traditional MS4s the comment letter is highly detailed I won't pretend to know all the aspects of it but keeping with the policy whether it's the quack or the MS4 the idea is to develop a letter ideally there's enough time and in this case there was 60 day notice or even more for it to be able to work through our committee process up to you guys so the committee developed this letter a lot of it is inside baseball type comments about storm water but there it is so if you adopted this letter it says basically thanks for allowing us to comment please consider these comments developed by our committee to choose anybody have questions or comments about the comment letter regarding the new storm water rule I just have a question of clarification number 22 section 22 22 under section 22 page 3 are we really suggesting that we have them double that they're suggesting by that comment it says it says please provide a detailed analysis on how the agency determined the $10,000 per acre pervious service was accurate amount to charge as an impact fee and then we put in the town of Williston things where the average retrofit comes out to 19-1 and it came across to me that we were saying you're not charging enough we're talking about you should double the per acre fee and I just was wondering how that was responsive to our communities my interpretation I don't know if somebody knows better but this is an impact fee on private developers not a fee on municipalities and so I think municipalities were concerned if the private developer wasn't paying an appropriate fee it was going to be underfunded what needed to get done because I think those fees may roll back either into DEC two meetings from now we'll talk about what the housing is getting one perspective here I understand I just wanted to make sure that we were proposing to double the fee essentially with our comment further questions or comments just to note there's one type on my part of the footer should say comment letter on draft storm water permitting rules so I'll fix that before the letter goes out lots of boilerplate anything else is there a motion then to approve the letter for the staff recommendation so moved thank you Mike is there a second on seconds any further discussion hearing none all in favor say aye aye all opposed no the ayes have it next up the national highway system and changes there to basin you're handling this Marshall and I will be handling this for the mayor here like that spirit alrighty good evening everyone I'm Marshall Distal I'm a transportation planner here with the CCRPC and I will be presenting with Jason Charest on our Chittenden County national highway system updates we have a very short presentation so you could keep comments or questions to the end that would be greatly appreciated so the overview so Congress approved the establishment of the NHS to focus federal resources on roadways that support the nation's economy defense and mobility to give you a little idea of the scope of the NHS roughly 90% of Americans live within 5 miles of one of these routes so there are three components of the NHS in Chittenden County we have interstates other NHS routes and intermodal connectors so I-89 and 189 would make up the interstate NHS in Chittenden County while other NHS routes would be we call regionally significant principal arterials so like US Route 2 or roadways that are also classified as freeways like 289 and then lastly we have intermodal connectors so those are NHS routes that connect to intermodal transportation facilities so rail stations airports and bus terminals so why does the NHS matter so the NHS is really intended to be this unified system of roadways that sort of connect population centers with intermodal facilities and major travel destinations to support intermodal transportation and enhance economic development so essentially the NHS is highlighting the most important routes for efficiently moving people and goods throughout the nation so it's a nationwide aspect so in terms of funding the bottom line is that we don't really know if there will be funding implications related to performance measures but we do know that there's likely to be a penalty if we do not meet our pavement and bridge condition targets on the NHS I'll shift off to Jason Thanks Marshall so our previous transportation bill federal transportation bill known as MAP 21 when it was signed into legislation it wholly incorporated a whole classification of roadways known as principal arterials onto the national highway system so with the stroke of a pen if you will about 44 miles of new NHS routes were added in Chittenden County when MAP 21 was signed into law and since then V-Trans has gone through the process of removing all of these designations outside of Chittenden County and it's not just V-Trans but many other DOTs in this country have undertaken this effort as well in consultation with the regional planning commissions in those regions clarification noted yes in consultation with the regional planning commissions I was getting there so while they were undertaking this process with the regional planning commissions we were in the process of updating our functional classification system and you may recall updates to that came before this in March of 2017 and the recommendations that we were looking at or the changes that we were looking at to our functional classification system at the time could have had implications to the national highway system so we asked that we hold off on making any changes to the NHS at that time so that we could finish our functional classification updates so we had done that and we have done that and now we are here at the NHS and lastly on this slide just to give you a sense of where we've been and where the CCRPC staff recommendation lands in terms of the total NHS mileage in Chittenden County before map 21 was signed we had about 121 miles after map 21 was signed I went up to 165 and tonight our recommendation would come somewhere in the middle at about 137 and so before we get to the actual recommendation just wanted to go through the process that we have laid out before us so we went to the TAC back in June and they made their recommendation which should be noted and it's really explicitly detailed in your packet that tonight's staff recommendation I'm just going to pause I feel safer that's amazing you don't want to take a tear to the night train alright of course today we had no vacuum cleaner upstairs I think they're working on you you missed it but we had it earlier during the NPO orientation we're going to buy them in a ORIC I'll just take this from the top so we went before the TAC with a recommendation in June and they made their recommendation and it should be noted that the staff recommendation tonight differs slightly from what the TAC recommended and the subtle change is detailed in the packet and happy to go into that after we finish up I only have one more slide after this and from there we brought a recommendation to the executive committee in August which is before you tonight for hopefully your approval after tonight assuming there is an approval of sorts we would submit the official request to VTRANS and should be also noted that we've been in consult with VTRANS throughout this process so they're on board with the recommendation that we're proposing tonight and they would then submit their official request to the federal highway headquarters in Washington D.C. for review and approval so here's our recommendation our recommended national highway system map on the right and we have proposed what is a two part motion if you will that is almost verbatim to what's in your packet tonight with one subtle change that we had overlooked the board accepts the final CCRPC staff recommendation as presented and this is the subtle change here with the additional intermodal connection to the Burlington downtown transit center and that's something that we had discussed with ATT&CK but we had just forgot to include as part of this presentation and also with the understanding that this system can be reviewed and changes can be made at any time as circumstances change and the population the system evolves and secondly to request that V-TRANS consider these changes as presented for submittal to FHWA and with that we can entertain questions I did before you know the two maps side by side? I do I was kind of a reserve slide to show the changes I was sort of a back pocket thing but inside so and I think that last point is important this is not intended to be a planning document this isn't a they waited this isn't intended to be a forward-looking planning document this is intended to reflect the transportation infrastructure as it exists now and so as circumstances warrant in the future changes can and should be made any comments or questions? Andrea I think this is tied to the number of miles or anything that we had on this there is a national highway funding program but it's not restricted to it so this doesn't affect the funding and really yes and no there is a little bit of a nuance to that as if we're going to put in if the feds are putting in performance standards the feds will accept however the performance measures get done the feds do tie their purse strings to meeting certain standards so when the state gets around to putting a budget together on what roads and what bridges and what infrastructure is going to have money thrown at it it's going to throw money at the ones it needs to to meet the performance standards so there's no extra money coming in for anything but what I think it does mean is that VTRANS and the legislature will pay particular attention to this network to make sure they meet those performance standards which generally will mean they'll get priority for funding so that's a little bit different than the way you phrased it but that's kind of what this does is that we're going to be looking at some more of those transportation performance measures and those are going to be tied directly to the NHS and so to the extent how you grade on performance measures is tied in any way to funding availability and prioritization it does have an indirect effect on it yes twice it's overdue it seems like what we heard earlier was that there was a preference in our training earlier the preference is towards or leans towards things that are in the highway system and that's sort of reflecting what you were saying and that there's a slight priority to put money here you got to remember that the feds are interested in a subset of roads particularly not just all the higher road network they have a particular interest in pieces of it so they sort of look after that I don't want to call it backdoor because I think it's much more upfront than that but this is the way that they kind of wink at you on where you need to put a good chunk of your dollars that's what I'm thinking and with that in mind why would we want to reduce the size of our national highway system and cut out those areas from that one bit of priority for future funding I suspect Inge is going to have something so I don't agree entirely with what John is saying because it isn't about the priorities the important thing is that we get the national highway system down to a sustainable network of roads that meet the federal criteria and many of these roads don't meet the criteria that's why your staff is making the recommendation that they're making what took place in map 21 was adding on all these roads that quite frankly it just makes no sense to have them on there they stop at municipal boundaries they connect to nothing they don't even meet the criteria for NHS designation so the important activity that we're engaged here is creating a network that's sustainable these are roadways that we're going to have to do additional data collection on you're going to have to do additional data collection we're going to have to develop performance measures we hope we never get to a situation where we don't meet the performance measures because we set them and you set them so if we're doing our jobs and doing them correctly the performance measures should be something that's reasonably achievable for us so we don't ever we're trying to avoid that the problem is if you spread this network and make it this grand thing that's been sustainable for us to do the necessary data collection analyses to support what the performance measures should be and I do agree with that we should make sure that what we have on the books is the proper network that all makes sense could I ask you to clarify the comment earlier tonight that said it seems to tend towards national highway system so we're going to be talking about performance measures in a second but you know I can just jump ahead and just basically there's some specific measures that they have penalties if you don't meet the targets for those measures and those measures are very specifically about pavement and bridges on the NHS if you have if you don't meet your target for poor pavements or poor bridges on the NHS there is a penalty associated with that right so that penalty says that the state receives funding to address NHS issues in the past we transferred a lot of DOTs have the ability to flex that funding right to take funding from the NHS and put it in the service transportation program which basically you can just give money to all federal aid roads so that ability might be not eliminated but minimized if you don't meet your targets because you need to start achieving your targets you have performance measures you have targets on your NHS and you need to do that so that ability might be minimized I don't think it's going to be terminated the other thing that you need to think about there are going to be some implications whether you meet the targets or not the other thing you need to think about is that we're not getting more money into the system I don't know, I believe that the money that we get for the NHS is $220 million we're not going to get more of that so the more miles we have on the NHS we're diluting that pool of money to actually fix the roads that we need to fix so that's the way you can think about it too there are going to be some implications but also we need to focus on the high priority roads in our region because we don't have enough money to fix everything another base, two more I'm assuming that outside of this map we basically have the interstates and we're outside they do go to the county boundaries I just wanted to verify that once again, Sherlock's not there the second thing is just a question most of this proposed NHS is pretty much what's the right word has a duplicity in it where you've got a backup route going from one place to another which makes sense and the only place I see that there might be something missing and I'm wondering why it was cut out is the connection from Winooski to Burlington we're now west of the interstate there's nothing at all there where there was so that you have two potential routes to get through there so I'm just wondering what the criteria was for taking that particular one out if you know what I'm talking about I think it was just a we saw it as redundant and just not necessary to keep in there I had a similar question it makes sense to me that there's not enough money to cover all the arterials in there before it adds a burden in terms of additional analysis and red tape and record keeping for something that's not going to be I always ask is it like the original sets where you throw every potential project that could ever get funded onto a list in the hope that you've maximized your options for spreading the dollars around in this case there's a penalty for doing that in terms of the administrative overhead so I get the idea of streamlining it but I do wonder is there an eligibility question where for some strategic roads it may be worth keeping it in the system just to preserve eligibility that might not otherwise be there so that's one question to Jim's last comment about the redundancy of major north south east west routes you know we did add Pine Street the Boulevard segment was in both but we've added the Pine Street north south connection to the train station and I'm just curious if the goal was to streamline why did that one segment get added just curious added it just got modified based on the changes that the Champlain Parkway has taken shape over time because I mean if you get dinged for having lousy pavement quality start your work it's a fresh pave now but man that's not going to last something to think about the routes that have been removed like take for instance Route 15 in Essex I mean we now that we have our roadways meeting our performance metrics or at least as far as we know Lenny will talk about it more we have the ability to flex our NHS funds over these routes so if there is a need we can absolutely meet that need but if we enter into the situation where we're including these routes and then you know degrading the overall performance and then losing that ability to flex funds that we may end up in a situation where there's a route that needs it and it can't get it that all made perfect sense to me except why include Pine Street if that's the call it's the Champlain Parkway it's the Champlain Parkway the alignment that got or the piece that got added is the last chunk where it's running on Pine Street so you added Pine Street just saying there's no benefit to having roads that aren't going to really get federal highway dollars why add one that will guaranteed a lousy pavement quality more often than not after the current it's technically not on yet it's unbuilt I think it also has to deal with the fact that the Amtrak train is going to be where it's going to be in Burlington and that's a road that leads there if you're coming up to the city so it's sort of a way to identify the road that at least from a federal level they predict you should use once the Champlain Parkway is built we could then actually consider removing the intermodal connector from exit 14 so that's something we could think about I'm going to ask one of my typical Jeff questions I never thought we'd add a trillion dollars to the national debt in the ninth year of an economic upturn like we did last December has anybody given any thought to add another trillion dollars to the national debt in the next well maybe 2019 leading up to the 2020 elections and they decide that well we'll take the federal funds and let your market to the national highway system for improvements and are we doing something to reduce our national highway system network and I understand all the reasons for it in a world that doesn't change I completely understand why we're doing it but are we potentially being sort of excited if something like that happens or has anybody even thought about that and it's been dismissed or what I asked the same question last year but I feel like I need to ask it again and I fully appreciate and understand the reasons for doing this and the good thoughtful staff input but if anything I've learned over the last three years the world changes and it changes pretty rapidly and are we guilty of doing something maybe by doing this that we might 18 24 months from now feel bad about well the one comment I have my understanding is that this has been an effort that's also been engaged in across the country to sort of readjust after map 21 and getting the NHS system back into like the position that was my point is is that under current the way things are going this doesn't affect the amount of money that we get as a matter of fact it could be a penalty but what happens if that circumstance changes and maybe it's not a big chance maybe it's not a big thing but if they add another trillion dollars in national debt and put it into infrastructure projects and they take a quarter of that a third of it half of it and put it in the roads and they say oh we'll just put it in the national highway system are we being short-sighted I'm just asking it rhetorically I fully expect everybody to say no you know it's foolish and everything but you know let's say we hope not I didn't know whether anybody looked at that I didn't I just have some conversation or I mean there's even been conversations and Amy's looking at me like I got three heads again but I mean there's been all kinds of crazy conversations in DC maybe the federal government should get out of this business of cash for everybody is that somebody here? okay thanks you know so you know I think we did have some conversation about trying to walk our way around that but at the end it still felt like a reasonable place to land but no guarantees in life for sure especially now I would just say that I think it's a fair comment or a fair thought I just follow directions and I I I was to establish a system that is present day it makes sense from a perspective most of these do not and we retain a couple which are the only ones in the state that have been retained well and added some I mean for instance the approach into Arlington from 189 there's some large infrastructure projects coming down the I mean the circulator I mean there's large projects on a route that we just subtracted so to Jeff's question I mean to me it comes down to a balancing of any administrative burden of leaving the list inflated that you could relieve by winnowing it and potential eligibility risk if there's a windfall and infrastructure week number 10 you know leads to something I mean I hear Jeff's point and that's the question is there's so much what now because it's just burdensome versus what the hell keep your options open maybe there's some formula that's pegged to miles I don't know well I think it's also it's not everyone takes out their crayons and comes up with whatever roads they want to have federal money for but there are specific criteria regarding intermodal connections and primary routes to get from point A to point B across the country that have to be met and it's just a matter of do which roads meet those criteria here and this is an effort at complying with it and again how wise the crite