Hi everybody and welcome to how Niantic Switch Pokémon go to use in Boi. My name is Lanna Nyakobi and I'm a server core infrastructure tech lead at Niantic. Who are we? Niantic is a leading AI technology company focused on exploring new applications for advanced hardware, wearable devices in particular, that merit the digital world and the physical world. Our mission is based on three key product principles. Mission and discovery of new places, exercise and real-world social interactions with other people. This mission has been our compass. It's paved the way for our consumer AR games, Ingress, Pokémon Go, Harry Potter. And that's what we are arguably best known for, but we're a lot, a whole lot more than that. Underpinning these games is a powerful technology platform, the Niantic real-world platform, which we've been investing in and evolving from the very beginning. Niantic real-world platform also supports social features, mapping and advanced AR. All the components needed to develop and publish a real-world AR game. As our platform grew to offer additional components and new games were published, we needed to adjust infrastructure to support the new workloads and complexity. Let's review our journey. Our journey took two parallel routes. One for unifying our service-to-service connectivity and the other to simplify and support our Edge Proxy. Let me start with a simpler one, how we unified our service-to-service connectivity and secured our backend services. In the beginning, our configuration was simple. Engines deploys our Edge Proxy routing traffic to the game servers. But as new services were developed and deployed, different routing configurations were created and defined by the dev teams. Those connections were passing through the front door using regional IPs helping not to hit the public internet. Others were using external services or infrastructure like VPC peering, which still required a gateway to be defined in the cluster. And we even had services sending data-to-data flow to update the game's data. This created several problems that we needed to address. This problem included the need for developers to add security and instrumentation to code, our inability to configure routes dynamically, lack of observability in alerting if instrumentation wasn't added to code, or the services indeed connected. And lastly, the need for new series during the team to learn all these technologies but have very little control over them resulting in maintenance mode. As a result, we focused our efforts in finding a solution that will isolate the connectivity configuration from the application and will enable us to address the rest of the issues. We decided to adopt Invoy Plus Fire for our cross-GCPs communication. The flexibility provided by this pair enabled us to support our different models from duplex mode to either pull or push and unified security with Federation for games and services. By creating a pool of gateways, we were also able to shift all services from using the Edge Proxy to using their dedicated, more secure endpoints. So we named our new project Service Gateway, mainly to distinguish it from service mesh that became a synonym for ISTIO in the company and caused a lot of confusion. What we loved about this approach was that there was no need for application code changes and we only had to do cleanup. In addition, the solution was cloud-native and ensure high availability. We used Gradle scripts with help charts to deploy and configure Invoy Inspire. And our measure performance was one million seconds of edit latency with max measure load of 20,000 requests per second per one virtual CPU, which was pretty good. One question you're probably wondering about was why we didn't adopt service mesh implementation for orchestration and management for the mesh. In one word, maturity. When looking at CMCF landscape map under service mesh, these are the graduated projects. These are the incubating projects, but most of the projects are still in sandback stage or not yet added to the map. When we started our journey, we investigated using ISTIO but decided to hold off for now due to complex configuration and breaking changes between versions. Looking at our next steps, with a future of increasing numbers of back-end services and games, it is obvious for us that we will need to find a solution for orchestration and management at scale. What we liked about shifting to Invoy was that the most of the tools under development were using Invoy as the proxy, so migrating to them should be an incremental step and we still had the option of using XDS in the meantime as our management tool. Let's review now our more interesting journey with Invoy as an edge proxy. I mentioned before that our game cluster deployment is simple, but while the deployment is simple, there were several things we wanted to address. Improving user experience when scaling was one of the goals and I will elaborate more about what this covers and why in a minute. But besides this issue, we also wanted to improve our monitoring and alerts, unify as much as possible our tools and data plane, and lastly support the company's goal in enabling external developers to create new games without exposing RIP. I would like to focus for a moment on the goal of improving user experience when scaling, mainly because this part of our architecture caused us some trouble. Here, the big question of course is why scaling created bad user experience. Problem lies in the proxy configuration and config map limitations. Our proxy configuration is tied very much into an IP. For every incoming request, the proxy is checking if the request URL has a prefix of an opaque ID. If one is found, the proxy matches that ID to a game server, removes the prefix and route the request accordingly. Requests without ID are round robin between the available game servers. We refer to the specific part of the configuration as the catch-all. In addition, our protocol supports HTTP and WebSockets requests. As a result, our configuration file can't fit into a Kubernetes config map and is deployed inside the proxy image. This problem is true for engines and invoices. Looking on the process of scaling up, we first increase the number of game servers replica. When all instances are happened healthy, we update the configuration of the routes, leaving the catch-all the same, creating a new image and update the deployment. This step can be disruptive to clients that are currently connected through WebSockets or pending a response from the server. When all pods are updated and healthy, we update the backend with the number of available game servers and update, again, the proxy configuration creating a second wave of disruptions. Scaling down process is very similar only in reverse order. Well, XDS to the rescue. Using a custom XDS operator, we were able to scale up and down the clusters without the need to restart or redeploy them. The operator receives the request that cluster sites through a Kubernetes custom resource, update the configuration and pass it to Envoy. We are currently in the process of deploying this new operator. Our next steps after verifying the operator is stable and working as expected will be to integrate it with the game server existing drain feature for a seamless scale experience. This overview or a new deployment. After verifying, we can achieve our goals using Envoy. We started to plan and execute the migration from Engingstone void. Our high level plan included running load testing to verify performance and provisioning of Envoy, test the migration scenario, run books and rollback in the load test environment, deploy the new Envoy instances and shift traffic from Engingstone void. Sounds easy, right?  We used the latest Envoy version, which was 112.2 and started with a basic environment of X game servers, X caching services, one proxy, and a load of hundreds of thousands of requests per second. The result looks great, except some pesky five or three hours that surfaced from time to time. We had to make a couple of changes to our production environment to be able to shift the traffic from Engingstone void. First change was to separate the public traffic from the backend services I mentioned before. Since we didn't onboard the service gateway yet, we took the approach of simply duplicating the engine's configuration and creating a dedicated pool for them. We then had to replace the existing external load balancer service with a node port with external traffic policy set to local instead of cluster. This allowed us to control the traffic and monitor both proxy pools while serving on the same port, which is a GCLP limitation. We also switched from old replication controller to a deployment object, which gave us an opportunity to do a simplified run of the traffic shift. Lastly, we switched from utilization-based load balancing to count-based load balancing, due to difference in resources between Engingstone and void. We copied the already prepared Grafana dashboards and created a new pool for the Envoy fleet. One of the features we couldn't find a replacement for, by the way, is the IP denialist, and we had to replace it with a Google Cloud Armor. If there is an existing Envoy filter that provides this functionality, we would love to hear about it, but if not, we will probably write a custom filter to provide this functionality. We're becoming very good in writing those. Well, the big day arrived and we started shifting the traffic from Engingstone void. Well, we started deploying. The traffic shift plan was to first increase the number of Envoy replicas in the pool when reaching full capacity, decrease the number of Engingstone replicas until hitting zero. We started with deploying a single Envoy instance. It was there for a couple of minutes when we started seeing an increase in five or three errors and then it crashed. We immediately scaled down to zero. This is just a short version, but after several days of investigations and digging up in Envoy and GCLP documentation, we found the following results. The main reason for the Envoy crash was because we were hitting it with 20 times the expected load. And even more, it was already deployed on a pod with limited resources, which might have been a contributor factor, but unfortunately, after correcting the traffic distribution to 2000 requests per second, we never encountered this problem again. The five or three errors were easier to understand but harder to find as there were a result of a discrepancy in the timeout for idle connections causing GCLP to return five or threes for connections that were terminated by Envoy. Fixing this part decreased the five or threes errors to a normal level. As it usually happens, we were ready for second try only two weeks later. We fixed the configuration, scaled it up to one instance and started monitoring the service. It was happily running for a day with no problems, so we decided we were ready for the next step. And scale it up to two envoy instances and we entered a new era of multi-invoy instances in production. Over the next two weeks, we slowly, slowly scaled up the Envoy fleet from two to five, from five to 50% and so on until we hit 100%. When hitting 100% of Envoy deployments and after verifying all is okay or at least that's what we thought, we started scaling down the engines fleet. In parallel to this migration, we had new features and services also added to the environment, creating problems of their own. So when problems started hitting us, we didn't recognize what is the source of them. Everything was looking good, except occasional five or three errors. And we also noticed an increase in annex domains received from Kube DNS that started when we deployed Envoy. We had no success tuning Kube DNS and had little information to understand the source of the problem. Like any other team, we were busy and with little information or access, this turned to be the status quo for four months until GoFest arrived. If you're not aware, GoFest is our biggest event of the year. When starting to scale the number of game servers in preparation for the event, we started receiving reports of an increase in five or three hours. This happened immediately after deploying Envoy images with the new configuration. If you remember step two in the scale-up scenario, that was before we even tried to scale Envoy, but hoping this might be related to load, we increased the Envoy fleet size. We didn't know that this actually made things worse. We also started noticing an increase in player complaints on the down detector. We investigated that configuration, wrong health check, everything, but found no clue except an interesting decrease in code DNS errors. That word confused us more, but then we found a hint. And just a reminder, our deployed Envoy version was 112.2 and this was fixed only in 114. So given the timeline and the importance of GoFest to the company, engines was deployed to replace Envoy and GoFest passed with no issues from the Edge proxy. And we went back to our low-test environment to try and figure out how to solve this problem. Back to our low-test environment, we started with reconfiguring it to much production. We scaled it up to much one-tenth of production and configured to have X10 services pointing to the game servers in help to recreate the conditions that caused the problem with sound production. It was easy. We got DNS errors already when hitting one-tirtieth of the production environment. At that point, I already knew what was the problem and maybe some of you are already guessing it. It was our configuration that caused the load in DNS queries. Our stateful backend configuration was causing the proxies to query code DNS four times for each game server. Now multiply that by the number of proxies, add to that the number of game servers and the number becomes too high. The solution we tested was Google Cloud new DNS caching operator which made the errors disappear completely, but will require an update to the JKE version. So my personal learnings are stop ignoring intermittent error, test in production-like environment instead of a low-test environment, continue evolving the traffic shift scenario to support future software and infrastructure upgrade. Just a reminder, we will need to upgrade our JKE version. One last part of Invoy I would like to talk about is our work of extending Invoy, mainly to provide external developers access to a platform without exposing our IP. Unfortunately, I can't share a lot about this work. I can tell you that included request validation for HTTP and web sockets requests, shifting the responsibility to block this traffic already in the proxy. It also manipulates the incoming traffic based on the received message and provide us with additional metrics related to the games. Part of this includes a web socket custom filter that we wonder if it shouldn't be part of the platform, even for the purpose of upgrading it to a GRPC at the proxy. And this is truly how our deployment looks like. I would like to summarize this talk with a wine voice slide. Well, we chose Invoy for the better of the mobility in monitoring, service to service proxy, the configuration, the better scale experience with XDS, and finally, the extendability. Thank you for listening, and I would like to thank everyone in Niantic that helped me in this work. And for those of you that find this interesting and would like to learn more, we're hiring, feel free to reach to me and check out our career website. Thank you, and I will be very happy to answer now any question you might have. Hi, everybody. I hope you hear me and see me. And I will be very happy to answer any of your questions that were in the chat. So first question, did we observe any issues when moving from engines to Invoy in terms of how the downstream connections are maintained by engines versus Invoy? And I actually asked here continuing questions regarding was it something specific? So as Srinidhi mentioned, we have seen an issue where Invoy retains high throughput connections constantly, whereas engines releases them productively. Did you see such issue during your creation? Well, we didn't see this as an issue. This was part of the behavior we already knew that this part of Invoy. As I mentioned, the main difference that we had between Invoy and engines was actually around the DNS and the DNS querying. And Janks are not querying the DNS and such so frequently, which was actually made us do some work models in our environments. With Invoy, we can now remove them. But the only issue that we had was with the number of DNS queries that we had. Second question was, can you elaborate on switching from utilization based load balancing to count-based load balancing? Does count-based load balancing refers to a number of incoming requests? So I forward this question to our SREs and part of our team that is also working on that. I believe this is a GCLB property, but I might be wrong here. And if we were mainly just looking on, yes, the incoming requests, so ensure that they're being correctly load balanced between different Invoy instances of the backend services. And thank you for the IP denies, we will definitely look into that. I think we looked at that in the past, but if you notice from the presentation, we started our journey a year ago when it was Invoy 12 and in A112 and it was Invoy evolved a lot since then. There are a lot of new things that we are using. So let me get back for another questions. So I get a lot of feedback here around what should we look for the IP deny. Thank you, I'll definitely look into them. It's really interesting. I heard that our back can help with that. Well, Rubens, if you'll tell me which slide, maybe I can share the presentation, but I think everything will be online soon. And you are always welcome to contact me through the Slack, I'm on the Invoy Slack channels or through LinkedIn or my email. And thank you, everybody. Somebody asked about the control plane and I missed that question. So we are using a control plane that was one of our moves to make the scale better. We are actually now going to start the plane with everywhere we have important. It's definitely going to improve our scale experience. And by the way, for the control plane, we're using, of course, LDS and CVS because our listeners, pathmatchings and clusters are really coupled into one-to-one. Well, we are no longer using engines itself in most of our places. And the one that we are using, I believe we're using the open source one. Well, I'm very happy to hear and help. And we are very happy to share from our experience. One of the things, as I mentioned, by the way, we did have to write a custom filter for WebSockets, which was a very interesting experience actually. And we will be publishing it in a couple of months. We need to pass a legal process for that. So everybody will be able to use it. So the number of our PS per core on our invoice, I do have it somewhere, but I don't really remember. And I don't want just to throw numbers. So, Mikhail, if you can just contact me, it's Rostak, I will be very happy to answer that. And yeah, thank you, everybody. If there are any more questions, we have a couple more minutes, but if not, then you have six minutes for refreshing. Thank you. Engines features that we could not replace with invoices with the IPv9s, that was mainly it. We actually gained a lot of things, moving to invoice. And we really enjoyed doing this mode. So, no, actually it was the other way around, except the Nile switch. I believe you will find solution very fast. Thank you, bye.


Next on from just drawing some simple graphs to get a visual feel of the data is just to do some very simple descriptive statistics let's go up to analyze and Reports at the top second one is for me as descriptive statistics, and I'm going just down to Descriptives and hit reset so that everything is clear This is what you'll see the first time and it's just select age And we can click this button to bring it in or I can just simply take age and drag it into the variable That's all I want. I want simple descriptive statistics of the age I can hit this option button and I can choose what I want inside of that those descriptive statistics Certainly, I want the mean I certainly want the standard deviation I would like to know what the minimum and maximum was I might even want to know what the range was That's just the difference between minimum and maximum. It's not the interquartile range. It's the full range maximum minus minimum I can get the skewness and kurtosis as well, and I'm going to hit continue and okay This is the syntax that was generated by SPSS and right at the bottom here. We see that we have descriptive statistics for the age It just gives us a valid in all 250 cells were entered so we don't have any missing data We see that we have 250 cases the Range was 67 that is 85 was the maximum 18 minimum and 85 minus 18 is 67 It tells us the mean was 51.02 for me yours will be different. The standard deviation was 19.793 We see the skewness there as far as the statistic and its standard area is concerned and the kurtosis as well Of course the closer these both are to zero the more we have a normal distribution Let's go back here to our data. What about all of these other scale or Numerical variables. I'm going to say analyze descriptive Descriptive just going to hit reset so that everything is clear and this time. I'm going to take all these little scale or Continuous numerical variables, and I'm going to Do all of them in one go my options once again. I want minimum maximum. I want to mean I want the range Don't want skewness and kurtosis. Let's just say okay and okay, and now we see we get a much bigger chart here Much bigger table. I should say and we have all of them age temperature heart rate white salt count and months We see 250 in each of those and once again We see the range that is maximum minus minimum We see the mean and we see or the average or and we see the standard deviation So all in one go we can have a look at the descriptive statistics for all of our numerical variables there What about the categorical variables? I'm going to show you from Let's take a diabetes versus Diabetes versus outcome, let's do diabetes versus outcome. I just want to create a little matrix That's columns and rows of values counting. How many patients? Survived did not have diabetes. How many survived did have diabetes? How many who died did not have diabetes? How many who died did have diabetes? So we're going to go to Analyze descriptive down to cross tabs. It's going to reset those So I want to know the diabetes Against the outcome now they can go in in any order. So you can change those around I'm not going to do any statistical analysis on this for now I just want a simple table that I can have a look at my Categorical variables and then we see patients who died and who survived without diabetes with diabetes So in my instance, I had 67 patients with diabetes who died and 55 patients I should say without diabetes who died and 55 without diabetes who survived 62 patients who died and had diabetes and 66 who survived and had diabetes So you get a nice overview here of your categorical variables. So there we go simple descriptive statistics Next up though, I'll show you how to do these but to split them up We could well imagine that we have age up here We see the mean was 51.02 and the standard deviation was 19 But we wanted to know what's their age difference between the survivors and those who died Not just the overall So we need to split our data set into those who survived and those who died so that when we do descriptive Statistics on the edge we get those just descriptive statistics for each of those two groups


It seems like if you're looking for a guy in this draft who can help run an offense Davion Mitchell can be that guy What do you think about his stock for the NBA? Yeah, I mean Davion Mitchell took a sizable leap in the 2021 season specifically from the three-point line Where he shot 45 percent on 63 attempts up from 31 percent on 157 attempts two seasons prior Although dropping a tad from the free throw line where he's a career 66 percent shooter The jumper looks good enough to keep defense is from cheating off of him while he's kind of running offenses playing both guard positions a little bit The top comp in my prospect model for Davion Mitchell is another player who did end up playing Both guard roles in the NBA and that's Darren Williams both are short but heavy only modest scores Though Mitchell likely gonna be a better defender I don't think many teams would dislike having Davion Mitchell on their roster But the shooting is a little bit of a question mark still especially for an older prospect


Every spring we put out fish traps to catch small newly hatched trout because we're trying to assess where the trout are and how many are hatching. And it's been a common observation for years that in those traps we will get sculpin. And some of those sculpin are substantially bigger than the whole of the trap. So the observation that intrigued me was this ability of sculpin to get into a space apparently smaller than its head. And what I needed was a student to work with who could have the knack of taking care of fish in the laboratory and watching behavior carefully. So it's what we call finding a student with a slimy thumb. So we began with the simple observation, that's how all science begins. What Harrison was able to do in the lab is turn that simple observation into a quantitative study where he was able to look at many sculpins in his tunnel that he developed and get an idea of how many of them ended up going into spaces smaller than their head. So his discovery was this ability of sculpins to compress their skull to get into a smaller space. And to the best of our knowledge, looking at the literature, nobody's actually looked at that ability for a fish to malform its skull. And then the eureka moment in some ways was Harrison's ability to find a method to actually quantify, to put it into numbers so that he was able at the end of the day to come back to me and say, yeah, yep, you're right. They are getting into funnels smaller than their head. It's like, got it. Right. We can put numbers on that. And that's exciting.


Hi, I'm Gene Bergman, Ward 2 City Councilor Progressive and we are doing our monthly TV show Burlington Progressives and I'm here today with Joe McGee who is a fellow City Councilor from Ward 3. Apparently our districts will be different but we haven't been, we haven't gerrymandered ourselves out of our districts. Governor signed that legislation I think today so there will be some real changes and we're going to talk about the proposed change to the motel program because we have as the news has been very clear this major crisis. So Joe you have been our lead councillor on this and how about you just sort of frame the issue? Sure, yeah absolutely. So for a number of years now the state has housed nearly 3,000 Vermonters using expanded general assistance program which is the program where folks are able to access vouchers to use at hotels and motels. Vermonters who are experiencing homelessness are able to access those vouchers to be sheltered and the state budget that was passed at the end of the legislative session just a couple of weeks ago made the decision to end that program and so as a result starting next week folks will begin to be exited from hotels and motels losing the shelter that has offered some measure of stability for a number of months, some folks even years and you know I think Gene what this shows is that so many people in our community here in Burlington and across the state have struggled to find housing as so many people are moving to the state, move to the state during the pandemic, driving up housing costs and really creating a crisis that was bad before the pandemic and has only gotten worse during and so that's where we're at right now. A number of legislators are prepared to vote to uphold what is expected to be a veto from the governor on the budget over this this decision and we have a representative Logan joining us now. As you speak we are joined by the old north end one of the two state representatives Kate Logan. Hi Kate nice of you to join us here Joe was giving us excuse me some context about the impending crisis or the worsening crisis that you know we're going to be facing in housing with the end of the motel program and that's what we want to focus on right now. Thanks Joe. If I could just really quickly just highlight you know as a result of this decision with so many folks being exited what we're looking at in Burlington this summer is in all likelihood an increase in in camping we're going to see more folks who have no other option but to sleep outside and so the budget that was passed allocated twelve and a half million dollars that could be used to help people buy tents and you know I want to be clear because there have been several news stories that have suggested that myself and others are pushing policies that would just allow people to camp in our parks and you know that really isn't the case what we're looking at here is acknowledging the reality that people are going to be sleeping outside and we have a moral responsibility to do what we can to provide services and support to folks in the best way possible that acknowledges that our service workers have been burned out are burned out and if a number of people are forced back out onto the streets we're going to be stretching our systems of support beyond their capacity. I mean what you speak of is the fact that I mean people live somewhere and that is in a town it's in a city so we get to deal with it as city counselors we get to deal with it as residents much has been made of the fact that this is a state problem as if somehow things aren't linked together but Kate as a state representative and this was your first term so we don't have a lot of time one day maybe we'll talk about it what that experience was like in this but from your perspective what is going on at the state level at the legislature the way that the the administrators administration dealt with it leading up to it why are we in this mess clearly Burlington didn't create it so and Burlington is not the only place that will experience the the sharpest impacts currently 20 to 25 percent of those living in hotels are in Rutland County Bennington County also highly overrepresented there was a relatively low participation of hotels in Chittenden County in the program so in essence we have offshored our unhoused population and our and our housing crisis to other parts of the state and so Burlington should certainly expect to have to take responsibility as we address at least one round of exits from the with the new eligibility criteria from the GA emergency housing program beginning next week 766 households will be exited I've spoken with but to answer your question what's happening at the state level what's happening with the state level is that the legislature the administration now that federal funding has largely ended for this program to continue it the way that we had been during the pandemic the administration as well as the majority of the legislature agrees that the program needs without federal funding we've extended the funding from March to July and that that was as far as we should go and the the tens and tens of millions of dollars that we were spending eight million a per month was one of the numbers that I heard was that we should be taking that money and investing that into building the long-term permanent supported housing affordable housing and emergency shelter throughout the state the perfect solution the perfect solution but what I think is really happening and I'm I'm seeing the administration from my position working in the homeless services sector advocating and supporting agencies who serve homeless and runaway youth the agency or the agencies in the administration are talking to me now they're not they weren't no during the legislative session very few practitioners were being called in and treated as experts on the problem what I think is happening is people who are quite detached from reality and the experience of every every day Vermonters so many of us are struggling with housing security this program is just a band-aid on that problem but so many of our legislators cannot relate to the experience of being housing and secure they simply cannot they own property many of them are landlords they don't they don't understand the experience of being unstably housed they certainly don't have never experienced homelessness they don't understand the way that our services networks work they don't understand what a continuum of care is they don't understand what a local housing coalition is they don't understand they don't know the social services sector they don't know how poorly staffed it is they don't know the chronic fund these are legislators that are faced with dealing with dealing with budgets but you've got an administration which has got a huge bureaucracy departments you know that are charged with housing people charged with dealing with mental health issues charged with the health and safety of folks who are having substance use problems the range youth yeah right they could are you saying that they're that they were asleep at the wheel and just failed to to to plan and failed to what they I mean they they work for the governor they weren't authorized to put a plan together because the administration stated what was going to happen so was just to be clear well in the initial budget adjustment act governor Scott was fine with the program fully and abruptly ending at the end of March so the legislature and the program people take care of yourselves so it'll self resolve it'll self resolve people will go where they the administration isn't saying that anymore by the way we've done a good job of making sure that people are aware of the practical difficulties that service providers as well as people living in the hotels are facing right now in trying to problem solve around this transition what we have been advocating for you know there's been a broad debate many folks were saying just keep the program going this is an essential lifeline this is an essential part of our lives I've lived here for two years at this point and then then you have at the other end of the spectrum and the program in March the legislature extended the program through July in the budget adjustment act with this next cutoff for this month which are the least vulnerable folks staying in in the hotels for example like I said I work with a statewide network of youth services providers we're one of those agencies is moving a couple 18 year old couple just graduated from high school out of a hotel and into a transitional living unit that is for youth under 21 who need something in between shelter and their own rental home so yeah so we we've sort of framed up what is going on this problem that this crisis that we are facing and we've got state and we've got local responses so we don't have a ton of time left but we do have enough time to to talk about what is going on on the the state I know that this is a regional issue for all the counties and so and folks have been involved in these countywide meetings and then on the local level so let's I don't know which is the best thing to start with I'll let you figure out by piping up which is the best way to to go okay what well I can go quickly and essentially the other thing that's going on at the state level is that the administration and the legislature have thus far decided that they think it's the responsibility of our local continuum of care and our municipalities to address the situation at the local level and they believe that they have put enough resources on the table with the budget to enable municipalities to take things up do you agree with that assessment you know based on the funding that I'm seeing the funding availability that I'm seeing going out right now I would say actually fairly supportive of what we want to do it's the process that's the problem and the timeline is too short so it essentially just passes the buck to municipalities and to county level housing coalitions to put a plan together which is why you know I'll kick it over to counselor McGee at this point and back him up by saying back them up by saying that there will be if the budget passes and we evict another 2000 Vermonters at the end of June we need places for people to camp well yeah and this is a time of a housing crisis for people who are working two or three jobs you were saying this before Joe when before Kate came in working people cannot afford housing and there are a lot of reasons for it not the least of which is we are a low wage state oh yeah public assets has made that clear so yeah we don't have available housing we don't have available shelter period anywhere in the state there are a handful of units available in several counties that's it so Joe yeah you know I think just so folks are really aware of the full spectrum of the crisis we're facing right now there are folks who have had a section eight voucher in hand for months who are having to give them back because there aren't units available for them to rent there are folks who and you can be working and qualify for section eight so I mean there is this perception that just a bunch of slacken poor folks who don't want to work and I've heard it as a city councillor you've heard as a city councillor you've heard as a state rep and somehow if only we just give them tough love then they're going to be able to bootstrap themselves up with obviously no no self no selfers off without the boots yeah pull on so and that's that's the that's the I think the crux of this issue here is that you know I hear people say a lot well maybe some people need to hit rock bottom to to uh to get better or something like that you can hear that a lot when people talk about substance use disorder and where we're at right now uh rock bottom in a lot of cases is is pretty dire it's it's death for a lot of people uh so we're talking about folks being exited from this program who rely on medication that needs to be refrigerated or devices that need electricity to operate and if you're living in a tent you can't refrigerate medication you can't plug in uh essential devices and so you know we're really looking at a crisis here and we haven't even brought up the fact that a new place is looking for a new operating manager for the Champlain Inn which is the low barrier shelter that's been operating on uh Shelburne Road for a number of years now um so we're we're looking at a shelter system that has been beyond capacity even with the GA program we're looking at lots of folks who might currently have an apartment but are facing precarious housing situations and could be facing eviction so what we're really looking at right now is a negative trend of you know looking at the number of people who are finding permanent housing versus folks that are actually losing permanent housing um and so I would just say so so what are we doing what do we need to do yeah that's a it's an important question um I think right now uh we need state support we need service organizations to come together to figure out how we can bolster um the shelter capacity in Chittenden County uh I think you know I want to make it clear that I don't think any of us think uh camping or even the uh motel hotel program is a solution to the housing crisis as Kate said these are band-aids at best um and so you know I think what where we go from here is you know looking at the permanent housing that is being built uh we're looking at affordable units at City Place the VFW Champlain Housing Trust is developing a lot of these we're looking at you know two or three years in a lot of cases before those units are actually realized and people are able to move into them and so uh I would really like to see the state figure out a way to help us support folks until we can get to that point of moving people into permanent housing you know and the city has begun doing that work of figuring out you know as we see an influx in uh camping uh on public lands um you know myself and others would like to see us explore the option of sanctioned campsites not in our parks but on other city-owned land where we could have services provided we could have bathroom facilities we could have other support that is necessary and easier to provide if folks are in um one or a few locations rather than uh scattered in dozens of campsites across the city and so you know that is uh the situation under the status quo that we have seen you know we saw tents in City Hall Park last year we saw tents in Callahan and Smalley Parks um and so we're having this conversation now to really figure out how we can avoid that because you know it's not enough to simply say well you can't camp here the next part of that is but here's where you can go and this is where you're going to be able to access services this is how we're going to be able to provide support so where are those conversations happening right now yeah so I think the the CDNR committee has been having those conversations with the ordinance that you and I worked on last year um we're moving in a different direction with that but you know the substantive portion of that conversation is continuing uh the council passed a resolution at our last meeting on May 15th um we're going to be having a full council work session to talk about camping and the city's response to camping at our meeting on June 5th so that is really going to be an important venue for us to talk about you know what is going to continue to be an issue for the foreseeable future and on the state level Kate or on the county level what's going on well the local response uh funded by the state and other sources uh is happening at the county level but I would say county level Chittenden the Chittenden county housing alliance which is our local continuum of care is talking regularly having an emergency meeting tomorrow morning having a public meeting next Thursday what's likely to happen at those meetings so I mean right now they're planning the exits for everyone in Chittenden county who is exiting and what they've found thus far is very few folks will be ending up intense um on this round which is good um it is good there are places for people to go um there are people who are going to be able to remain in the hotels because of um you know medical conditions um there are people who are being rehoused right now um but so so that's where all this money that the state is channeling is going into organizations that make up the Chittenden county housing alliance and that's where a lot of the local decision making is going on I will note that Burlington is the only municipality that has representatives on that county housing alliance hey great question I don't know um and then at the state level obviously we have the veto session coming up in June um but in addition to the hot funding that was put into the budget the commissioner um or the secretary of DCF um commissioner commissioner thank you I'm tired I was late today because I'm writing funding proposals um for youth services organizations because the commissioner of DCF put out a memo on Monday of this week saying hey by June 1 get us a letter of interest letting us know what you need so this is in addition to that housing opportunity program um money that got put into the budget we don't know where the funding is coming from although we have been um we uh the coalition of legislators who uh voted no on the budget have been very helpfully pointing out places in the budget where funds could come from um there the DC DCF has said hey we welcome additional proposals for emergency shelter and various other forms of response to the situation those are due next Thursday so um and like I said in in my role directing a statewide network of youth services providers the agency has the agency of human services the agency of administration and the agency of education have all been engaging um well that's that's good and it's it's not it's not any indication that things are going to slow down but um I've also been talking with money folks who have said that as folks exit the hotel program that means the amount of resources for the hotel program you know expands and so that means for the some of the most vulnerable folks who are still residing in hotels at the end of June it's possible that their stays could be extended so people are trying to work on a lot of small solutions but it doesn't fix the overall problem which was that the timeline given for this transition was unjust way too short and inhumane so we have about four minutes left um which gives us enough time for each of you to tell folks what is most important for them to know about this issue right now yeah that's uh a tricky uh tricky question but I think you know I want folks to know that we are working on solutions we are doing what we can to to make the best of this and it's it's a pretty dire situation but um I think you know the conversations are happening and we have to do the best we can with the resources that we have to support folks and so you know counselors and state representatives are in communication about how we can collaborate on this going forward and so I do want folks to have some assurance that these conversations are happening and we are doing our best to make a plan and Kate yeah thanks um I think what folks need to know right now is that this is not just a Burlington problem it's um it's a Chittenden County problem and it's a problem in every county in the state in my role I know what's going on at the local level in every county in the state and there is no housing available and there is no shelter available the waiting list for those who are already qualified for housing assistance programs is long folks are getting housed but it's taking some time so our community is going to be receiving a considerable amount of resources in the coming months and years to address this issue but we are going to have to have a plan locally and your state representatives in Burlington and your city council are going to be working with the Chittenden County housing alliance to put a plan together and communicate with the community as soon as we can and ensure that we have a safe and humane summer for all those who reside in Burlington. It's thank you thank you both it's a really hard task to make a reality of the value that housing and being housed is a human right and to do that in the face of crises with an insufficient social safety net and a low-wage workforce it requires us to be looking at building an economy that is based on solidarity based on these basic principles that say that all of the basic needs are human rights and we need to fund them and we need a tax system that's going to do that that's based on people's ability to pay right and right now we have a regressive it's progressive for comparatively so but it is not one that's like that so we've got a we've got a lot of work to do it's I think why the progressives are here and I'm very happy to to be part of this party and part of this movement with with both of you because I think that the value that we've all contributed is really significant so thank you for taking this time thank you all for watching Burlington Progressives TV and we will do our best to give you an important show in the the next month thanks have a great night


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The Black Duck Drake's hosted Climax Fisher and a girl's basketball showdown. Zoe Mills passes it inside to Selena Murray for the layup. Later on, Mills dishing it out again comes up the floor connects inside with Alexis Barbie finishes the layup. The Drake's controlling the paint in the first half. Haley Murray finds Joanna Swedberg for the inside bucket. But the Knights a big second half as they win this one 51 to 49. PBS